Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time review - Not quite Animal Crossing

If you haven’t been keeping your eyes on the horizon for a new Fantasy Life game like I have, then a certain Animal Crossing spoof may have piqued your attention on April Fool’s Day this year. The trailer showed off Tim Crook as he explored a customizable island that you can build from the ground up to fill with villagers and decorations as you please. Yeah, that’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons alright, but in reality, Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is its own thing, while still retaining the same kind of appeal that Animal Crossing has.

To be clear: this isn’t just an Animal Crossing clone. While Fantasy Life includes a bunch of the social aspects you likely love about Nintendo’s life sim, it’s distinctly its own beast. This is far more of an RPG where you must build up skills in a variety of different “lives”. Cutting down trees requires its own life, as does carpentry, mining, blacksmithing, tailoring, and more. Outside of the crafty lives you’ll also need to hone your battle skills as a Paladin, Hunter, Magician, or Mercenary. 

Each life has its own level, skill tree, and different items that can be earned as a result of mastering it. The problem is that the distinct lives initially feel disparate. You level them all up individually, but this means it’s easy for one life to advance completely out of step with the others, not helped by the fact that the Cook and Alchemist lives have very limited recipes to initially craft, making them tough to level, while Carpentry and Tailoring have dozens of available recipes to churn out.

If you’re exploring The Depths – an incredibly deep cave dungeon – you might come across rare and valuable ore and tree resources, but be unable to harvest them because of the lower level of your lives. I set myself the task of felling a level 15 Great Oak Tree, and it took me far longer than expected to get to the appropriate level — and that tree is found in one of the game’s first areas. Harvesting resources is a lot easier if you have party members that specialize in the life you need, like having a Farmer for, um, farming.

Your party is made up of former Strangelings. Strangelings are people who have been transformed into objects, but you can turn them back by exchanging flowers called Celestia’s Gifts with a Goddess Statue. You’ll earn more flowers simply by improving the quality of your island and building homes for the villagers. Once human again, Strangelings will live on your island and happily join your party to adventure through dank caves and across the continent of Ginormosia.

Ginormosia feels like an area that would make the original Nintendo Switch crumble. Unlike the rest of the game, this is an open world expanse that features towers to uncover the map and shrines that house puzzles and challenges to solve. Yeah, a lot like Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Shrines here house new Strangelings to add to your party and island, and manpower is required on the island to clear the land and open new routes in The Depths. It takes a while, but everything wraps back around and links together neatly, with each activity adding experience to your various lives so you can craft more furniture, weapons, and armor so you can explore further and see more.

If Fantasy Life i has a problem, it’s that when I’m not playing it, I’m not thinking about it. Unlike with Animal Crossing, where the daily cycle had me excited to see what was new each morning, Fantasy Life i leaves my mind as soon as I put the controller down. Pick that controller back up, though, and suddenly an hour turns into two, which becomes five before I know it. Despite not picking the game up that frequently, my average play session must be over three hours long. There’s just always something to do, and when you get tired of the (admittedly repetitive) crafting and gathering minigames, it’s time to delve into a dungeon or explore an open world.

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time isn’t up to the quality of a big Animal Crossing release, and it doesn’t quite have the depth of dedicated farming and life sims, but it makes up for it with a breadth of activities that are simple, but so hard to put down. This isn’t going to replace the likes of Animal Crossing or The Sims in your heart, but Fantasy Life i is a genuinely heartwarming RPG adventure that scratches the social sim itch.

If you want something to scratch that casual social sim itch, Fantasy Life i just might be the game you spend the most time playing in 2025. It's also a great Nintendo Switch 2 launch game.