Iris Reviews Fantasy Life for Paste: A Roleplay Game Where You Can Be a Heroic Cook, Tailor, or Angler

"Fantasy Life: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor" is the latest article by New World Notes' Janine "Iris" Hawkins for the ultra-hip Paste Magazine, and it's a review of a Nintendo 3DS game a lot of SLers and other roleplay fans should love: Fantasy Life, where you can adventure as a standard Paladin, Mercenary, or Magician, but also take on much more mundane roles, like Cook, Tailor, or Angler. SLers in particular will enjoy the fashion and design aspects of the game, Janine tells me, who adds this play tip: "Keep progressing in the story so you can get access to shops that sell the materials you need instead of always having to hunt or them."

Another fun feature is the game encourages you to play many characters, passing talents from one to another:

Although I chose to play through the story focusing on only one Life, Fantasy Life encourages players to take on as many as they like, and this system is handled with a surprising degree of flexibility. Many different Lives share stats, so while I was plugging points into Dexterity to improve my Tailoring skill, I was also essentially putting points towards my future Life as a Hunter. Furthermore, challenges that you’re given for one Life can be completed even while another Life is active, so when you’re buckling down on your Blacksmithing you can still get credit for the delicious lunch you cooked for your party members.

Read the full review here.

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Comments

[Sjöfn Stoneshield]

The man is a warrior and the woman's tailor. Equal gender stereotypes preservative in most games.
The world is flooded with industrious girls baking and serving and are generally domestic. And boys who are big, strong and adorable. The game in which the woman is the hero is easily counted on one hand. Usually, she combines the role of heroine by working part time as a sex object.
The world needs yet another gender preservative game?
The world's richest countries have the most liberated women and the world's poorest countries have the most oppressed women. The same also applies in virtual countries.

[Janine/Iris]

@Sjöfn Players can choose to be male or female and can be any class(es) they want. I chose to be a tailor primarily because that's the class I was most interested in.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

What I want is for Japanese developers like Level 5 to start doing "home console" games again, not just DS stuff where they can basically keep making the equivalent of PSone/PS2 games.

Yes, I know, everyone rides trains in Japan and plays portable games. But if they want to sell games to us gaijin...they need to start making big screen games again.

[Janine/Iris]

@ChronoCloud They never stopped doing that afaik. Level-5's own Ni no Kuni came out for PS3 right at the start of 2013 I think. Beyond that you might want to check out the Atelier games, Tales of Xillia 1&2 (2 just came out this year iirc), Final Fantasy of course, etc.

If anything the issue is that fewer of those games are being localized, or are (like Fantasy Life) taking several years to get here.