Fantasy Life
I would describe Fantasy Life as a cross between a life simulator and an action RPG. The gameplay has a good, albeit a bit generic, foundation of combat and exploration, but the true focus of the experience lies in the job system. While the story chapters are all easy enough to complete without giving any attention to the twelve playable lives, the rest of the world is full of exciting things to discover that will be virtually inaccessible without putting in the time to develop at least a few of them. Each of the lives has an associated set of challenges for you to complete that earn "stars" towards ranking up. Every time you rank up, you unlock new skills that can make the rest of your adventure easier or more exciting.
I categorize the lives into one of three buckets, each with their own capabilities and benefits. Combat lives, like paladin and mercenary, are obviously focused on fighting. Each one has an associated weapon and a preferred subset of enemies to target. I really enjoyed these because they offered unique approaches to combat situations while both encouraging and facilitating exploration into the parts of the world you wouldn't otherwise see in the story.
Resource gathering lives, like miner and woodcutter, were my next favorite because they gave purpose to the exploration that the combat lives allowed. Just about everywhere you go, there's some kind of resource to collect, whether it be items to pick up, fish to catch, ore to mine, or trees to fell. With these lives, you gain the ability to harvest those things so you can sell them and make money, or craft them into something even better.
My least favorite lives to play as and rank up were easily the crafting lives, such as blacksmith and carpenter. There are more of these jobs than in either of the other categories, yet they have the least amount of variety. I appreciate that crafting makes the resources that I collect more valuable to me, as the resulting weapons, armor, and other tools improve my performance in every job, but it was always so draining to rank these up. The crafting mini game that you have to do when making anything is virtually identical between all five lives and needs to be performed ad nauseam in order to rank them up. In fact, I ended up completely changing how I played the game because I couldn't stand doing any more crafting.
At the start of my playthrough, I committed to ranking up all twelve lives as quickly as I could. This translated to ranking them all up once between each story chapter. At first, the balance was pretty good, giving me a few challenges that got me out on adventures, but not so many that I wasn't ever touching the story. However, I think it was around chapter five that my motivation had completely drained. The rank-up challenges had become more difficult and more numerous, forcing me to dedicate a lot more time to them than I would have liked, and the payoff was waning. By then, all of the skills I had developed and the levels I had grown meant that I was vastly over-levelled for the story sections. Normally, that's just fine to me, but here it meant that I was finishing the story chapters so fast that I had to go right back to doing rank-up tasks again. I didn't want to give up on the game though, so I went back to my old ways, ignored all of the other lives, and played the rest of the game as a paladin.
Although I'm a bit disappointed that I failed in my initial quest of fully ranking up all of the lives, I think my positive opinion of Fantasy Life only survived because I chose to give that up. This game has a cute story, delightful characters, and a mountain of content, but you need to know where you're going to draw the line if you truly want to enjoy it. Hopefully they'll figure out the balance a little better for the upcoming sequel, especially since it has even more lives available. Thankfully, even after my less than perfect return, I still think this is a great game and it remains one of my best memories with the 3ds.
