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Fantasy Life i Wants You to Grind, Farm and Fish Your Way Through Its Time-Travel Story

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time review — Level-5's life sim RPG sequel scores 8.5/10 with 14 jobs, time travel, and a Bone Dragon.

By mitch·3 min read
A girl entwined with the turning of time stands amid tools of farming, craft, and combat.

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is a 2025 role-playing life simulation game developed and published by Level-5. It is the sequel to Fantasy Life. The game released for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows and Xbox Series X/S in May 2025. A Nintendo Switch 2 version followed in June 2025 as a launch title. Versions for Android and iOS arrived in August 2026.

Trailer, via LEVEL5ch【公式】.

An Uncharted Island and a Bone Dragon

The setup is simple and strange in the right measure. You and the archaeologist Edward set sail, follow a light from a fossilized dragon, and find an uncharted island. A Dark Dragon attacks. The fossil wakes as a Bone Dragon. You chase it through a gate that appears out of thin air and come out somewhere lively and peaceful instead of ruined.

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That gate is the whole game in miniature. Fantasy Life i is a life sim wearing an action RPG’s clothes, and it never picks one over the other.

Fourteen Jobs, One Player

Like the 3DS original, you pick from fourteen jobs, called life classes, and switch between them whenever you want. Each class opens its own tasks. A paladin’s work is not a cook’s work, and the game lets you hold both without apology.

The classes are the spine of the thing:

  1. Combat classes, which carry the Bone Dragon fight and everything after it.
  2. Gathering classes, which feed the island’s rebuilding loop.
  3. Crafting classes, which turn what you gather into what you sell.
  4. The rest, which reward curiosity more than efficiency.

Building the Ruins Forward

Time travel is the hook, and it is not decoration. You build up a ruined island by traveling a thousand years into its future. The island is the project; the story is the excuse to keep working on it.

Today is the day you and the archaeologist Edward set sail on an adventure.

The combat holds up better than a life sim has any right to. The camera switches between third person and an isometric bird’s-eye view. Single player, multiplayer and co-operative modes are all here.

The Slow Middle Stretch

The pacing sags in the middle. Fourteen classes is a lot of onboarding, and the game is in no hurry to explain which ones pay off. Players who want a straight action RPG will find the simulation layers slow. Players who want a pure life sim will find the Bone Dragon waiting.

Neither complaint is fatal. Both are the cost of the ambition.

Why the Wait Was Worth It

Fantasy Life i earns its 8.5/10. It is the rare sequel that expands the original instead of sanding it down, and the time-travel rebuild gives every class a reason to exist beyond a checklist. Level-5 came back to this series with something that respects the wait.

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