FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time

So much content & easy to come back to. I played the first game on my 3ds and was so excited for this one! Definitely did not disappoint!

Excellent reimagining of the original 3DS game. Really enjoying the gameplay.

[h1]Story (3/10)[/h1] Predictable story which didn't carry the game. Not the focus of this game, so it's ok. [h1]Graphics (8/10)[/h1] Looks good. [h1]Gameplay (7/10)[/h1] Lots of grinding. As far as I can tell this is the main selling point of this game. There are a lot of "lives" (= jobs) with different skill trees, but the lives can be grouped into 3 categories: Battling, gathering and crafting. Especially the lives in the latter two categories are very similar making feel the grind tedious. There is not a lot of variety and at some point I didn't feel motivated to grind anymore and went ahead to complete the story in order to shelve this game. While there is an open area to explore, you can grind area levels here. The active battle system feel a bit clunky and the crafting is too QTE-heavy (= less fun to grind). There is also a town building, but it is - you guessed it - also grind heavy. Maybe this would have been better if I was able to play multiplayer (see below for more details). If you are into grinding this is the game for you. [h1]Sound (8/10)[/h1] Enjoyed the music. If you have reached a certain rank in a life there is a song for it. I got only three of the lives to that rank, since the grinding got too tedious. [h1]Performance/Configuration/Settings (1/10)[/h1] The game launches the EACLauncher at startup checking for EasyAntiCheat. If the latter is not installed, the game wouldn't start. Didn't know this program is a thing before this, and upon researching it I didn't want to install it, since it will be able to access the deepest layer of your PC. To bypass this I opened the GameBootstrapper.ini and changed the application path to this: ApplicationPath=NFL1.exe This booted up the game directly, but using this method you will be locked out from most of the online stuff. Quite a bummer (would have liked to try out the multiplayer). And you also need to apply it each time the game is getting updated. [h1]Misc[/h1] The EAC alone should be enough reason to downvote the game but since I did enjoy the single player experience, it will get a pass even though barely. If the next iteration puts EAC into the game, I will not buy it.