I had a version of this review written out in my head as I started Fantasy Life’s long-awaited sequel on Nintendo Switch. It’s a good enough follow-up that captures enough of the fun gameplay loops of the original 3DS game but is hampered by the technical limitations of the Switch 1. Then publisher Level-5 announced a Switch 2 upgrade and that drove me to a much more ideal Fantasy Life experience. Running much better on Nintendo’s newest hardware, Fantasy Life i is an incredibly engrossing game that only stumbles because of the sheer scope and size of everything it’s trying to bring together.

For the uninitiated, Fantasy Life is a self-proclaimed “slow life RPG.” I think the term is silly jargon, but it does kind of sum it up. This is an RPG, complete with level-ups, party members, and lots of loot. But it’s also sort of a farm sim? You start off with access to 12 different “lives” (aka job classes) that are split into three different groups: combat, gathering, and crafting. Everything works in harmony as to best utilize all the classes, you need to work together. You gather items by chopping down trees or mining rocks. You can then hop over to a workbench and don your blacksmith hat to create weapons and armor via crafting. Then you can equip those to be better prepared against enemies wielding a sword, bow, or magic wand. To start, you have to choose a life; from there, you could in theory just rock that job all by itself but, at least to me, the game is optimally played by starting off all the 12 jobs in tandem at the outset. Leveling up the jobs requires completing specific quests and the quests are usually running alongside the story areas. I had fun bouncing between lives and managing all of their progress at once, but the game can slow down to a crawl whether you’re trying to manage all 12 jobs at once or just piecemeal doing them one-by-one later in the story.

That speaks to what I said near the start, where the game trips because it’s gigantic. I touched on the 12 lives and the story, and those are huge parts of the game. Additionally, you have a whole town you build that features villagers, houses, and a proc-gen dungeon. But that’s not all: an entire Breath of the Wild-inspired overworld is inexplicably also in the game, complete with towers that unlock parts of the map and a handful of puzzle and combat shrines. The wild thing about this area, called Ginormosia, is that it’s introduced early in the story and then just...never really referenced again until the late game. You can go there if you want to. It’s fun to mess around with and can be an easier way to build up a life or clean up some quests. I’ve come across some really fun little secrets throughout. But it’s so disconnected from everything else it feels like it’s borderline from a different attempt at the game (which is probably true to an extent, since Level-5 has mentioned how this game wasn’t coming together about a year or so ago and they had fully reinvent it). It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all there is to do in Fantasy Life i. I had the most fun when I just followed what I was enjoying, even if it usually left some aspects of the game in the dust (e.g., decorating my house).

The sequel has a much more action-packed story, especially in the very wordy intro. The narrative works best as a background element that occasionally dips into parodies. Zelda-esque shrines are shiny pieces of poop. There’s an extended bit with a Deku Tree-like character who sings. It’s largely cute and funny as long as it gets out of its own way. The original game did the awesome Dragon Quest thing where it strung together a series of vignettes and this one does the same. An element from the 3DS game that I loved was how, even if you were defeating enemies in the combat jobs, everything was always just some sort of misunderstanding. That monster wasn’t mean; he just had a headache! The sequel made me concerned it was going to go in the opposite direction but thankfully it doesn’t fully lose touch with that antithetical video game theme.

Combat is simplistic but each of the four classes feels different enough. Paladin mixes quicker sword swings with shield parries, while Mercenary makes you a big lumbering menace with a giant sword. Archer is a quick little ranged fella while the Magician turned into my mana-wielding powerhouse over time. The gathering and crafting can fall into repetition since they’re all similar in execution, but some of the nuanced differences between farming and fishing helps smooth out the overall grind of the classes.

Multiplayer does exist for this game, but it’s not the main draw for me by far. Locally, a friend can hop in and control partner Trip in a glorified Wii-era sidekick mode where the second player can’t really do that much. For the online of up to four players, you can’t do anything with the story. It’s best used for messing around Ginormosia or the proc-gen dungeons in your village. Even there, you can’t access the towers or shrines in Ginmormosia. It’s a limited experience, though the developer is making tweaks to it.

I was nervous for Fantasy Life i, because I truly loved the 3DS original and was not that optimistic that Level-5 could capture the same magic a decade later. For the most part, they did. This has the addictive gameplay loop of completing quests and furthering your lives in tandem. This has the seemingly endless parade of adorable touches filled with cute writing. In a way, even the ambitious scope that threatens to sometimes take down the whole thing is reminiscent of the original and the era that its developer Level-5 was going through with the success of Professor Layton and Yo-Kai Watch. If Fantasy Life i is representative of what they’re going to be doing going forward with the likes of Professor Layton, I’m becoming more and more hopeful that they’ll be able to reach their old heights. Fantasy Life i is enjoyable even with its occasional slips. I’m happy to be back juggling my multiple jobs of Angler, Paladin, Blacksmith, and Artist.