Wow. It can’t have been good at all for it to have flown completely under my radar. I just remember a lot of disappointment when it released in Japan that it was a gacha game that had next to nothing to do with the original gameplay-wise.

I know the feeling. At some point, you just have to decide what to prioritize in the backlog, and what to let go.

Glad to know I’m not the only one!

Are you planning on buying the sequel? And if so, are you planning on playing through the first game before you play the sequel?

Absolutely! I’m looking forward to it, and also hoping a port of the original. I’d love a port and or/sequel of the spiritual sister game, Ever Oasis, too.

I wouldn’t expect parity in performance between those platforms anyhow. As long as it’s not running like a slideshow like early reviews suggested, I’ll have to get it. Several people said it was awful in docked mode, which is really odd, but then the game was pulled from the store and replaced, so I suspect that was an erroneous version.

Not at all. The original is a 3DS exclusive, so it may be somewhat hard to get anyhow.

I would imagine there’s little direct narrative connection between the two.

It’s a light ARPG where you can freely swap from a variety of jobs that determine what skills and abilities you have. Unlike most other games in the genre, Fantasy Life has a substantial focus on skills beyond combat. There are basically three different classifications for jobs: gatherers, who have abilities suited to gathering specific types of materials, producers, who use those materials for crafting goods, tools, and weapons, and combat classes. All classes can fight, but combat classes specialize in fighting at the cost of being largely useless for everything else. It’s a very fun and rewarding loop to develop all of the jobs so you can maximize what things you can do, but it’s also completely valid to beat the entire game playing as any job. I beat the game as an angler/fisherman just to see that it could be done.

Yeah, I never played it. As far as I know, it was only officially released in Japan, and AFAIK the hacked versions you could play outside of Japan were pretty broken by the lack of proper online functionality. I sit in this weird grey area of being disappointed that we didn’t get it released in the US, but also being aware that we probably dodged a bullet with that, and we might not be getting Fantasy Life i at all if the mobile game damaged the franchise here.