YMMV / Fantasy Life

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Think of the bounties from a monster's point of view: the fact that the other enemies always attack any bounty in sight may be a Mercy Kill for the captured monster as far as they see it — or else they're breaking the box and setting the monster free. Admittedly, neither of these explains why the monsters are so insistent on beating up a recently-caught fish instead of wanting to eat it or even being remotely interested in a freshly-excavated piece of ore or a just-felled tree, though.
  • Paladins. While they're generally nice and most missions you're given have you attacking dangerous monsters, the Life also has quests for defeating the Napdragon and five of its offspring. While the one that gives you the quest says that it's because they lost plenty of Paladins to the Napdragon, they also leave out the part that the dragon only ever attacks when provoked, and anyone that's in the area that it lives never have any problems with it.
• Breather Boss: The Forest Wraith for the wizard life, provided your fire magic isn't too far behind. It's basically an amalgam of the Gale Wraith and Earth Wraith, who are both weak to fire. Also, chances are that it will be one of the Expert challenges that you put off until after you become a Master to be as prepared as you can. As a Master wizard, you get to recruit Hazel, who specializes in fire and randomly boosts your magic.
• Difficulty Spike: Origin Island's enemies hit a whole lot harder than most main game enemies, meaning you're better off not fighting them if you don't have at least 1 high-ranked combat-based Life available.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: If Tumblr has anything to go by, Dragonslayer (the paladin who is by the graveyard at the West Grassy Plains) has a growing following, considering he wasn't too involved in the story.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: The main story is clearly balanced around the idea that not everyone going through it will have a combat-based Life and the ability to fight; as such beating the story is ridiculously easy for anyone who does have a combat Life. Outside the main story there are actually difficult bosses like the Napdragon, but as long as you have enough attack power to do more than 0 damage to them even they can be cheesed with generous use of HP potions and Life Cures, meaning the game is never particularly challenging. This is frequently listed by reviewers as one of the game's major flaws, even by those who otherwise liked the game.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The main story has a paltry 7 chapters not counting the prologue or your first Life tutorial, plus some errands in between. With only a few battles necessary in the chapters, and usually having powerful allies, it's possible to finish the story very quickly. Of course the main emphasis is intended to be on sidequests.
• Game-Breaker: Some NPC allies are constantly at a higher level than the player. Some have useful capabilities. Some have both. Odin is a big favorite for just this reason; he's always a few levels above the player, has decent attack power, and can use several area-of-effect attacks. Plus, he's available as an ally about halfway through the story, whereas the goddess sisters and the monarchs, who have similar capabilities, aren't available as allies until after the story is completed.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The Script Breaking that can happen at the beginning of the gathering lives and for the fruit/honey harvesting of the paladin and hunter. If you for example start a woodcutter/miner with logs/ores already in your bag, the game will act as if these were just cut down or mined and consider the challenges involving them completed. Depending of where the materials come from and how many different kinds you're carrying, you can end up an Adept if not an Expert just after finishing/skipping the tutorial quest. This has drawbacks, however. One is that if you are actually intrested in the job's Sidequest Sidestory, you will never get to see your colleague's "normal" dialogue for the ranks you skipped and have to plough through a bunch of "congrats for your new rank, here's your challenge/present/information" dialogue before being up to date. The other is that these jobs have an insane number of ores to be mined or trees to be cut to become a Legend. The part of this with the highest reward to effort ratio is the small portion taken care of as job challenges. If you for example start the miner with a ruby in your bag, that's a certain number of ores that you didn't mine while actually looking for it that will add to the grinding portion of the quota.
  • There's a way to cancel enemy attacks by going to the menu screen right after their attack starts, since technically the attack still happens in the background, but it won't do any damage or knockback while you're at the menu. Using this can let you completely nullify some of the enemies' more powerful attacks.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Good news for those who wish to do so: some cutscenes, master songs and tutorial quests beyond the first can be skipped.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The way bounties work tends to be needlessly convoluted, to say at least: whenever you kill a strong enemy, mine a particularily tough rock, cut down an especially hard tree or yank out an especially large fish, it turns into a cage containing the said enemy or a sack with one of the other 3 items inside of it. You then need to bring it over to the nearest bounty clerk to cash in your money reward and either get an item dropped by the enemy or an actually useable version of the other 3 items. So far so good, but the process is made needlessly convoluted by all the other limitations placed on the bounties:
  • There can only be 3 bounty items present in the game at the same time, and if you create any new ones, the oldest bounty disappears. This isn't too much of an issue normally, but in the endgame dungeons where new bounties are created constantly, you need to backtrack repeatedly if you don't want to lose out on the rewards.
  • Your fast travel options are disabled when you're carrying a bounty: you can't skip directly to any of the locations available on your map menu, meaning you need to carry them back to the nearest bounty clerk manually, although you can still do so when riding a horse. There is at least 1 bounty clerk in every major outdoor area or a special NPC that lets you warp to a number of locations closer to a bounty clerk even when you're carrying bounty to alleviate the problem, but its made far more apparent by the next issue:
  • Both you and any enemies can and will damage your bounty, and if it runs out of health, it's destroyed. Again, this problem is made worse in the later areas of the game, where there's a large number of enemies that're aggressive by default. The relative toughness of the bounty is largely irrelevant as well: you can spend several minutes hacking away at a magical rock with your pickaxe and barely manage to mine it loose, but once it's being dragged around in sack form behind you, all it takes is a few stray enemy attacks to destroy it completely. If this wasn't annoying enough, the enemy can and will purposefully attack your bounties, and if a bounty is hit even once, it's left behind, meaning you need to go back and pick it up and kill any enemies near it that'll destroy it in seconds if given the chance. Thankfully, using the horse helps with this to a degree as well: when you're riding it, your bounties disappear, making it so that enemies can't hit them, although if your horse gets hit during an inopportune moment, it runs away to its stable, dumping you in the middle of enemies with your now-vulnerable bounties.
  • The possibility to destroy the bounty yourself is a double edged sword. It's probably there so you can destroy the bounties you don't want to count towards the limit of three, but the reality of it is accidentally destroying one you want to keep.
    • Thankfully, any bounties you need to cash in for God/Creator rank challenges aren't really in any particularily difficult locations when compared to the rest of the game and the above mostly applies to the Bonus Dungeon.
  • Almost half of the Lives you can choose (Blacksmith, Carpenter, Tailor, Alchemist, and Cook) all have the same basic minigame with slight variations. To a lesser extent Miner and Woodcutter overlap as well. This has been considered a major flaw by critics, especially when considering What Could Have Been with some of the cut classes.
  • Save data is tied to your system, not the game cartridge. Considering only a few 3DS games do this, it's a giant pain if you lose your console, sell it for a new one and don't do a system transfer before handing it over for good, etc..
• Scrappy Weapon: The bow, due to one simple issue: shooting an arrow pushes you back. At low levels, this is mostly a non-issue, as the whole point of the weapon is to stay away. But once you get to higher levels and your combo length increases, you’ll be shooting a lot of arrows, and be pushed back really far. It’s to the point where the bow’s ultimate combo requires you to be point blank when starting it, as the strongest shot will miss because you’re too far away otherwise.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The game shares a quirky sense of humor and emphasis on parent-child relationships with the Mother series.
  • It could be considered one to Rune Factory, which is also a Role-Playing Game and Slice of Life combo in which you have to do your own Item Crafting to get the best weapons.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Angler challenge to fish a Golden Swordfish is one of the more annoying ones: it's the only lordfish that has a rare variation that appears maybe 20% of the time you enter the area and due to the layout of Port Puerto and Tortuga Archipelago, it takes at least a minute to reset the chance for it to spawn. Finally, when you finally do manage to get it to spawn, it's extremely easy to find yourself lacking in stats and equipment to actually fish it out successfully, forcing you to waste another 15 minutes getting it to spawn again when you're strong enough.
  • The Blacksmith challenges involving Dragon tier armor aren't much better: there's no guaranteed way to get Dragon Scales and the chance to get them from the few sources that drop them is 30% at most. This wouldn't be too bad otherwise, but the easiest way to get them is as a drop from the Napdragon, which can take several minutes to kill unless you're extremely overleveled and which has several randomized spawn points that you need to comb through to find him.
  • The Cook challenges in which you need to cook dragon meat. You need at least six pieces of it and the only source for it besides the two pieces Flapjack gives you is a drop from the gold dragon in the Ancient Ruins, so you need to either fight it yourself with another Life entirely or know someone willing to go after it for you. Luckily, you can buy some from a shopkeeper in Rocky Hill Shrine if you have the DLC.
    • Additionally, there are Cook challenges for getting the cooking skills up to rank 15. All of them. If you want Legend (or God/Creator), be prepared to do a lot of grinding with dishes you probably won't even use. The Origin Island DLC eases the pain a bit, but not by much.
  • The Tailor challenge that translates to "make multiple copies of the light and umbral sets". The light and shadow mana needed to make the ten pieces of clothing only drop from Wraiths in the vanilla game and they are enemies designed to be a challenge to a late-game Wizard. That Tailor job better have been undertaken to clothe a Wizard.
  • The final challenge for Alchemists: making a Philosopher's Stone. The first two items you'll need, a King Gel and an Antenna Lantern, are relatively easy to find and obtain, as they're both found in the same dungeon, though you'll need a reasonable Angler rank to take down the Lordfish that drops the Lantern. However, the last item to make the Stone- an Unknown Life-Form- takes the cake. Only the bosses found in Dark Void drop it, and it doesn't have a very high drop rate, either. Hope you have unlimited patience and a high-ranked combat Life, because finding one is going to take a while.
  • The Miner and Woodcutter Hero rank quests aren't that terrible until one notices their quests to harvest 500 ores/trees. This does not mean gathering 500 pieces of each material, it means "harvest 500 ore deposits" and "cut down 500 trees", respectively. Zones usually only have around a dozen of these resource points, including the boss-tier spots. The only way someone would have this fulfilled by this point in their Life is if they were forced to keep digging/cutting to get the rare stuff for the crafting classes' higher-end projects. More likely than not, the player would have only needed to mine/cut 150 of each resource at most to get what they needed.