A fisher. A woodcutter. An artist. A farmer. A hunter. A Paladin. A hero. Fantasy Life I: The Girl Who Steals Time is the sequel to the cult-classic Nintendo 3DS life simulation game, where you can take on many jobs and live multiple lives. Now, after a few delays and a lengthy wait, the latest Level-5-developed joint is finally released on multiple platforms, with high hopes weighing on it. Thankfully, it pulls off those ambitions, not just presenting a vibrant and charming new RPG adventure but making the entire series a quintessential ‘numbers go up and watch the hours melt away’ franchise for years to come.

When you and your motley crew of journeymen happen upon an uncharted, mysterious island, your call to adventure begins. A giant abyss of a hole, a bone dragon and a message from a girl begging and pleading you to save the world beckon you forward out into the great unknown. The threads to solving the mystery include, thanks to your new fandangled time-travelling powers, visiting the archipelago in your near vicinity, made up of islands in the present day and one a thousand years in the past.

I’m going to get this out of the way first: Story is not at the forefront of Fantasy Life, and that remains the case with The Girl Who Steals Time. Being functionally a tutorial to the greater world and the many jobs (labelled ‘lives’ in this universe) you’ll embark on, the narrative is very stitched together with cutscenes introducing a boatload of characters, all with their own conflicts. Tying it all together is a mystery dripped in fantasy; a magical and mysterious elf keeps visiting you when you least expect it, and dark energy seeps out of the ominous dark hole situated on the island in the past. What it all means doesn’t amount to much that exciting, because Level-5 isn’t exactly interested in telling a good story. However, that didn’t stop the team from overloading it with cutscenes aplenty and conversations that hold little value and go nowhere. Fantasy Life fans already probably know this well, but you should be warned: The Girl Who Steals Time is a game where you’re going to want to (and just might) be holding the B button to skip through the long lines of dialogue.

Though you can be interrupted by meaningful game progress or levelling up a life by a story moment, at least the world’s charm is always there. There’s delightful humour and whimsy wherever you look. The simple quests that flood the map often make for oddities in character exchanges: one side quest had me gathering honey for a young girl’s mother who had fallen deeply ill… only for the mother to sheepishly admit that she was just constipated. One of the main things you do to progress in the main story is rescue one of your bumbling adventurers, Edward. You do this constantly, and it’d be maddening if it weren’t for the overzealous comedic value of say, finally levelling up mining enough to break that big boulder that stands between you and him… and then he gets trapped in another part of the mine, now tasking the player with saving him from behind a giant turnip once you amply level farming. The game offers you all these bizarre moments and one-liners that’ll make you snort, and it does it while having the cute, cosy and chibi aesthetic you know from games like Animal Crossing. Perfect. No notes.

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time can be surmised as an MMORPG distilled down to only a maximum of four people able to play together at the same time. Movement and how abilities and classes work are incredibly similar to that genre. Combat lives have combos, light and heavy attacks and area of effect attacks. Players will undoubtedly find their favourites. Mine was Hunter, the archer life that can zip around environments and arenas with the right bumper button, doing a spin dodge, freeing up space to line up devastating piercing shots in a straight line or a torrential rain of arrows from above. The Mercenary lives use this same button to strengthen their sword, doubling damage and so on. Crafting lives like cooking and blacksmithing throw you into minigames where you need to position your character at the right spot at a workstation before entering a QTE prompt. Gathering lives like woodcutting and mining have you managing a meter, to net the resource before your SP (special points) fully deplete and prevent you from continuing progression. These are all incredibly formulaic, but they are satisfying to use and grind away at.

What the Fantasy Life franchise does really well is make even the most monotonous tasks seem exciting. Bosses don’t just come in the form of enemies that you need to slay with your sword. There are legendary trees or ore minerals, or fish to conquer that have their own boss-like gauge. Suddenly, you’re not just seeking to slay that dragon, but your other white whale, your other want, in the world is to finally chop down that rare cherry blossom tree.

Additionally, The Girl Who Steals Time is an RPG that is excellent at having every little thing feed into one another. There is a bounty of skills to unlock that bolster every little facet of your combat wits and gathering, unlocking new strong or charged attacks and lessening the SP required for actions. There are plenty of quests for each life too, tasking you with killing x amount of y type of enemies or finally taking down that legendary fish. Cross the threshold for a required number of completed quests for a life, and you rank up, unlocking higher-level gear. I cannot emphasise enough that the grind is very akin to an MMORPG, but nevertheless a straight shock of serotonin to the brain.

Even while Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is doing ten million things at once, it’s also like three games in one. There’s your main stuff where you’re completing quests and working through levelling up your lives. Then, in your downtime, you’re also essentially making your own Animal Crossing village on an island, welcoming in villagers that you’ve rescued from dungeons, building houses and terraforming the environment.

There is also a separate instanced island that’s an open world and features a zone that you explore and climb around in, unlocking towers to defog a map and entering shrines to complete puzzles and earn a reward… just like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. This latter reference is less subtle and almost coy; the first time you happen upon a shrine, you discover it’s green and glowing and has an inviting entrance, only instead of being inside an almost rock-like structure it’s inside a luminescent poop. The characters even comment on and question why this shrine has taken this shape, but both you and I know it’s to get as close to the likeness as possible while giving a wink and a nudge.

You could almost accuse these elements of being derivative because of how familiar they are with their inspiration. Yet they hold their own well, so it’s hard to stay mad for all that long. The Fantasy Life series already wears its inspiration and heart on its sleeve, having a gorgeous and colourful art style that is very Nintendo, despite no longer being a third-party exclusive to said platform. Everything is so bright and full of life and charm that you forgive small oddities like the invisible walls you run into a little too often in the open world, or yes, the nonsensical, frankly boring story. If you were to take an MRI brain scan of me while playing Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, you’d see me enamoured and enlightened, filled with activity. It’s simply that good to see the numbers go up.