Why I'm not playing the new Fantasy Life
When I was a child, my Nan let me play with this strange device called a “DS” that could play games like my Dad’s Xbox 360 or PC without needing to be plugged in. Alongside Brain Training and 101-in-1 Explosive Megamix, she had these two games that reminded me of my favourite point-and-click adventure games starring a behatted gentleman. His name was Professor Layton.
When I got my own DS (a red DS Lite that repeatedly fell out of my hands and into solid concrete until it stopped working in 2012), I started receiving the latest Professor Layton game each Christmas up until the series wrapped up in 2013. I got the instalments that came out before 2011 for a few years afterward, but it was time to expand my horizons beyond Layton, LEGO games and New Super Mario Bros.
Two things critical to my taste in games happened in July of 2014. The first was that I bought the much-delayed crossover game Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney with £40(!) of my own money and soon dived into the wider world of adventure games and visual novels. The second is that I received a Wii U for my birthday and resumed reading the Official Nintendo Magazine since I would be able to play the big games they were covering again, like... Mario Party 10? ONM shut down just five months after I started reading again as covering a failed console did not attract much of a readership. Despite our short time together, ONM showed me so many games through their coverage, getting me to take chances on independent and experimental games for the first time.
In the penultimate November 2014 issue, writer Kate Gray (who I've gotten to know in the years since) reviewed an RPG for the 3DS called Fantasy Life. It was made by the same people as Layton, which was a byword for quality in my book. It offered real-time battles in a connected world like Zelda but it had twelve distinct classes called “Lives” you could swap between. Some just changed your weapon of choice, but many more asked you to look at the game’s world Reveria in a different way.
Let’s say you were a Hunter in need of a stronger bow to take on the Fanged Ape without taking an hour. You could mow down lower level enemies and sell their spoils until you had enough money to buy an upgrade like in most RPGs, but you could also switch to the Carpenter life and make a new bow yourself. Of course you need wood and string to make the bow, but that’s where the Woodcutter and Tailor lives come in. You could even customise your bow to have unique elemental abilities or make it stronger than any you’d find off the shelf! It may sound like busywork on top of a standard action RPG to some but to me it sounded like a world that you could be a part of while also going on your quest. The game’s humour came through in screenshots dotting the six page review (pretty big for anything without Mario in it) too, which reeled me further in.
Off the back of this review, I asked for the game and got it for Christmas…2015. My tastes had been pretty narrow up to this point, so I probably wasn’t vocal enough about the game in time, plus you never know when a child’s asking for a £40 game on a whim. From that day, it remained in my 2DS game rotation (I had broken my Aqua-Blue 3DS by this point – concrete struck again). I would go on expeditions with NPCs from the story mode in abandoned mountain mines and through ancient desert mazes while stuck in the car. I was very much there for the exploration and side quests over the main story, so it was not until I was deliberately finishing up old games in 2020 that I saw credits. I finished Paper Mario Sticker Star on my birthday that year too.
In the years since reading that fateful review, I became more and more aware of Level 5’s games. They spearheaded the Guild series that brought a Millennium Kitchen game outside of Japan for the first time, Argos shops were littered with collectible discs you could put into your own Yokai Watch to tie into the games, and I discovered that they developed Dragon Quest IX – the first RPG I ever heard about thanks to a robust marketing campaign here in the UK (They even got Jedward in adverts for it!).
After Layton wrapped up, their football series Inazuma Eleven faded away and Yokai Watch petered out, Level 5 had a tough time in the latter half of the 2010s. They developed an episodic Layton successor about his daughter Katrielle for phones, ported it to 3DS and Switch and finished the story’s central narrative in an anime. Besides that and the multiple delays to Inazuma Eleven Great Road of Heroes, I didn’t hear much about the once-prolific company. They had always been so ambitious, with projects spanning mediums and a stable of beloved series so I was sure they would figure something out after Snack World failed to take the world by storm in February 2020.
And then they shut down their international operations.
After paring their North American branches down for a year, the company finally shut them down and effectively ceased operating outside of Japan. Their only game publicly in development was Inazuma Eleven and since they hadn’t localised fellow Switch game Yokai Watch 4, or the remake of the first Yokai Watch, it seemed like the company was struggling. They also launched a manga platform that week which I’m surprised to report is still going, so maybe they were leaning into their multimedia strengths after all. From here there were occasional updates on Inazuma Eleven, but I decided it was best to accept that I would never see a Professor Layton or Fantasy Life game again, let alone anything as original and exciting from the company.
A year later mobile developer Boltrend Games announced a beta release of Fantasy Life’s semi-sequel Fantasy Life Online outside of Japan. Level 5 were not involved in the publishing or translation of this, shutting down the game’s Japanese servers a week before FLO’s public release in the rest of the world. I spent an hour with it back in December 2021 and found myself wishing I was right about never hearing from Level 5 again.
The localisation was abysmal, riddled with typos and poorly delineated currencies and as a gacha game, there were plenty of them. I did not endure the game for too long but here’s a rundown of my experience : on Lunares (misspelt as “Lunare”) you create a character, you go through a combat tutorial, you choose to align with the red or blue faction (belonging to the deities Buto and Jaken, respectively), you then choose your starting Life and are thrown into a gacha pull screen where you “Summon” allies unique to this game. With that first taste out of the way, you’re transported to Reveria with a mission : find Lunare Detective Piccolino. You meet up with Yuelia, your main companion from the original game, and set off for Grassy Plains to find Piccolino.
Throughout this whole experience, familiar sights and sounds greeted me : Nobuo Uematsu’s music as chipper as ever, the sound effects just like I remembered and an all-new cutscene using Yoshitaka Amano’s designs (a lot of Final Fantasy people recruited for this game). I did my first quest, slaying rank and file Carrotys for the same dozing old guard watching over the Grassy Plains, but could never shake the feeling of wrongness. I checked out the monetisation, featuring such highlights as Diamonds (Paid) and Diamonds (Free), and deleted the app from my phone. The game was delisted a year later and went offline shortly afterwards, which isn’t the first time this happened to a game released globally by Boltrend, I understand. You can watch some footage preserving the game here.
Following this disappointment, we next heard from Level 5 when they licensed out their Ni No Kuni series to Netmarble. It was released in English in May 2022 and is actually still running. The flagrant blockchain and NFT elements appear to have been phased out too, so it’s just another gacha game now. Maybe the future of Level 5 lay in farming out its series to gacha game developers in exchange for a share of the profits? We also heard about a mech game called Megaton Musashi being released in Japan with some updates, but outside of that, all was quiet again.
In the February 2023 Nintendo Direct, Level 5 came back in full force. Professor Layton! New game Decapolice! And…is that Fantasy Life? I couldn’t believe it. After years of silence outside of sporadic Inazuma Eleven teases, the company was back on the main stage. In their Vision presentation a few weeks later, Level 5 founder and CEO Akihiro Hino also announced a global release for Megaton Musashi and an overhaul of the new Inazuma Eleven, now called Inazuma Eleven Victory Road. They were well and truly back from the dead.
But necromancy comes at a cost. How could a company go from extensive cost-cutting in 2020 to publishing five games day and date internationally just three years later? In short, they could not. Delays hit the games and presentations again and again. Decapolice was delayed to “post 2024”, then to “2025” and is now expected to launch in 2026 alongside an anime. I kept up to date on their Tokyo Game Show presentations too, where they showed off some of Professor Layton and the New World of Steam’s puzzles each October and other random teases. As of February 2025, two years after announcing so many games, only their global re-release of Megaton Musashi actually came out, itself built off of a game first released in 2021.
As for Fantasy Life i, the game’s producer Keiji Inafune (yes the Mighty No. 9 guy) left Level-5 Comcept, the studio he founded, in “mid-2024” in the middle of the game’s development. Comcept was then re-established as Level-5 Osaka, consolidating everything they had been doing as a subsidiary under the main company’s watchful eye and Hino taking the reins as the games producer in the company’s central headquarters. All the while, the game tested poorly with playtesters, according to the devlog released in March 2025, necessitating “major revisions”. The original Fantasy Life may have started as a DS game and been co-developed with Brownie-Brown and h.a.n.d, but it did not take the combined efforts of their Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka offices to get it out the door after yet another delay.
What’s more, it became apparent that the only way the company was keeping up with management’s grand ambitions was by taking shortcuts. During the “Study Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in the Age of AI”, Hino showed off how generative AI was being used for concept art and layouts for title screens and marketing.
Since Large Language Models and their ilk took off in 2022, I have not touched one once. The environmental impact of these tools is well-documented, they are built on stolen art and they have been seeping into the games landscape while companies lay off those expensive humans. Intellectually, ethically and creatively, I loathe AI usage and yet I didn’t stop looking forward to my new Level 5 games.
When I saw Boltrend’s shoddy localisation of Fantasy Life Online, I was disappointed but figured Level 5 needed the money.
When I saw the blockchain Ni No Kuni spinoff, I shrugged. I was never going to play it and again, they seemed to need some fast cash.
When they announced five games in the span of a month, I held my breath. They used to release five games a year on the 3DS sometimes but could they scale that up to console games?
When I saw the AI concept art and ideation, I raised an eyebrow. So long as it stayed away from the final product, was it so bad?
When I saw people point out AI assets littering the Holy Horror Mansion trailer, I sighed. This wasn’t going to represent the final product anyway right?
When CEO Akihiro Hino gave a talk to new developers saying that 80-90% of code in games is AI nowadays, weeks away from their first original game launch in years, I was done making excuses for them.
From Stable Diffusion in their marketing, to having no qualms who they license their worlds to, to grossly over-scoping their teams, making up for it with AI-generated code and who knows what else at this point, enough is enough.
Level 5 has always been ambitious, just look at Yokai Watch’s meteoric rise from a single game to sequels with multiple versions a la Pokémon to a TV show and a Just Dance spinoff game. But when you scale down to stay open and then announce far more than you could handle at your peak, delaying games about as fast as you can announce them (the company still has at least five upcoming games) time and time again, you’ve eradicated all the goodwill and trust you had built up over your career.
On the 7th of May 2025, I cancelled my Fantasy Life i preorder. This was a sequel to one of my favourite games ever made, coming out at long last, but I know it would just let me down like the company has for the last five years. I don’t want another hollow facsimile of the worlds and characters I once loved paraded out for a paycheck and I definitely don’t want to pay to take the chance that it’s actually good. Maybe updates and reviews of FLi and Layton will change my mind in time, maybe the company will scale down and cut back on AI and maybe pigs will fly. For the time being, I won’t let my nostalgia blind me to the greed of a corporation.
Thanks for the memories, Level 5. May you rest in peace.
Fantasy Life i is an action RPG developed and published by Level 5 for Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4/5, Xbox Series S/X and PC via Steam. It was released in advanced access on the 18th of May and was released fully on the 21st of May. A Nintendo Switch 2 Edition is planned. If you would like to support what I do, consider backing me on Patreon for early access to my writing or make a one-time donation on Ko-Fi. Thanks for reading.
