Fantasy Life

The newest collaboration from Mother 3 developer, Brownie Brown and the Professor Layton series creators, Level-5 is a fairly original sounding RPG.

Fantasy Life will be a “slow RPG” according to Anoop Gantayat’s translation on Japanese gaming news site, Andriasang (who have been covering the Level-5 Vision 2009 conference.)

As Eric Caoili of Tiny Cartridge pointed out, the game looks incredibly similar to Mother 3, but of course, that’s probably because the same art team at Brownie Brown that worked on Mother 3 is working on Fantasy Life.

The game doesn’t focus on combat, but instead focuses on living the lives of various characters that you create, and by playing through the game multiple times, experiencing multiple “small endings” to hopefully collect enough information to piece together the bigger picture.

Level-5 merely said the game doesn’t focus on combat, so does that mean it doesn’t have any combat at all and is a game purely based on interaction? That’s a possibility as Level-5 did mention two stats your characters would have based on your decisions. Richness, which measures your money and wealth, and Happiness, which of course measures your happiness.

High happiness levels, means more charisma, and Level-5 says that the happier your character is, the more likely that character will be able to speak to more people that might have not wanted to talk to that character before.

Fantasy Life boasts some rad production values as well, since Final Fantasy composer Nobou Uemetsu will be composing the entire score for the game. Oh how, I wish the DS had better sound.

The game looks absolutely awesome, yet little is known about the interactivity that will go on within it’s world.

- Kyle