Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time seems to offer exactly what the cozy gaming community has been looking for. A community so eager to jump into a chilling, cute world of miniaturized characters that it helped Level 5’s newest title reach the mark of 1 million copies sold and flooded TikTok and Reddit with posts about the game. From cute characters to a whole island to customize, it is the quintessential cozy sim game, and I love it. However, I learned, eventually, that the zen of the game only lasts as long as I stay away from its cooking minigame, where chopping adorable little vegetables and frying eggs becomes a race to be the best.
A Life in Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is the equivalent of what’s usually a job in other role-playing games — classes that you can equip to perform certain actions. Right off the bat, you can unlock up to 15 Lives, each in different categories. A battle Life like Mercenary allows you to engage in combat; a gathering Life like Miner allows you to harvest materials from the environment; and a crafting Life like Cook allows you to make things like clothing or dishes of food.
Image: Level-5 via Polygon
After enjoying my time a bit as a Mecernary, I chose Cook as the Life to start my journey into crafting things. In the cooking minigame, there are three stations for you to use: a pot on the left side, a cutting board in the middle, and a frying pan on the right. You have a time limit to perform a sequence, and in each one of them, you might have to press a button quickly, hold it, tap it multiple times, or rotate the joystick. The idea is to perform the actions shown above your character in their respective stations. Do a great job, and a satisfactory “Great Work!” appears on the screen.
The whole concept is simple. It is challenging but far from as annoying as Stardew Valley’s fishing minigame. You will finish most dishes if you respect the level requirement — but if you do an OK job and still complete the dish, the game will simply describe it as “Done.” I couldn’t help but feel I could be better at it. I should be better at it. I wasn’t going to simply accept the compensatory prize the game was offering me by saying, “Hey, at least you did something” whenever I finished a dish. No, sir. I was going to hone my skills.
Image: Level-5 via Polygon
I began to study all the options I could think of to save time and to score every sequence perfectly. We have around 8.5 seconds to complete three to four actions in the minigame, and dishes have different maximum numbers of sequences you can perform when trying to prepare them. The first step was to stop playing with a controller and change to keyboard/mouse, which felt better and helped me perform the rotating action faster.
In order to speed up the process, I also tried to cancel the animations, seeing if I could change stations before my little guy finished chopping his vegetables or stirring his soup. Getting stuck in long animations means, in games like League of Legends and even Genshin Impact, losing damage output. But in Fantasy Life i, I was losing the chance to fry another steak.
Image: Level-5 via Polygon
The next step was to reduce my reaction time, which involved memorizing the symbols for each station. I was taking too long to understand that I should hold the button instead of tapping it multiple times when practicing my omelet. And I wanted to quickly identify which station I should be at and what kind of action I should perform. When you play endgame content like raids in MMOs, progressing in a fight requires you to identify the mechanics and quickly respond to them. When it comes to Fantasy Life i’s cooking minigame, the goal was to eventually make my brain understand the symbols not as a place in the kitchen, but as an input on the controller. Instead of damage-per-second, I was increasing my soup-per-second.
The last step required me to read the interface of the game more efficiently. In the cooking minigame, while the sequence of actions you must perform is on top of your head, you can see the following one on the right side of the screen. It’s like Tetris showing you what the next shape is. It allows you to always be one step ahead. So, I practiced checking the next sequence while performing the current one, putting all my cerebral capacity into preparing the next three or four steps in my mind — a difficult task that more often than not led to my cute character feeling disappointed when I mistakenly positioned him in the wrong station.
Image: Level-5 via Polygon
But I am far from having completely mastered the cooking minigame in Fantasy Life i. I still need to figure out what the fastest way to level up is. My gear needs to be upgraded. There are many skills to unlock, and I need to learn how to better apply them. I must understand the economy to gather funds and buy materials. But I know that, once I reach the max level with this Life, I will be okay… Maybe take some time to actually relax playing this game and start another Life where I’ll have to grind my way up to becoming master once again.
I mean, Carpenter does seem fun, right?
