Fantasy worlds are rather well known for their less than friendly–make that totally aggressive and dangerous–wildlife. Much of your time will be spent out in the wilderness, so you’ll need to know how to survive against such threats.

Fortunately, fantasy worlds are also known for their diverse and often over-the-top weaponry and armour.

Basics of Weapons¶

In Fantasy Life, there are five distinct types of weapons: Longsword, Greatsword, Bow, Staff and Knife. Which weapon you can use depends on your current Life and skills.

For instance, if you’re a Paladin, you’ll have the Longsword skill, allowing you to wield Longswords. Should you change Life, you will retain the Longsword skill, so you can continue to wield Longswords but only if the Longsword can be equipped in your current Life.

Wielding your Weapon¶

The controls vary for each weapon type, but can be largely generalised.

When you have a weapon equipped, press the A button to draw it. Then press A again to attack or the B button to put it away.

For close-combat weapons, if you press the A button consecutively while standing still, you can perform a chain of attacks. Otherwise, if you’re moving while you press A, you will perform a moving dash attack.

When your weapon is drawn and an enemy is in sight, your character will automatically lock onto the enemy directly ahead. This allows you to move around, while still being in a prime position to wallop the enemy. If you want to lock onto a different enemy, press the Y button.

As you rank up, you can also use special skills, such as holding and releasing the A button or X button to perform charged moves. Basically, there are many ways you can beat up bad guys.

Protecting Yourself¶

Offence is wonderful, but defence can be equally important. Of course, you can expect to equip better and better armour to reduce the damage you take.

Paladins go one better with the ability to block with a shield . By holding the X button with a shield equipped, you can greatly reduce the damage taken from enemy attacks.

Also consider moving around to carefully avoid enemy attacks. Every enemy has their own set of attack patterns, so if you memorise them, you can often avoid their attacks and retaliate with a well-timed counter-attack to boot.

You might wonder if standing your ground with a shield is redundant if you can just hit and run, but when enemies get more frantic and deal more damage, it can be a more reliable and less risky strategy.

It hurts!¶

Should you take damage, you may wish to flee the scene to heal. This would be a good time to put away your weapon with B and run towards a safe spot. If you have healing items assigned to your Pouch, you can reduce the downtime you suffer too.

Finally–and we don’t want to jinx it–but should you take too much damage and reach 0 HP, it doesn’t have to be Game Over for you.

If you assign one or more Life Cures to your Pouch, you can use a Life Cure to instantly revive yourself with a fraction of your health.

Healing potions and Life Cures can be purchased from the general store, from traveling salesmen (or salesplush, rather) and other venerable vendors. You may also find them stashed away inside treasure chests.

Tips for a Non-combat Life¶

Okay, that’s all well and good if you’re in a combat-based Life, but what if you’re a Cook or Tailor? Well, Cooks and Tailors can still fight, but early on it’s hard to ignore their inferior combat capabilities.

In which case, consider recruiting NPC allies to help you fight. You will befriend a number of allies during the main story and additional ones as you rank up in each Life. But we’ll discuss that in a future topic.

The other alternative is to avoid battles, although the combat experience is very enticing… If you’re in a large open space area, you can simply run to avoid enemies.

When you’re moving in narrow spaces, however, it might be better to sneak around instead (hold the B button before moving).