Level-5 has released a new blog post about Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, revealing what might have been a major reason for receiving multiple delays since its 2023 announcement.

The blog reveals that in mid-2024, the game’s producer Keiji Inafune left the company, presenting an “unexpected challenge” for the dev team. Inafune is known as one of the creators behind the Mega Man series, and more infamously as the creator of Mighty No.9.

The blog does not go into detail why Inafune left Level-5, but says that it led them to “reassess and restructure” Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. After internal playtests led to “harsh evaluations”, Level-5 CEO Akihiro Hino took on the job as producer, with his team in Osaka committing to a “complete overhaul” of the game.

I decided to take on the role of producer, shifting the core development team from Osaka to our headquarters. While the Osaka team had been dedicated from the start, the project evolved into a collective effort across our whole company—with developers from Fukuoka, Tokyo and beyond, we were able to significantly strengthen our development capabilities. This restructuring allowed us to expand the team and create an environment where we could focus on fine-tuning the game’s quality right up until the very end.

From that point onward, we undertook a complete overhaul of the game: adding open-world exploration and parkour-style actions, restructuring the system’s progression flow, improving the core mechanics, and refining the scenario to be even more emotionally impactful.

With the game planned to release on May 21st 2025, it is only a matter of time before we see if this restructuring paid off.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.