…What? I told you I was a lost cause. Save yourselves!

I had to do a spot of extended babysitting earlier this month because of reasons. To keep my niece entertained, I downloaded Love Nikki: Dress Up Queen on my tablet and let her try it. Why that game in particular? Because I’d seen ads for it (which turned out to be false and non-representative of the actual game, but that’s a matter for another day) and it looked harmless enough for a second-grader, so I thought why not.

As for how I ended up playing the game myself after she went home, and how I ended up spending enough money on it to reach VIP 6 level… well… Umm… I’d love to tell you how, but I don’t quite know myself. I think initially it was because she would ask for help whenever she couldn’t pass a stage – which was often, because Love Nikki isn’t really about fashion. So I got involved in helping her pass stages. Then I got super involved in the crafting aspect of creating new suits because videogame crafting has always been my “thing.” And one thing led to another and now, here we are.

Story

Nikki, an ordinary pink-haired girl, and her ordinary talking cat Momo are whisked away to the magical world of Miraland by a mysterious woman. They discover that Miraland is a world where everything, absolutely everything including war and politics, is decided through style battles. Can Nikki style her way through a political quagmire and return to her original world? … Of course not, otherwise the game would end. I actually enjoy Love Nikki‘s story, what little sense I can make of it. And I hear it gets very serious and dark later on, but with the road blocks the game loves throwing in my way, I probably won’t find out till late 2022.

Gameplay

When you read the title “Love Nikki: Dress Up Queen,” you might be forgiven for thinking that it’s a mobile game about fashion and styling. It’s not, though. It says “dress up,” it doesn’t say anything about “look fashionable” or “wear items that look good” or anything outrageous like that. Love Nikki is actually about throwing together random items with high stats so you can pass stages and get pretty pictures as virtual rewards.

It works like this: every stage has a theme. Every piece of clothing has tags that correspond with a style or a theme, e.g. “Simple,” “Elegant,” “Office,” “Swordsman.” They also have grades like 1-5 hearts and A-SS in certain qualities. So you receive your theme, then you match the pieces to the theme, creating an outfit. Throw in some skills like smiling or dissing your rival (there’s almost always a rival) and then, if your score is high enough, you win.

And that’s why my niece struggled with the game. The poor child was trying to play Love Nikki like a proper fashion game and selecting clothing that actually looked good and made sense as an outfit. Hahaha, so cute. An experienced RPG player would know that you always go with the gear with the highest stats, fashion be damned. So if a stage calls for “elegant and mature” clothing, you don’t wanna look like this:

You want to look like THIS!

Common sense, practicality, aesthetics, not blinding onlookers… none of that matters a whit. Just throw on the rarest pieces with the highest stats and wing it. And if you’re not sure what best to wear, your assistant Momo will flat out tell you what garish combo you need to clear the stage. Creativity? What’s creativity in the face of a walking fashion Chernobyl?

The only place where fashion and looking good actually matters is the Competition, a mini-game where the developers set a theme and players do the judging. But that’s a whole ‘nuther kettle of fish with its ultra-specific themes that require a small subset of suits, backgrounds and accessories (often paid or super grindy) to get a high score in.

The TL;DR is that Love Nikki is not about fashion. It’s about grinding/farming/paying for suits with high stats so you can pass challenges. Not only will you fail stages if you don’t dress crazy enough, but the game will also stop you regularly and force you to grind and craft suits you don’t even want before you can progress.

Come to think of it, actually there’s precious little else you can do in this game besides grinding for suits. The Competition takes a few seconds to set up. The Stylist Arena takes about 10 minutes a day once you have “good” suits set up. Dreamweaver is similar to story mode where you need specific suits/grinding items to pass. And then… that’s it.

The rest of the game is about spending puny bits of stamina to gather fancy-looking suits of clothing. Some of which are really lovely, but many of which are too far-fetched and over the top for me. It’s not that the clothes don’t look nice. They really, really do and I love the colorful 2D art. It’s not too bright, not too pastel, not too girly, not too drab, and there are some very creative items! It’s a great-looking game. However, personally I’m much more attracted to practical-looking clothes. A super-fancy suit like this…

..just raises all kinds of questions. Wouldn’t those sequins be scratchy? Why is she sitting on broken glass? Imagine the cost to make it, the size of the dry cleaning bill… And where would you wear that dress to? I’ve lived on this earth for decades, and the only ball I’ve been near is football.

I mean, looking for realism in a video game about fighting war through style battles is… not advisable, but when I have to spend real-life time and energy gathering such suits, I prefer the ones that require me to do fewer mental gymnastics. Not to mention the simpler ones are easier to get too. It’s fun to play with them in the Free Dressing option, despite the bittersweetness of knowing you will rarely “use” them in-game because the boring normal stuff almost always has dismal stats. It’s all about the stats, I’m afraid.

Pay to Win? Free to Play?

Now, let’s talk about how I came to spend… hmm, about $50? on this game when I’ve been playing many other, better gacha games for longer and never spent a penny. I should preface this by making it clear that you can totally play and enjoy Love Nikki for free. No ads, no pestering, no nothing. There are a few things you can’t get without paying money, but there’s sooo many others available that you won’t even notice. In fact, you’ll often hear people in the fandom saying they’re “V0” i.e. “VIP level 0” = they never spent anything on the game. Roughly 90% gacha games are F2P (free to play), so that’s the normal way of things.

What makes Love Nikki a little different is that you get permanent benefits for spending money even once. Most games, you buy your crystals or your primogems or whatever, you spend them and get your shiny goods and that’s it. Until the next time you spend money. In LN, in addition to the shiny JPEGs, you also get a boost in status that gives you minor rewards in perpetuity. For example, now that I’m V6, I’ll get all this stuff every day:

Plus 15 extra max stamina, +20% to Arena and Competition round prizes and discounts on new items, all for as long as the game will last. If you’re in it for the long haul, the extra boosts will add up significantly over the years.

Naturally the developers aren’t stupid. They’re not giving you all this out of the goodness of their hearts. A lot of these privileges cost premium currency, a.k.a diamonds to unlock. For example, in theory a V6 player can challenge the Stylist’s Arena 17 times and win up to 85 Starlight coins a day. In practice, 12 of those challenges will cost 20 diamonds each, i.e. 240 diamonds a day for the full gamut. Meanwhile the game only gives 60 diamonds for free daily (120 with a monthly card), so where does the deficit come from? Yup, they expect you to spend more IRL cash on diamonds.

…but I won’t. Having bought two monthly cards for extra daily diamonds and a bunch of starlight coins to jumpstart my story progress and build a decent wardrobe, I think I’m good for now. It’s pretty clever of them to provide “privileges” that require you to spend more money to take advantage of them, though. I should take note of that for the real world applications. Hmm…

Aaaanywaaay, I’ve been playing Love Nikki for less than a month, so if I’m still interested in the game and have the time to spare, I’ll talk more about the story, characters and gameplay progression another day. This is enough for a preliminary post.

What else am I playing?

Nothing much. I stopped playing Genshin Impact for like 2 months, but I picked it up again last week because I hear the summer islands are only temporary and will be going away soon. So much exploring to do. I also have two archon quests to catch up on and the Vagabond Sword thingy and the Dodoball tennis thing to do. And the game has login bonuses this week, yay.

In “proper” gaming news, choice paralysis continues! I was googling PS3 emulators the other day, and I think maybe my desktop computer could run one? Maybe? There are only three PS3 games I want to play: Ar Tonelica Qoga, Time and Eternity (rip Imageepoch) and Persona 5, so I definitely don’t want to buy a whole console just for three games. Not that I have the time to play them, but I’ll look into the emulation route and see. Shhh, don’t tell Sony.

In other news, I got my laptop fixed, so I can continue Tokyo Xanadu eX+ if I want to. But I think it’s time for me to admit I just don’t want to finish it so I can move on. I keep wanting to do a final roundup post for it, which would require a final roundup play session, which I’m too lazy to do. Not to mention all those games I tried for an hour and thought they were kind of cool but feel too lazy to continue playing, especially since I know they will only disappoint me in the end. I don’t want to think any more, so bring on the casual games!