I think a lot of people (mid-range cope) dream of a robust, visually gorgeous, user-friendly, scrimblo wardrobe simulator. A thingamabob that you can build OCs with, and let you choose from a wide range of clothes to drip them out in and pose and rotate to your heart’s content. Anybody who’s spent ungodly amount of time in /gpose knows this, the people who use Koikatsu also know this but won’t readily admit it.
My experience with fashion games - namely Love Nikki and Style Savvy kind of highlights that the entire concept of gamifying the subjectivity of fashion is something of a mug’s game. They all crumble in the exact same way, by the fact that challenges posed by the game i.e. “make an outfit with X theme” always falls to using the ingame search function and highlighting the exact tags it’s asking for, then selecting the best article of clothing in each category. What else are you going to do, actually plot out an outfit that bangs? This dumb bitch algorithm doesn’t know what colour schemes are, mismatching, wrong sizing for the body type, etc. The outfit you submit will receive a score and it will Never make sense. Your character will look like a biblically accurate secondhand rug store but you’ll Perfect the mission and you’ll learn to like it - because you’re Powergaming - it's all a means to an end: to see ur OC in a new story mission reward jacket that will tie everything together.
It’s not great!! The fact that this is a mobile game gives Life Makeover carte blanche to take the absolute piss. Your progress isn’t gated by your style savviness and outfit co-ordination, but entirely by you not having high enough arbitrarily-graded clothes. This is where the gatcha stuff comes in and I don’t even need to tell you that it’s stingy as fuck because you’d already have guessed. Why do I need to grind so much to dye the clothes too jesus christ show some mercy. I’d honestly recommend playing a hacked .apk of the game if I knew those existed.
I’ve played Life Makeover back at release on mobile briefly, and again now that it’s gotten a fully-fledged PC port. Man I think this game is so pretty. I love how detailed every article of clothing is, I love how the physics makes the multi-layered dresses and hair flow. This being a game developed in China there’s a pretty strong lean towards incredibly well-rendered opulent traditional hanfu clothing, which is inexplicably the most 'overpowered' clothing in any situation, it’s pretty funny but I respect it. Love the wildly undercooked Sims-lite homebuilding thing it has going on too. Love the awful murder mystery storyline with a first-pass translation that the voice actors were clearly not allowed to stray from. Given enough time & patience and hopefully none of your money, you rack up a surprisingly varied array of clothes and then you can finally play the game, which is to just make nice fits. Is it WORTH all of that effort? No, but
My experience with fashion games - namely Love Nikki and Style Savvy kind of highlights that the entire concept of gamifying the subjectivity of fashion is something of a mug’s game. They all crumble in the exact same way, by the fact that challenges posed by the game i.e. “make an outfit with X theme” always falls to using the ingame search function and highlighting the exact tags it’s asking for, then selecting the best article of clothing in each category. What else are you going to do, actually plot out an outfit that bangs? This dumb bitch algorithm doesn’t know what colour schemes are, mismatching, wrong sizing for the body type, etc. The outfit you submit will receive a score and it will Never make sense. Your character will look like a biblically accurate secondhand rug store but you’ll Perfect the mission and you’ll learn to like it - because you’re Powergaming - it's all a means to an end: to see ur OC in a new story mission reward jacket that will tie everything together.
It’s not great!! The fact that this is a mobile game gives Life Makeover carte blanche to take the absolute piss. Your progress isn’t gated by your style savviness and outfit co-ordination, but entirely by you not having high enough arbitrarily-graded clothes. This is where the gatcha stuff comes in and I don’t even need to tell you that it’s stingy as fuck because you’d already have guessed. Why do I need to grind so much to dye the clothes too jesus christ show some mercy. I’d honestly recommend playing a hacked .apk of the game if I knew those existed.
I’ve played Life Makeover back at release on mobile briefly, and again now that it’s gotten a fully-fledged PC port. Man I think this game is so pretty. I love how detailed every article of clothing is, I love how the physics makes the multi-layered dresses and hair flow. This being a game developed in China there’s a pretty strong lean towards incredibly well-rendered opulent traditional hanfu clothing, which is inexplicably the most 'overpowered' clothing in any situation, it’s pretty funny but I respect it. Love the wildly undercooked Sims-lite homebuilding thing it has going on too. Love the awful murder mystery storyline with a first-pass translation that the voice actors were clearly not allowed to stray from. Given enough time & patience and hopefully none of your money, you rack up a surprisingly varied array of clothes and then you can finally play the game, which is to just make nice fits. Is it WORTH all of that effort? No, but