What a bizarre little game.

Disclaimer: I only played the first part, I had no interest in spending money for the sequel story.

A bite-sized tale of grief that tackles heavy subjects like suicide, misogynist violence, child death, and more with all of the deft of Neil Breen yelling "I can't believe you committed suicide. I cannot believe you committed suicide. How could you have done this. How could you have committed suicide."

It seems to want to have an ending with the feelings of love and friendship conquering despair like Undertale, but it can't be assed to care about the characters enough to make that kind of ending feel earned. Full of potshots about fat people being lazy and killing themselves by eating junk food, women being shallow attention seekers and the only black character being an angry criminal. How am I supposed to believe these characters are worth anything and can stave off grief when they don't have any value to the developers writing them?

If your game is going to be story-focussed, focus on the story. The game offers no engaging gameplay loop besides the shoddy writing, and the only thing it really has going for it is some pretty art. And the art is pretty! But you could play a million other games with pretty art that would have anything else to offer

If I wanted a lecture about how you should always listen to and obey your parents and eat vegetables I'd watch the Disney Channel. Go play Spirit Farer instead. 3/10

This game is my 1000 hours played not recommended title.

There's a lot to love about Infinity Nikki. I think that an open-world dress up game is a winning formula - cosmetic items are always a joy to unlock in any game, and ones that lack them (or even ones that don't) are often very lackluster in player customization. Games like Genshin Impact will offer only pre-created costumes, typically at a premium, rather than letting players pick an choose their outfit pieces for themselves - resulting in less player expression, which is kind of a bummer.

Infinity Nikki is also unapologetically marketed towards women -- which isn't typical for games, especially gacha games. And the ones that are are often marketed towards heterosexual women via male characters - not something I'm interested in. Nikki imagines a world where 2014 pop feminism is back. Women run the world. Your eyeliner is so sharp it will kill a man. Fashion is magic - literally. There are important older women, women who have different facial features and bodies from each other (truly revolutionary gacha game stuff here), and little girls who play with bugs and in the mud. At the best of times, the plot feels like a campy straight to DVD Barbie movie at the best of times, and the EN voice acting is PERFECT to nail this aesthetic. It's good. It rules.

AND YET. The execution of this game is such a fucking nightmare!! On nearly every level!

The game makes some truly baffling writing decisions, the barks get under your skin REALLY quickly and the plot DRAGS and is SOOOO BORING. If at the best of times it feels like a Barbie movie you - campy, fun to watch and laugh at with frieds, at the worst of times it feels like a Barbie movie - nobody here cared enough, extremely boring, and meaningless. I wish it were campier. I wish it were worse. I wish it were more remarkable in any way at all.

The gacha game / live service / mobile game (whatever you want to call them) systems in particular in this game are killer. I'm a gacha game veteran, I know what I'm signing up for. But man, it feels like the marriage between gacha systems and gameplay loop. Having a ceiling on the amount of resources you can get each day before you have to spend the shitty daily currency is demoralizing. The fact you have spend shitty daily currency to get materials to level up clothes to do the stupid styling competitions is annoying. Leveling up outfits doesn't feel satisfying in and of itself the way leveling up characters does in gacha games, because you're not regularly interfacing with the boons of the level ups except when you interface with the style competition checkpoints - which is not frequent once you've cleared the game's main content. You don't want to level up your favorite clothes the way you'd level up your favorite gacha characters, because often your favorite clothes suck and won't do anything for you.

The fact that in order to craft clothes, you have to decide whether you'd rather have more clothes you like or spend your currency to engage with the styling contest system the the game forces upon you is also deeply annoying. I like having lots of clothes to choose from. I would like to be able to make more clothes - I should not be punished by being told "sure you can make clothes that you like, but they're objectively useless and you'll be wasting currency you could be spending on progression systems." Fucking why. It's also amusing that a dress-up focused game falls into the classic "my good gear is uglier than my cute clothes" videogame problem. The game presents like it would want to encourage you to dress up and customize your character, but there are no actual rewards to doing so, the game demotivates you from making clothes for more options in dress-up, and only includes four outfit slots. Why do my friends and I have to resort to coming up with our own fun where we choose dress-up themes in the game ostensibly about playing dress-up?

Nikki isn't just a mediocre dress-up game, it's a mediocre platformer collectathon too. It wants to be a Mario game where you run around collecting star pick-ups, except those don't actually do anything for you. Everybody I know has several hundred extra just sitting around. And of course these are the only collectibles that have internal tracking systems - good luck finding anything else without looking it up online. The collectibles that actually DO things for you are not trackable and have teensy draw distances - you're going to have to be close to standing on them to find them. And this isn't even a money grubbing gacha thing. It appears that the developers just straight up did not seem to consider that people would be more interested in collecting the materials that get you things than the ones that do not.

None of this is to mention how incredibly janky this game is. There are times that the UI straight up does not receive button inputs from a controller - particularly when navigating around clothing based menus - which is INCREDIBLY FREQUENT in this game. Nikki demands a 4gb ram (insane for a phone game) and will frequently crash if you don't meet that. I regularly see animals floating above ground, I've had to reload areas because critical assets straight up did not load in properly (the stuff that makes catapults work). And the mechanical stuff isn't mentioning some truly impressive laziness like including important markers on the map before you've progressed far enough in the story to be able to use them. Oh there's a seal on the map? That's cute! Let me track it and see what it is. It's not there. This is because you haven't progressed far enough in the story - which there won't be anything to indicate. Okay.

Despite everything, I do still enjoy playing this game. Whether that's because I've been brainrotted by a decade of playing gacha games, because I like playing dress-up, or because I like playing the games my friends are playing - I could not answer that for you. Again, I see heart here, I see charm. When I don't have to play the game at minimal graphics it can be beautiful! I want SO BADLY to believe in a version of this game that doesn't suck ass. But it's not the version that exists right now. I cannot in good conscience recommend this game to anyone, and I especially would discourage spending money on it. But I will still be playing. Maybe one day a year out this game won't suck as bad. But I have my doubts.