Ed Thorn
I’ll come out and say it: I had no idea, really, what Infinity Nikki was about before I dove in. I knew from some trailers that it was a free-to-play game about collecting pretty dresses and exploring a relentlessly positive open world. In those respects, I was correct.
I’d just missed the really big part – the fact it’s a pacifistic Genshin Impact wearing a pretty dress. And as that realisation sunk in for the first time, my heart also sank with it. I really tried, I mean really tried to get into Nikki’s gacha offerings; to delight in its menagerie of menus and cash in countless currencies for fun socks or glitzy tiaras. Sadly, I won’t be logging back in ever again.
Infinity Nikki has you play as a pink-haired girl called Nikki, accompanied by a small cat creature called Momo. Momo is like if Meowth had the coin ripped off his forehead and was plugged into an AI beauty filter. They are both glassy-eyed individuals who would die if you sat them down and forced them to watch The Raid. Anyway yes, they get embroiled in this cosmic mystery that doesn’t make a great deal of sense: 1) They get sucked into a portal, 2) They meet a goddess who’s like, “Miracle Dresses, very stylish, save the universe, get them innit”, 3) You accept, knowing full well the experience will cost you 27,000 mega crystals down the line or whatever.
So off you pop, traversing a land that’s very teehee and whoopsie daisy, with the first town called Florawish. This sees you talk to lots of NPCs who talk through a series of words presented in a normal black font, interspersed with lots of coloured words like “Twinmoon Kingdom” and “Wish Envoy” that they kind of expect you to be curious about, but actually just overwhelm you to a point of numbness. For what it’s worth, you get roped into some mystery around wishes and comas and my my what a pickle it all is. To me it was all a bunch of nonsense, merely facilitating the stuff you do in the game.
And at the most basic level, you’re to bounce between quests (main or side) that’ll have you unlock new abilities. These abilities are tied to dresses, which you have to unlock the blueprints for, and then craft using materials you’ve gathered. For instance, there’s a dress for double-jumping, catching bugs, for fishing, and one for… being an electrician and doing these puzzles where you have to rotate wiring to repair circuits. And as you progress, the focus shifts more towards unlocking new zones that contain rarer materials, with a view to getting the Miracle Dress and filling out your wardrobe.
Those bugs and fish? All to be funnelled into those frilly skirts and opal earrings. But to truly become the number one stylist, you need to make good use of double-jumping and ‘purifying’, which is Nikki’s gentle way of murdering demonic cloth creatures with orbs that go pewpew. Either through little open world challenges or through quests, Nikki’s main thrills and spills lie in hopping on platforms and not falling to your death. These platforming sections sometimes take place in beautiful locales, like bright sewers home to frogs and lip-filler fish or expansive factories that spill torrents of paper cranes from the skies.
These hop-gauntlets are about as challenging as avoiding the crack between the tube and the platform, with the ‘purifying’ also an overly simple click of the mouse for a quick vaporise. Regardless, I enjoyed the rhythm of them and how they felt almost like a retreat from the game’s gacha elements.
I understand that for some, the gacha elements represent a sort of messy bliss, one where you’re collecting bazillions of currencies from bazillions of menus, then working out the economic risk of trading 100 berries for 10,000 Nikkibucks. You might, after all, need those 100 berries later when upgrading any number of outfits or skill points. This is just a snapshot of the complexity of Nikki’s innocent hunter gathering.
For the gacha uninitiated, it’s very easy to get lost in Nikki’s menus, an overlay that seemingly tracks your every move and blinks at you when you’ve done literally anything. Eaten your five a day? Great work, here’s some Tinkly Winklies! 10,000 steps? Orbs Of The Orifice, coming your way! I jest, but I am also dead serious – this is what it’s like. Sometimes I’ll press escape (to bring up a menu that may or may not be separate to the overlay menu permanently present at the top of your screen) and discover several reward tracks I’d forgotten to cash in, so I just press “claim all” and stare as the squares of things pour into my inventory, as my dopamine receptors ding and the light leaves my eyes.
Out in the open world there are these fast travel points that also let you hop into different realms. Realms of Ascensions, Realms of This And That, all letting you do challenges to earn things that you can further feed into new dresses. There are lots of these Whimstars (think Mario Odyssey’s moons) that you need to collect in mini-platforming challenges, too. Often the game’s main quest gate keeps you from progressing until you’ve unlocked like 88 outfits or collected 25 stars.
What I will say is that unlocking new outfits and customising Nikki is an excellent experience. The outfits are often appealing, with lots of accessory slots and headgear and so on to really glam out your gal. You can view your sartorial choices by rotating Nikki in a preview menu, with a camera mode that’s feature rich. For those of you planning to go all-in on the fashion front and share your swankiest Nikkis online, you’re well served here.
Perhaps what’s most striking, though, is that fashion in Nikki isn’t sexualised in the slightest. There’s literally no sense of the dresses or accessories – which it literally classes as “sexy” – as being tuned for a male gaze. Although different body types would’ve been nice to see, in making Nikki a more inclusive representation of one’s personal style.
Sickos can delve deep into upgrading these outfits with various currencies to unlock new colours and whatnot, alongside better stats. These stats let you take part in tougher Style Offs, where an NPC sets you a task of being particularly “Cool”, say, and you’ve got to put together an outfit to hit a certain points threshold. What this really entails is just sorting and filtering your wardrobe and clicking on all the items with the best stats in that category, whether or not they fit together as well as puke and a pocket square. I understand that a subjective catwalk would be almost impossible to program, I just can’t help but feel the in-game competitive wardrobing is undermined by its own gacha systems.
I’ve not even mentioned the in-game microtransactions, which to be fair, aren’t all that aggressive. There’s no pop-ups as you stick on your heels that exclaim “GET 50% OFF BETTER HEELS HERE” with flashing neon arrows pointing to it. And to be honest with you, I don’t really understand the shop or whether it’s integral to being the best Nikki you can be. It’s this dizzying barrage of premium currencies that you can seemingly earn by distilling down your many thousands of normal crystals into only a handful of sparkling Resonance Doodads – or you can get them by spending actual money, which I’d imagine is a lot more efficient. Get these crystals and you can feed them into a lottery that grants you a percentage chance of earning super duper dresses that are better than those you’d earn from regular questing.
From Nikki’s review build at least (real world spending wasn’t active), it didn’t seem like microtransactions were key to just existing and dressing Nikki nicely. For the highrollers, perhaps it will be, but I don’t think it detracts too much from the game being an overall pleasant time for folks who want a gacha that remixes Genshin’s formula into something less fighty and more cheery.
As for me, I find the game’s bubblegums and whimsy becomes a cloying sweetness I forever want to chew down hard on. The platforming and the purifying is fun if overly simplistic, and only feels like an escape from the overwhelming gacha menus because you’re finally able to do something that isn’t clicking on a “claim all” button. I just didn’t care enough about Nikki to nab her that Miracle Dress or even just to dress her up good, as it always came back to a blinking icon telling me to collect 20 more Floof Spangles in several elementary jumping or dodging tasks. You know what – if I could bite down and chew off the gacha part, I would.
This review was based on a review build provided by the publisher.
ranzware
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