#inclusitivity

A new game like love Nikki is in development! I downloaded the early release of it and so far, I love it! It’s called, Love & Fashion ootd! It’s more like a mixture of love Nikki and Line play. - you get a house, a garden, and a housekeeper! You get to dress up the housekeeper however you like and take pictures with them as well - you can also talk to other players and explore some of the communities to search for treasure, which you can then use as points to claim certain items for limited costumes.

There’s a daily log in bonus, too. Just like in love Nikki. -- There’s also a feature just like the mystery house which gives you 1-2 free pulls each day! 

In the game’s story, you not only do you get to dress your character up but also your housekeeper, and NPCs as well.

It also has an arena feature like love Nikki where you get to walk around and battle other players. I feel like while this game copies a lot of elements of love Nikki it also makes a lot of improvements and does enough to stand out on its own.

For example. In love Nikki, you may have different skin option ( albeit very limited ) but you can only use makeup that goes along with that skin. You can also be penalized if that skin doesn’t match the theme of the challenge. In love & fashion, any makeup option goes with any skin option. So if I have a dark skin option, I can use any future make-up for it and have it match. Which is totally awesome!

I have also found that you do not get points taken away if you choose another skin color. This may change in later stages but so far, points don’t move up or down if you change your characters skin, at least from the visible point meter in story mode.

This is great because it truly allows you to have freedom with your character where love Nikki heavily focused on the lightest skin type and only gave one make-up type each for other skins unless certain events gave you more, but there really no options in the clothing store to buy make-up for other skin types besides the default skin. This was always an issue because for these sort of dress up games the makeup also changes facial features, eyes, and expressions so you were quite often left with just a plain smiling face if you wanted a darker skin tone. Plus, if that skin tone was highly rated, but the face that goes with it wasn’t, what you would often see is a mixture of a dark face and mismatched skin and vice versa in order to win a match or challenge. It made for some absurdly looking outfits but it also kept things from looking streamlined if you wanted other options for your avatar look or actually wanted your avatar to reflect you.

What love & fashion does is correct this issue and allows more customization and inclusivity to be featured in their game for a more global approach. I’m not sure just how many different skin types they may in the game, currently, but the fact that so far, any makeup/face will match any skin type already offers far more customization options than what love Nikki currently has in this particular issue. 

Other features this game has is an in-game chatting option. I haven’t talked to many people yet but I feel it definitely helps to add more of a community to pass the time with or quickly ask players game related questions. Adding friends is simple and there seems to be quite a few options I haven’t fully looked into yet in terms of in-game player base.

There’s a “bond” feature which I haven’t selected yet. But what I can gather is that you select an in-game player to be your partner and then in that you two help one another out in dailys. If you want to break the bond it seems as though you have to spend diamonds to buy a potion to break a bond with your current partner. I haven’t really delved into this feature yet so I don’t know much about it.

There’s also a garden you can plant and harvest in. I don’t know much about this portion of the game yet except that the plants you choose to plant and harvest give you items for crafting. Crafting seems to be just as big as love Nikki when it comes to costumes so it’s nice you get a little extra help in gathering materials.

Speaking of costumes. There’s quite a bit of them in this game. I’ve only been playing literally just a day but I haven’t been able to put it down. You can choose costumes you like and put them in your collection. You can also comment on those same outfit sets and like other players comments as well. -- crafting costumes to advance in the story seems a bit more streamlined. You can quickly hit the back option, to get back to the crafting menu when choosing specific missions to grind/ harvest specific items for certain stages. I was able to make a mission costume, the one featured above, in no time flat as the game lets me go back and forth to different mission stages for crafting baboo breeze, all while allowing me to stay in the current mission challenge I was doing that this costume was for. Love and fashion has a quick match feature, just like in love Nikki, so I can easily just hit that without doing the whole mission again. It also has a “top score” button as well! 

You get a house pretty early on in the game. The plain cream color picture in this is basically how the house starts out like and the blue wallpaper that is decked out one is how my house looks now. It’s quite easy to rearrange furniture and buy items for the store. You use the same money you would buy clothes with for furniture. You can also win/unlock furniture as well by just playing the game. Some items you can interact with and sometimes you will get a prompt to do so. When you do, you are awarded with in-game currency. Other players can also visit your home and rate it and gift you flowers. If you don’t want anyone to visit though you can set a house password and only friends to come to see it.

Your avatar itself can have a popularity rating. How this really works or purpose of it, I’m not really sure, but there is a ranking system for both the arena and just regular outfits, so this may perhaps play into that. for your profile, you can set up a tagline, your sign, and a title. Titles are awarded to you by what you accomplish in the game, so you do get quite a bit of bragging rights for avatars profile!

A few last final notes about the mobile dress up game, Love & Fashion...

 Atheistically, this game looks great. All the characters have a bit of a bounce and motion to them, you can also take group photos and change the facial expressions of the characters before you take a photo of them, you also get two free backgrounds at the start of the game to pose in front of. The rest are unlocked by diamonds. 

Clothes seem to clip on correctly and have a depth to them, in the accessory section of the dress up portion of the game, you can often times be in the same category and select multiple things to be on your character. So the headwear section can have two options, as long as it’s not both a hat. I also really like how easy it is to go between the different sections in the closet.