Fashion Dreamer, the newest release from the developer (Syn Sophia) of the cult classic Style Savvy games, garnered high expectations from fans hoping to find a spiritual successor to the series. While Fashion Dreamer is not technically part of the Style Savvy family (known as ‘Style Boutique’ in Europe), it offers fans of those DS and 3DS games an opportunity to take their fashion expertise to Nintendo Switch.
Unfortunately, Fashion Dreamer’s gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. At the beginning, we are welcomed into a virtual world called Eve, where we play as an influencer putting together outfits for NPCs and even other players if utilizing the online mode. The majority of the game is spent creating outfits, called ‘look-its,’ for characters that are spaced out across a small map, called a ‘cocoon.’ Each character wants their outfit to meet specific criteria, like featuring a certain color, including a clothing item such as a jacket, or having a particular vibe such as being “cool” or “unique.”
When styling a look-it for a character, we could pick pieces from our own collection or from a limited selection of other clothes that often did not actually help with the criteria we were trying to meet. Each look-it is scored out of three stars where one star is a freebie, one star is for meeting the character’s criteria, and one is for following an active trend.
There are multiple active trends at a time that are viewable in the “pop-up area” of the map. For example, a trend report at our time of playing included the color purple, leather, long skirts, jackets, boots, and animal prints. Including any one of these significantly in an outfit could be enough to earn that final star.
The thing is, scoring poorly while styling a character didn’t seem to have any impact on the overall path of the game. Even when we scored just one star on a look-it, the NPC dialogue indicated that they loved the outfit and we still received a reward, albeit a slightly smaller one than if we had maxed out the score.
The reward system itself is needlessly fragmented. Reputation points, which you get by creating outfits and getting ‘likes’ from other players on your look-its or designs, ultimately determine influencer ranking, which seems to go up to platinum level. Then there is brand level, which is related to how many clothing items are made in the item creator. Creative keys allow for the purchase of new designs that can be customized using the item creator, but blue tickets also unlock different designs through a gacha-style machine featured on each map. E-points are used for buying furniture and creating individual instances of items in the item creator and we ended up with way more than we could ever use just from other people online interacting with our designs. Yellow tickets are used to play bingo at a separate machine on the map, but winning bingo just results in more E-points. Finally, gold coins are used at vending machines to buy props for pictures. It was exhausting just typing this, let alone keeping track of it all while playing.
Shockingly, none of these currencies are used to purchase actual clothing items. It’s ridiculously easy to get new items simply by ‘liking’ the clothes that other characters are already wearing or interacting with trend boards that display various items in each cocoon’s pop-up area. Not having to work for or purchase clothing items took all the drive out of hunting down that perfect piece.
We were hoping that unlocking the ability to style our own boutique would bring more complex and engaging mechanics, but all it really involves is putting furniture and clothing in a small room. The clothing you display doesn’t even have to be of your own design, which seemed to defeat the purpose of it being our own boutique. After our boutique was set up, other online players could visit it and ‘like’ the articles we had on display, ultimately drowning us in even more E-points.
Despite Fashion Dreamer’s frustrations, it definitely delivers on being a fun dress-up game, even if the novelty wears off quickly. Playing around with different color combinations and ways to layer pieces kept us well-occupied for the first portion of our playthrough. We were very excited to find that most shirts can be worn tucked or untucked, allowing for greater variety in how to style outfits.
And although online play causes an overabundance of e-points, it was cool to see what types of items other players were making and wearing. We especially enjoyed receiving styled looks from other players who put together outfits for our muse.
Conclusion
Fashion Dreamer’s main focus of creating outfits is enjoyable, but there isn’t a whole lot else going on in the game. Some players might be able to spend hours just collecting clothing items and putting together different combos for their muse and other avatars to show off. However, those who enjoyed the more mechanics-heavy and story-influenced elements of the Style Savvy series aren’t going to find the same charms in Fashion Dreamer. Either way, it’s probably worth waiting for the price to drop before trying this one on for size.