So, this post is written over the last couple of days or so as I really wanted to talk about things as I’ve played further since my first post. I will say the things that I think have me most frustrated with the game at this point can be summarized as the RNG, Grind, and lack of filters.
The RNG and Grind are kind of a combination thing where having to deal with one would likely be less frustrating than having to deal with both, but I’m going to start on the filters first.
Unfortunately, the closest you can get to more specific category filters, out of the official filters, is just organizing by categories altogether. It’s still not great. There’s no way to categorize items by color or type or look or anything which as someone who is not particularly fashionable, it makes some challenges quite a struggle.
There’s also an issue with having so many colors where some shades will not qualify even if maybe they should, such as certain pink shades I use not counting as pink, but red or purple. I still haven’t even figured out what colors count as neon– if it is palette related, I haven’t unlocked it yet.
And that’s where my issue with the RNG comes in. Getting additional colors, such as eye colors for example, are randomly given when making outfits for characters. You have 8 eye colors to start with unordered numbers. There are apparently dozens of eye colors and who knows when you’ll unlock them because you just need to hope you’ll unlock it after creating an outfit. I’ve only unlocked two so far and I’m at the point where so many requests just… keep repeating. There isn’t enough different dialogue and even dressing up other players’ muses can only do so much as they don’t change out too often and I don’t want to like… clog up someone’s mailbox as you can only have 100 at a time. And while this is absolutely a me thing, I stress a lot more when putting together a design for another player than for an NPC which also means suffering through the lack of filters even longer.
At this point, I’ve more or less given up on the idea of even getting any new physical customization options I want. If I could, I’d love darker brown eyes and/or a nicer ponytail (mainly for nicer bangs but I wouldn’t mind a ponytail version of some of the nicer wavy hairstyles). Bonus would be a darker brown hair color that isn’t the pure black that has more cool tones than warm tones, but I’m mostly okay with the hair color I have at the moment. I wonder if any characters even have a nice ponytail…
At the very least, sometime after you get a character to follow you, they may show up in your Showroom and request an outfit around one of your brand pieces which is pretty neat.
But the actual rough grind has nothing really do with influence or follows. That isn’t to say there aren’t rewards for that still– I did end up hitting Diamond Rank at 100K Likes which unlocked some new patterns (still need to use keys to unlock them though) which was a surprise, but I’d be even more surprised to see any rank above diamond. I guess we’ll see though. Supposedly there’s Purple at 1 million?? So there is still some long haul for me, but at least it’s something I feel I have more control over.
Regardless, the real grind is all about your Brand Level which goes up to 200. And it just gets slower and slower. It’s times like these where it makes sense that this game lets you go online even without having Nintendo Online.
It takes more experience to level up, item costs are higher to make (Rarity 10 items cost 500K to make– you’ll be needing to spend around 700K or so for those last sets of levels), and just going around making outfits just… doesn’t do enough. You’re essentially really hoping tons of people like your stuff or to get lucky with Bingo and/or the Gachapon.
Bingo should be pretty obvious as to why as some of those multipliers are crazy, but the chance of you actually getting a multiplier is pretty low. I’m like 90% sure a person I saw at 160+ must have gotten one as they only had about 40K likes so I’d be surprised if they earned enough points otherwise unless I’m missing something obvious. Even a level 200 person I saw had just 140K Likes (while I currently had over 200K at this point– as I get closer to finishing this post, I’m at over 400K) so whether it’s them getting very lucky or me missing something, I don’t know.
As for the Gachapon, that’s how you don’t have to pay e-Points for patterns as long as you have some you earned from those. In this case, you’re hoping for high rarity items which would give more experience without paying, but I have yet to get a single super rare item. I’ve gotten Silver only a handful of times? Which… is a really low rate and many of the items aren’t even in the gachapon anyway.
And that’s what I mean when the RNG and Grind is rough because this is the part of the game I’m stuck at as I desperately try to earn more so I can unlock the Dresses I want to at some level I’m not even sure of. The repetitiveness gets tiring and the only real bright spot is when I get a cute mail notification of someone wanting to make an outfit for me. Some of my favorite outfits some people have sent:
I ended up making two more muses– one based off my site mascot and one based off my husband:
I don’t really have any plans to use either, but I had fun making them.
Going back to what I was saying before though, each of the issues kind of aggravates the others. I wouldn’t find the grind so tiring at this point if the filters were better and there was an undo button, but right now I have to spend so much time scrolling (even with the Filters) and reading each name to figure out what kind of fabric something is or guessing at what may count and thus, miss out on a heart or two because I just don’t know and there’s too many items for me to memorize everything that works and doesn’t and I don’t really want to waste my personal filters with that.
Similarly, I don’t think there is any good reason to lock physical customization behind character gift RNG. Animations? Fine. Those along with Keys, Tickets, and new characters seem fair to me. Patterns are kind of frustrating, but considering all the RNG and grind with them, I’m not surprised. But eye/hair/skin colors? Different make-up types? That’s a lot more frustrating.
As it is, I recently realized you can only have up to 5,000 Items saved. And I don’t even know where to start in cutting some out, but it’s made me want to be a lot pickier with what I like. (Since taking thing screenshot, I’m past 4,000 now. Really going to have to get that all organized soon enough)
I think the rough part is, like with the Style Savvy games, it’ll become an issue of having items for helping characters vs items you actually want, but it still feels rather small after how big Styling Star’s inventory space was. I understand that is a different game, even if Syn Sophia is behind both series, but you’d think the Switch version would be able to have more than a 3DS game. Besides the fact that part of the entire point of the game is liking each other’s stuff which is the best way to help people earn Points, you need to constantly be making items to get your brand points up, so you’ll be making a lot of the same thing in different colors at times and it just… feels like a bit of an oversight. Speaking of oversights, I also feel like the game has been more laggy the more I’ve played/collected things which uh, also isn’t great.
I’ve seen people say how at least you can always remake your own items, but it just gets so expensive and I really wouldn’t want to do that personally.
More than anything though, I feel like the word I’d use to best describe how I feel playing the game right now is “discouraged” which… isn’t really great, especially for something that’s only been out for a few days. The cost jumps up so quickly and I’m not entirely sure if I progressed too quickly or it just was considered to be a slow burn, but it’s really unfun to suddenly need to spend 500K to make certain items. Not all items have patterns you can earn otherwise and don’t even get me started about the amount of items I still have locked. I’m trying to just get items I really really like since I’m not sure if I’m supposed to unlock them someway or not and as you get items that cost 60 Keys to unlock, they really do become a rare commodity. I really wish I would get more keys instead of Lucky Coins I won’t even use because I rarely take photos, let alone any with the vending machine items to need more than like… 1-2 of each item.
Despite my discouragement and some of the more negative focus of this post, t’s not like I’m not enjoying the game. I still am and I really like it a lot– I think the biggest problem I’m facing is the grind is mostly out of my control. What I can do personally earns very little and the main ways are up to other people and RNG and that’s not fun. Especially when you get the exact same request multiple times in a row.
I know some people are disappointed with the lack of areas and not having a proper store and while I wouldn’t mind if the Showcase was bigger to BE a proper store, I do enjoy the more relaxed pace of not necessarily needing to buy up items and manage an inventory. That was always my least favorite part of the Style Savvy games and I enjoyed dressing up everyone and customizing stuff more.
As for the areas, we have a lot more room to roam in each of the areas we have so I can’t really be too surprised, but I do wish there was more to do in each area. There’s very little character interactivity outside of the Camera poses which I’m just not really interested in. Maybe more could be added in the future, but other than talking to characters/making them outfits, liking items, and taking photos at little spots in each Cocoon (or the Photo Egg), that’s… really it.
But as I said before, the game is very much focused on the dress-up portion and there isn’t really much for people who preferred the management side.
On a positive note, I did finally figure out how to look up players so here is my friend ID!:
The font color is… certainly a choice. If you’re having trouble reading it, it’s: jwn37pAXmp
I ALSO FINALLY GOT A PHOTO WITH THE CUTE BEAR:
And I’ve been hoping to try and work on my own categories to help with the filter issues, but the problem is that I still don’t always know what will and won’t count for certain requests which is why more official filters are so needed. You can also set only 32 items to each personal categorized list which… I wish there wasn’t a limit for your lists. I know there are 10 pages so it’s 320 total, but I guess I just wish I could scroll certain lists so I could have a bunch of different things because I can’t think of any good way to split up items in the first place.
Regardless, Updates are planned for the game and while I have mixed feelings on it (I’ve long since been tired of drip feed updates– New Horizons and Splatoon pretty much broke my patience with that kind of thing), I’m hoping that means better filters and increased inventory limits will come as I can’t really enjoy more clothing being added until some things are adjusted.
Anyway, after too many days, I finally unlocked the Witch dress at level 172. I also managed to get the eyecolor I wanted from one of the salon people. I still don’t have it technically, but since I rarely change physical stuff, hopefully I won’t accidentally remove it.
I think at this point, the only things that will be keeping me from playing more is the limited space of Showrooms (The room is so big and I get they want space for NPCs to come in, but there’s no reason just the front can’t be reserved for that and there is still al ot of space) and lack of filters. I’ll likely be playing in Offline mode now that I’ve hit level 200 to try and level up NPCs and get my Likes up until I hit 1 million. (I’ll probably just edit this post once I do unless I feel like I have a lot more to say).
The small showroom size still drives me crazy between the fact that items can be blocked, you can’t go under hanging items, and how big some items are (plus the amount of variety when you can place so little). I’ve done my best to make sure all items can be reached, though, some need to be reached from behind.
Anyway, to celebrate hitting level 200 (and getting this post up), I did this template I found on Tumblr by alinatron-mewtube.
Of course, right after I put that together I updated my Showroom again so uh, oops:
Anyway, onward towards 1,000,000! And whatever the Max NPC levels are because at this point I have over at 30+ and I’m scared. (Edit: There does not seem to be a maximum, but NPCs cap out at level 13 so I’ll just be getting them all to that now).
