I’ll come out and say it: I actually had no idea what Infinity Nikki was about before diving into it. From some of the trailers, I knew it was a free-to-play game about collecting pretty dresses and exploring a relentlessly positive open world. In this respect I was right.
I just missed a really significant part – the fact that it’s a pacifist Genshin Impact wearing a pretty dress. And when this realization first hit me, my heart also sank. I mean, I really tried Really tried to get into Nikki’s gacha deal; to delight in a menagerie of menus and cash in countless currencies for fun socks or sparkly tiaras. Unfortunately, I will never log in again.
In Infinity Nikki, you play as a pink-haired girl named Nikki, accompanied by a little cat named Momo. Momo is like Meowth who had a coin plucked from his forehead and hooked up to an AI beauty filter. They’re both glassy-eyed people who would die if you sat them down and forced them to watch “The Raid.” Anyway, yes, they get caught up in this cosmic mystery that doesn’t make much sense: 1) they get sucked into a portal, 2) they meet a goddess who says “Wonderful Dresses, very stylish, save the universe, get them immediately”, 3) You accept, knowing full well that this experience will cost you 27,000 megacrystals or whatever.
So off you go, traveling through a land very witty and full of daisies, with the first city called Floraish. In this way, you talk to a lot of NPCs who discuss a series of words in a normal black font, interspersed with lots of colorful words like “Twinmoon Kingdom” and “Wish Envoy”, which they kind of expect to interest you, but actually after they just overwhelm you to the point of numbness. For what it’s worth, you’re drawn into some mystery involving desires and comas, and oh, how lovely it all is. To me it was all a bunch of nonsense, just making things easier for you in the game.
At the most basic level, you must switch between quests (main or side) that will unlock fresh abilities. These abilities are related to dresses, for which you must unlock blueprints and then craft them using collected materials. For example, there is a dress for double jumping, catching bugs, fishing, and a dress for… being an electrician and doing puzzles where you have to rotate wires to fix circuits. As you progress, the focus becomes more on unlocking fresh zones containing rarer materials to earn the Wonder Dress and add to your wardrobe.
Those worms and fish? All this to wear with ruffled skirts and opal earrings. But to truly become the number one stylist, you’ll need to make good utilize of double jumps and “clearing,” which is Nikki’s gentle way of murdering demon-clad creatures with bullets that fly into the bench. Either through miniature challenges in the open world or through quests, Nikki’s main thrills and thrills come from jumping across platforms and avoiding falling to her death. These platforming sections sometimes take place in lovely locations, such as vivid sewers that are home to lip-filling frogs and fish, or sprawling factories with torrents of paper cranes pouring out of the sky.
These hop gloves are as challenging as avoiding a crack between the pipe and the rig, and “cleaning up” is also all too basic with a click of the mouse for a quick vape. Regardless, I liked the rhythm of them and how they felt like a departure from the gacha elements of the game.
I understand that for some, the gacha elements represent a kind of sloppy bliss where you collect bazillions of currencies from bazillions of menus and then calculate the economic risk of trading 100 berries for 10,000 Nikkibucks. Eventually, you may need those 100 berries later by upgrading any number of outfits or skill points. This is just a snapshot of the complexity of Nikki’s gathering of innocent hunters.
For the uninitiated, gacha is very basic to get lost in the Nikki menu, an overlay that seemingly tracks your every move and winks at you when you make a literal All. You ate five a day? Great job, here are some Tinkly Winklies! 10,000 steps? Orbs Of The Orifice are coming! I’m joking, but I’m also deadly earnest – that’s what it looks like. Sometimes I’ll hit the escape key (to bring up a menu that may or may not be separate from the overlay menu permanently located at the top of the screen) and discover a few reward tracks I forgot to cash in, so I just hit capture all and see , how squares of things flow into my inventory, how my dopamine receptors ring and the featherlight leaves my eyes.
There are rapid travel points in the open world that also allow you to jump to different lands. The Lands of Ascension, the Lands of This and That, all allow you to complete challenges to obtain things that you can later utilize in fresh dresses. There are tons of fancy stars (think Mario Odyssey moons) that you have to collect in mini-platform challenges, too. Often, the game’s main quest gate prevents you from progressing until you’ve unlocked around 88 outfits or collected 25 stars.
Let me just say that unlocking fresh outfits and customizing Nikki is an excellent experience. The outfits are often attractive, with plenty of places for accessories, headgear and so on to really highlight your girl. You can preview your sartorial choices by rotating Nikki in the preview menu, in camera mode with lots of features. Those of you planning to throw everything on the fashion front and share your most elegant Nikkis online are well served here.
Perhaps most strikingly, however, is that Nikki’s fashion is not sexualized in the slightest. It literally makes no sense that dresses and accessories – which are literally classified as “sexy” – are attuned to the male gaze. Although it would be nice to see different body types, making Nikki a more inclusive representation of personal style.
Sicks can delve into upgrading these outfits using various currencies to unlock fresh colors and so on, as well as better stats. These stats allow you to take part in more challenging outfits, where an NPC assigns you the task of being particularly “cool,” let’s say, and you must create an outfit that meets a certain point threshold. This really just means sorting and filtering your wardrobe and clicking on all the items with the best stats in a given category, whether they match or not, as well as puke and pocket squares. I understand that it would be almost impossible to program a subjective subterfuge, I just can’t aid but feel that the game’s competitive wardrobe is undermined by its own gacha systems.
I haven’t even mentioned the game’s microtransactions, although honestly, they’re not that aggressive. When you hold on to your heels, you don’t get pop-ups saying “GET 50% OFF BETTER HEELS” and flashing neon arrows pointing to it. And honestly, I don’t really understand this store and whether it’s necessary to be the best Nikki you can be. It’s a dizzying barrage of premium currencies that you can seemingly earn by distilling many thousands of normal crystals into just a handful of shiny resonant goodies – or you can get them by spending real money, which I guess is a lot more effective. Get these crystals and you can donate them to a raffle that will give you a percentage chance to win super fashionable dresses, better than what you earn from regular jobs.
At least from Nikki’s review (actual spending wasn’t energetic), it didn’t seem like microtransactions were the key to Nikki simply existing and dressing nicely. Perhaps for high rollers this will be the case, but I don’t think it detracts too much from the fact that the game is an overall enjoyable time for people who want a gacha that remixes the Genshin formula into something less combative and more light-hearted.
As for me, I find that bubble gums and fantasies become a sickly sweet that I always want to chew strenuous. The platforming and clearing is fun, if overly simplistic, and feels like an escape from overwhelming gacha menus because you can finally do something that doesn’t involve clicking the “Claim All” button. I just didn’t care enough about Nikki to get her a Wonder Dress or even just dress her well, because she always returned to the flashing icon that told me to collect 20 extra Floof Spangles in some basic jumping or dodging tasks. You know what – if I could bite and chew some of the gacha, I would.
This review is based on the version of the review provided by the publisher.
