You know that flavor of internet conversation where one familiar item is identified as another, wholly different item in a way that shouldn’t make sense but weirdly does? Like how a hot dog could be classified as a sandwich, or because it has a filling enclosed by dough, a Pop-Tart is ravioli. Despite Infinity Nikki’s looks of a high-quality dress-up gacha game, it is actually Breath of the Wild reborn in some fancy-ass clothes.
In the game, you play as Nikki, an ordinary girl who gets whisked away to the fantasy world of Miraland along with her talking, bipedal, pantsless cat Momo. In Miraland, fashion is magic and a guild of stylists use it to combat the world’s evils and one another.
I had issues with its clunky, unintuitive, and at times unresponsive control scheme.
Infinity Nikki having so much in common with Breath of the Wild was not immediately obvious. I started out disliking the game immensely. I had issues with its clunky, unintuitive, and at times unresponsive control scheme. The menu icon is in the top-right corner of the screen but is opened by holding the left shoulder button. But when you open the radial menu, you can only highlight icons with the right thumbstick. The direction pad is straight-up not functional, and while you use the X button to confirm selections, circle is used to click through dialogue. It’s a mess and a platform switch between mobile and PS5 didn’t address this at all.
Control issues aside, Nikki then rubbed up against my antipathy for gacha games. I don’t hate them outright despite their reputation for having the same kind of predatory design elements that led to crackdowns on lootboxes. Rather, I’ve found them to be either completely impenetrable with their thousand million progression systems and currencies layered over utterly banal gameplay, or so naked in their core purpose to extract my time and money that they turn me off. At first blush, Infinity Nikki felt like that.
In addition to exploration and fashion battles, Infinity Nikki is filled with all kinds of mini-games that provide an entertaining break from gameplay like this take on Flappy Bird.
But as I was running through a pastoral countryside, gentle piano music playing at a default volume a few notches below a whisper, I spied a golden twinkle in the distance. I found a plant I could collect. Then another. Then Momo, who is basically the mobile game version of Persona 5’s Morgana, told me something called a “whimstar” was nearby. I found it at the top of a rocky cliff, requiring some light platforming to reach. From the elevation, I saw a treasure chest, so I used my bubble outfit to gently glide toward it before changing into my purification outfit to dispatch the monsters guarding it. Once they were gone, I saw a bug I could collect with the new bug catcher’s outfit I had just made. Then I…
It’s easy to read this and think that all Infinity Nikki has done is take BOTW and stuff it with microtransactions (which I’ll get to later). But by the time I had my, “Oh shit. This is Zelda,” revelation, it didn’t feel like a cheap clone. The same pleasing jolt I got solving a Korok puzzle, I felt from getting a whimstar. And the dress-up mechanics added a layer of novelty that further enhanced the game and my enjoyment.
Everything in Nikki is powered by fashion. There are special outfits, like my monster purification dress or bug catcher uniform, that impart abilities that let you traverse the map, collect materials, and fight monsters. You then use materials you’ve gathered from those activities to upgrade your ability outfits or obtain the clothing you want to customize your avatar. There are so many pieces of clothing and accessories, each one rendered in intricately beautiful detail, that you use to exude your own style and win fashion battles against other stylists.
After exploration, I had the most fun crafting outfits in fashion duels against NPC stylists. Each piece of clothing is assigned points in five categories: sweet, fresh, elegant, sexy, or cool. Whoever has the highest points in the designated categories wins. Since these battles are based on score, you can easily win wearing an ugly mishmash of high-value clothes – kinda like how I won my first battle. The experience was so rewarding that it made me want to try winning future battles with looks that are both high-scoring and high-fashion.
To borrow a phrase from Final Fantasy XIV, “Glamour is the endgame.” It means that you’re not playing to become powerful or beat the game, you’re playing solely to fund your fashion habit. And it’s surprisingly not expensive.
Despite Nikki being a gacha game that is, at its core, designed to get you to spend money, its monetization systems feel more vestigial than critical. Most gacha games never require players to spend money, but are usually designed such that you can’t help it. Core game activities are arbitrarily limited and if you want to keep playing, you have to pay up. From what I’ve seen after 15 hours, Nikki doesn’t have that.
Dressing up is the core feature and there’s a cash shop where you can spend money on consumables that give you the chance (known as “pulling” in the gacha community) of winning high-value, tantalizingly pretty clothes. But there are so many other, cash-free ways to get outfits that are just as pleasing as anything for sale.
You can make a look out of mixing and matching pieces from your ability outfits, earn clothing or the blueprints to make them from quest rewards, or simply buy stuff from in-game vendors with in-game cash. I was not a fan of all the lace, sparkles, and pastels I made for my first outfit that I considered tossing a few bucks into the fashion slot machine. But as I continued my magpie-like adventures I made a punk rock look I’d actually wear in real life without spending a dime. It felt like the shop is only there for the folks who just have to have the exclusives it offers.
I enjoyed how Infinity Nikki subverted my expectations. A gacha game managed to recreate Breath of the Wild in function and spirit while the depth and detail of the fashions spoke directly to my love of individual expression in games. It wasn’t simply an Unreal Engine 5 version of the dress-up games of the early internet but a spiritual, sartorial successor of one of the best games of the last decade.
Infinity Nikki is available now on Android, iOS, PlayStation, and PC.
