Rambling: Fashion Dreamer Review
Note: I’ve just beaten the game, so I’ve included an addendum with my thoughts of the game as a whole. I will be touching on spoilers. As such, do not read past the TL;DR if you do not want to be spoiled. You have been warned.
Fashion Dreamer came out this Friday, and I've been playing it a lot last night and this morning. I had a lot of things to think about with the game, and considering how I'm currently working on a Style Savvy shrine, I wanted to talk about its supposed spiritual successor on the Switch.
For the uninitiated - Fashion Dreamer is a Switch game developed by Syn Sophia, the people that made Style Savvy. In Fashion Dreamer, you play as a Muse in the fictional MMO of Eve creating and dressing up your own Muse as well as the Muses of other players to gain a following. You can get additional clothing items by interacting with other Muses, checking the trending items area, or through exploring showrooms that you and other players like you create. Muses with larger following gain access to an assortment of options including traveling to other Cocoons, or different areas of Eve with their own aesthetics and styles.
The Good
Right from the get go, you're hit with the game's central setting - it's this MMO world where you play as a Muse and hang out in areas called Cocoons dressing yourself and other people up. I adore this concept so, so much. While no other game can top CrossCode in terms of nailing the concept of the fictional MMO (and in other aspects - I'd love to talk about it one day), I've always got to commend the use of it in other games. As you play through the game, you'll find other NPC Muses that comment on their lives outside of the game, such as being frustrated over not knowing what to wear for school or being thirty and realizing that napping is a good thing. These NPCs are rather shallow otherwise, but it's still a very fun little touch.
I have some complicated feelings about Muses, but for the positives: I'm so, so glad there's more diverse hair options in this game. One of the things I've always been tired of with Style Savvy et. al. is how eurocentric the hair options are, with the token afro that can't be obtained until you literally beat the game. I'm also glad that all customization options for Muses are not gender locked - you can choose any aspect you want. This does make for some rather goofy looking Muses when you pick the really big anime eyes in combination with certain mouths and noses, and can be kind of a pain since you can't modify the little details like in games like The Sims, but I'm glad we still have a wide array of options nonetheless. I also like that we get the option to create Muses that appear older, as in most fashion games older people are generally nonexistent or token supporting cast rather than someone you can actually play as.
I really have to commend Marvelous / Syn Sophia for the choice of making the Online Mode 100% free for everyone, no membership required. Many of the modern iterations on the fashion / dress up genre use P2W aspects that, considering that the whole point of the fashion genre is to, y'know, play dress up, gets problematic fast. As such, having no P2W elements is a breath of fresh air (and ought to be an expectation with paid games like this).
Specific to Style Savvy - I'm kind of glad things aren't locked by brands anymore! And I like the emphasis of creating your own articles of clothing and sharing it with others. I also like that we aren't specifically locked to playing singleplayer or multiplayer, though there are some multiplayer specific issues I'll touch on later.
Performance-wise, the game is great up until a certain point (I'll touch up on that later). After the initial loading when you launch the game, everything tends to load pretty quick even on multiplayer mode. There is some pop-in, though I think the incorporation of the whole "fictional MMO" allowed Marvelous / Syn Sophia to craft a way to make it immersive in the game.
The Ehhh?
I tend to like the overall offerings Fashion Dreamer has in terms of styles of clothes, however I do find them kind of limiting - funny enough having the opposite of Style Savvy's offerings in that there's a lot of mid-to-high waisted pants and skirts tend to hit around the waistline. I really like it as it's the kind of stuff I wear, but I do kind of wish we had options of low, mid, and high rise bottoms. I like the ability to tuck in shirts or leave them out, though I wish we had the ability to layer inners and tops like in the Style Savvy games.
Circling back on the P2W part - while there are gacha elements to the game (in the gacha machine and bingo machines), the only way to participate in the gacha elements is through creating Lookits for Muses throughout the game to get tokens to use in them. I think the inclusion of the gacha elements are to echo to other F2P fashion games, but I think the game would benefit from just not having the gacha elements in place in the first place?
The game's approach to gender seems progressive at first, however as you play the game it ends up being rather superficial. Most clothing is restricted to Type A (feminine) bodies - namely, the options of skirts and dresses - and while Type B (masculine) bodies do have significantly more options compared to that of similar games, they still are rather limited in comparison. Not to mention that many of the options Type B Muses do get are rather mid as hell and boring in comparison to the options Type A bodies have. Not to mention that the Type B restricted clothing is rather nonsensical - why have it restricted anyway?
I find it puzzling and rather disappointing that the developers would make some attempt to decouple bodies from gender and then the actual gameplay just continues supporting that coupling anyway. It is also unfortunate that the only body types beyond the Type A and Type B are just changes in height/proportions - everyone still remains pretty lithe and lean. While I kind understand the limitations with accommodating larger characters on a game design level (though I feel it echos the sentiments of “we can’t have female protagonists, they’re too hard to create!” that was incredibly prolific in the 2000’s through the 2010’s), it's still frustrating that those looking for some plus sized dress up games are relegated to picrews and The Sims. Moreso, it’s rather unjustifiable that in 2023 there hasn’t been a good fashion/dress up game that includes plus sized people. Fat people exist in our world in spades, and can be as fashionable as anyone else. Why then do developers of games, especially those behind games like Fashion Dreamer, continue to exclude us - in games where self-expression and self-presentation is an evident aspect of the game?
The Bad
If you're going in expecting some kind of story or gameplay similar to Style Savvy, you're going to be disappointed - there is no story to Fashion Dreamer. You walk around and be pretty, and you make other people pretty. I don't mind it myself; while I do love having story and lore in my games, I also enjoy sandboxes and Fashion Dreamer is no exception to that. But I do see a lot of people jumping in hoping that it's a spiritual successor because of Syn Sophia's involvement with the game, and the fact is that it is not.
Once you start getting into later influencer levels in the game, the performance of the game slows to a crawl when preparing a Lookit for a Muse. This can be remedied through the use of inventory management, but it is still an issue to look out for. This is exacerbated by the use of online play. The areas with trending items are also incredibly laggy when playing online as it loads more than double the amount of items than what's showcased in singleplayer.
The base Switch screenshot tool is absolute hot dog water when it comes to screenshot quality. I'm not interested in docking my Switch and hooking up the capture card every time I want to take cool screenshots of my Muses. The "stamps" you can put on your captures in the Photo Egg look horrible after taken especially when made larger, even if they look great on the Switch itself. See example one, and example two.
TL;DR
Fashion Dreamer is a fun sandbox dress up game. I've really been enjoying my time playing the game overall so far, though there are aspects of the game that really put a damper on the experience. If you jump in expecting the spiritual successor of Style Savvy, you're going to be incredibly disappointed; but if you jump in expecting a fun dress-up experience, you're going to have a great time.
Addendum
I wanted to make an addendum for this post as I’ve “beaten” the game as of Saturday night. I’ll be going into spoiler territory from this point forward.
Unless you’re incredibly interested in the fashion genre as I am, I can’t recommend this game in its current state. It ought to be $15-20 maximum.
When I say “beaten” Fashion Dreamer, it’s less beating the game and more just progressing to a specific level the game deems “endgame” - Platinum rank (there are two additional ranks - Diamond and Master). Because of Fashion Dreamer’s open-ended sandbox nature, it makes it so that it doesn’t really seem like you “beat” the game, and that in combination with what you receive for “beating” the game, the game “ends” in kind of a whimper.
At the endgame point, you have access to all four Cocoons - Hope, Act, Fun and lastly Love - which you gain access to upon reaching Platinum. While very aesthetically fun, these locations end up being incredibly small and not being particularly varied, which makes the gameplay loop of finding Muses to dress up rather monotonous. I think the developers plan on adding more in the future, but as it currently stands, I really wish we had more in the basegame - especially, say, a forest one, a gothic one, an ocean or space themed one… Cocoons as a concept are really cool, but their execution falls rather flat.
I also think the scope of showrooms are rather limited as well. It’s fairly slow to progress enough to get decorations, and said decorations aren’t customizable beyond putting down items or articles on them. I also wish we could have more than two mannequins. Again, the developers are planning on adding more content in this area, but as it stands I wish there was more.
I’ve simmered on it more, and I’ve come to genuinely dislike the inclusions of the Gacha and Bingo minigames. The Gacha minigame gives single-use blueprints to create items with, which while not terrible in concept, is heavily weighted so that you almost never get the rarer items. The Bingo minigame gives you “e-points”, which are used for creating new articles of clothing. The Bingo3 minigame isn’t so bad, but the Bingo5 minigame is an utter slog, especially since you can only use one ticket at a time and 80% of the time you don’t get a number that you have - and those bingo tickets stack up rather fast. I think the developers should’ve axed the Bingo minigame entirely and just given e-points in its place, and increased the amount of Gacha tickets your receive or increase the rates for rarer items.
Now that I’ve been able to see most of the clothing options, I’m still sorely disappointed by the options Type B muses get. Even at their most interesting they’re still so painfully mid compared to Type A clothes! It sucks so much and makes the decision to separate clothes by Types even more puzzling to me. Just let Muses wear any clothing regardless of Type. I also wish there were separate accessory options for gloves and jewelry.
The game’s performance drops hard once you get over 1,000 clothing items in your inventory (I wouldn’t be surprised if the game ends up being unplayable after the 2.5K mark), as well as Cocoon Love in general being particularly laggy. This frustration is compounded by needing to switch through menus frequently in the game.
Overall, I still really like the game, but I really hate that it was released in its current state - an unfortunate blight that consumers have become accepting of with modern video games. Yes, free content updates are nice, but you know what is nicer?
Having a longer development cycle to ensure that all the content that makes the game complete is in the game on Day 1.
We shouldn’t be celebrating this. We shouldn’t be commending Syn Sophia or other developers for maintaining a pseudo-live service game where they push out a half-baked game and put in everything else at a later date, even if it is free. There are exceptions, of course, namely with Stardew Valley’s long and historied content updates - but a one-man indie development band Syn Sophia is not, and the content updates coming to Fashion Dreamer aren’t to add to the game’s foundation with free expansions but rather to make the game whole because shareholders and consumers alike forbid otherwise and want the game out yesterday. Not to mention how horrific this is for data preservation - when Syn Sophia et. al. inevitably turns the servers off for this game, all that extra content is gone. Poof. Reduced to atoms.
And all you’re left with is an incomplete souped up mobile game on your Switch that you shelled out big bucks for.
I need to emphasize - I still very much enjoy Fashion Dreamer! It’s the game I’ve been searching for, a fashion game that was more than shovelware that wasn’t looking to drain your wallet more in the process. I’ll continue to play this game because I have fun playing it. But there are aspects of it that frustrate me, both on the fashion side and core gameplay side. If you did not buy this game yet, then just wait in a year or two when the game is actually complete to buy it.