Played this for several years. I love the general concept (unabashedly feminine RPG, no real dating sim element, with a dress up aspect) but the monetization drove me further and further up the wall until I had to quit for my own sanity.

Nikki is probably still the top dress up game franchise out there in terms of quality, but honestly that's kind of sad because Nikki is top notch in terms of artwork but actually pretty crap in terms of anything else. Even purely in terms of story writing and game design, and introduction of new characters - I often like where they're trying to go but find they usually don't execute. The story was always a bit out there, but it just got weirder and less coherent, and it became clear they didn't have a very good plan and were making things up as they went. It was particularly bad on the global server, where we got story-relevant events and gameplay elements out of order, resulting in even more confusion. I think shortly before I quit there was a "resolution" to the vampires vs elves storyline, but I felt like there never WAS a true vampires vs elves storyline - it was mentioned a couple times, but the story didn't really tie in to anything or go anywhere. Later chapters also got significantly shorter with fewer levels and less story progression, seemingly to drag everything out further.

The game design also has a lot of interesting elements that Nikki proceeded to just ignore after a while, and never do an QoL updates for or otherwise fix. For example, there is an arena (for points-based PVP) and a competition (for style-based PVP), and both of these scaled poorly as the population increased, but Nikki never went back to fix these, and at some point seemed to abandon ever adding new rewards. Nikki also had really bad powercreep, to the point where you basically had to save up for the big "hell events" (basically big spending events where you could get expensive new outfits that were usually some of the best for both points and popular styling, aside from paid outfits) if you wanted to remain competitive. This also meant that the side content became less and less worthwhile.

And that's where things tie into the terrible monetization. I won't get too deep into this, but basically everything got more expensive. LN used all the tricks in the microtransaction-based mobile game book, and they got more and more grating as prices went up and a larger and larger proportion of items were locked being a paywall. I was also playing pretty early on, when they chose to dump all the expensive limited events on us (out of order and faster than the original Chinese server got them), but refused to give us basic welfare and QoL stuff that the Chinese server also got, so this didn't help my perception. I ended up feeling less and less good about the idea of spending money (something I was initially open to) and held out as f2p until I quit, but ultimately I realized I was throwing in excessive amounts of time trying to keep up with all of the events without spending money, and it was affecting my daily life.

I don't want to dive too deep into all the problems I had with this game. I did have fun with it for a while, especially early on, and I do recognize it's pretty good quality compared to other similar games. You might enjoy this game if you only care about getting some clothing items to play dressup, or are just very zen about monetization. However, if you have concerns about gambling addiction, or will be annoyed about increasing monetization and paywalls, you probably shouldn't get into this game.

It's a shame, because I do think it has good ideas. I never got into Shining Nikki because I had heard it was super expensive, even worse than LN, and I didn't really trust Paper/Elex by then. I also played some of the earlier games, which were not as advanced in terms of quality, but had some more of the energy of early LN - I'm not sure where they went wrong, but at some point monetization took priority over actual good game design. I'd love to see someone else create a game with a similar concept and art quality but better managed monetization.