It is nice that there is a store management component and that you have to adapt to your clients to force yourself into seeing fashion with other eyes, out of your comfort zone and adding charisma to the different customers along the way. After all, if it was more of a toy where you simply dress your custom character as desired since the very beginning, in the hopes of fulfilling a sort of dressing freedom, it would struggle to compete against the at the time already plentiful online dress up games and, specially considering children as the target audience in mind, simply drawing characters and their looks with literal boundless possibilities and references to borrow inspiration from.
The management of the shop is also thought less as a strategy game and more about having a bit of everything in reserve to please everyone. To please not because of clients being walking cash bags (the monetary aspect is so irrelevant that the game will give you funds for free if you somehow get close to being broke) but because of an honest intent to see them as characters, mostly defined by their stylistic preferences. They have their little backgrounds and will even ask you to hang out when enough confidence is built, it is a communication exercise by understanding them through fashion.
Having said that, there is something missing around there. Serving your customers becomes tedious, even when the requests try to be varied, and these same people that the game wanted you to care about individually become a certain mass of tasks to complete to get to the next shop ranking to get to the next fashion contest to eventually get the credits rolling. A disheartening, although perhaps accurate, depiction of the job and the career, a subconscious design output never addressed nonetheless.
My view may be wrong, since the game will continue living on long after you win whatever you want to win, yet somehow it seems trapped between two extremes. One can just wonder if it could have been better by compromising either with being a relaxed game to check once in a while without pressure, just out of sheer interest, or a more mechanically asking game, perhaps even taking more fantastic approaches to present an active challenge while making you care about fashion.
Or maybe I am resentful and envious that women have better style possibilities.
The management of the shop is also thought less as a strategy game and more about having a bit of everything in reserve to please everyone. To please not because of clients being walking cash bags (the monetary aspect is so irrelevant that the game will give you funds for free if you somehow get close to being broke) but because of an honest intent to see them as characters, mostly defined by their stylistic preferences. They have their little backgrounds and will even ask you to hang out when enough confidence is built, it is a communication exercise by understanding them through fashion.
Having said that, there is something missing around there. Serving your customers becomes tedious, even when the requests try to be varied, and these same people that the game wanted you to care about individually become a certain mass of tasks to complete to get to the next shop ranking to get to the next fashion contest to eventually get the credits rolling. A disheartening, although perhaps accurate, depiction of the job and the career, a subconscious design output never addressed nonetheless.
My view may be wrong, since the game will continue living on long after you win whatever you want to win, yet somehow it seems trapped between two extremes. One can just wonder if it could have been better by compromising either with being a relaxed game to check once in a while without pressure, just out of sheer interest, or a more mechanically asking game, perhaps even taking more fantastic approaches to present an active challenge while making you care about fashion.
Or maybe I am resentful and envious that women have better style possibilities.