‘Infinity Nikki’ Is ‘Zelda’ Meets ‘Pokémon’ — But Make It Fashion

Overlooking a dozen little blemishes is much easier when the final piece captivates the imagination, a truism that applies quite well to the new dress-up game Infinity Nikki.

Infinity Nikki is the start of a new era for developer Papergames. It’s the first game published under their international brand, Infold, the first Nikki game made for consoles and PC, and, more importantly, a total reimagining of what the series can be after 12 years and four games. The Nikki series has always been solely about collecting clothes and putting together outfits, but Infinity Nikki takes the dress-up series out of the menus and illustrations where it previously existed and drops it into a vibrant open world. It’s a big change and mostly a good one, though Infold only becomes noticeably confident with it in the game’s latter half.

Released in 2012 for mobile devices, Nikki: Up2U was Infold’s first Nikki outing, literally just a game about dressing Nikki up alongside her sassy talking cat Momo. The series quickly grew from there, evolving Nikki’s wardrobe options, putting her in heated competition with other stylists, and adding expansive storylines that blended saccharine fantasy with surprisingly dark themes. In 2017, Love Nikki put the stylist in the middle of a war in Miraland, for example, while 2021’s Shining Nikki has her crafting guns for a few quests and evading assassins. Fashion’s not for the fainthearted.

Wild as these narratives could get, Infold never made the story a priority for Nikki — until now.

Nikki in wishland

Infinity Nikki also takes place in Miraland, though as always in the series, Nikki retains no memories of having been here before, and the setting shares little in common with its previous iterations. A mysterious dress transports Nikki and Momo to a barren cliffside, where they encounter Ena the Curator, a goddess brought low and bound in chains and shadow. Ena gives her the Heart of Infinity, a special item that grants Nikki unique inspiration (and level-up abilities, since this is a video game, after all), and tasks Nikki with finding Miracle Outfits to help save the world.

For the time being, though, Nikki decides to explore the world and see if she can find anyone who knows what’s actually going on, which is how she gets caught up in a bigger drama. Wish culture — basically prayers — is prominent in this version of Miraland, but something dreadful is happening to those with fervent, heartfelt wishes. They’re falling into comas. 

This blend of sweetness and melancholy sets a tone for the rest of Infinity Nikki, and the broader idea that gradually develops — a surprisingly grounded one for a game about magical clothes — is that beauty and loss must coexist. The world is a dark and sad place, but the healing power of creativity and the pursuit of beauty can make it whole and worth living in. Like other Nikki games, these heavier themes come and go amid more lighthearted beats, but that general concept is what moves everything in Infinity Nikki forward.

What elevates it above other “belief and happy thoughts will save us” fantasies is how firmly rooted Infinity Nikki is in Romantic literary tradition, the period from the late 18th and early 19th centuries that brought forth the likes of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Shelly. Yes, a game about wearing pretty clothes is drawing on one of the most radical periods in Western cultural history at every turn. Infinity Nikki’s underlying philosophy comes from the same concepts that inspired this era — belief in the transformative power of creativity; love of nature and the pursuit of harmony with it; preoccupation with folklore and matters of the spirit; even the basic idea of the natural world inspiring creation. It’s the thread, so to speak, that ties all of Infinity Nikki’s disparate pieces together and turns them into a proper Romantic fairytale.

If only Infinity Nikki were as eloquent in how it delivers these ideas. The localization from Chinese language to English quality varies wildly outside the main quests and item descriptions, occasionally to the point where it’s impossible to know what’s happening. Infold has published games internationally for over a decade now, so there’s really no excuse for a script with issues of this magnitude. Hopefully, future patches can start smoothing out some of the roughest areas.

Dress of the wild

Questing is just a small part of Infinity Nikki, though, an excuse to push Nikki into Infold’s first open world. Comparisons to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) are easy and accurate, since former Zelda director Kentaro Tominaga led development on Infinity Nikki. Infold built Miraland using principles similar to those that guided Nintendo’s work on Breath of the Wild, including how it handles points of interest and even the little shrine-like puzzle rooms dotting the landscape.

There’s more going on than just anime Breath of the Wild, though, and it’s part Super Mario Odyssey as well. Infinity Nikki stashes Whimstars — items Nikki uses to unlock new powers in the Heart of Infinity — everywhere, as Odyssey did with Power Moons. They’re tucked away in unlikely places, rewarded for completing certain puzzles, stashed in treasure chests, hidden behind specific mini-games — it’s impossible to run around Miraland and not stumble on a dozen Whimstars or so.

Speaking of mini-games, the number of them in Infinity Nikki rivals this year’s Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s (gratuitous) total. Nikki surpasses Rebirth by making them entirely optional, and it even does one better than Genshin Impact (2020) by tying most of the open world’s activities to the settings they exist in, instead of throwing them out in random places. The sheep herding game, for example, sits in the middle of Stonewood’s farming district, while a bike shop is just outside Florawish’s art academy, where students frequently skip class to cycle off into the woods for inspiration. It’s a small touch, but a welcome one that makes Miraland feel less obviously like an artificial playground.

Infinity Nikki’s first two regions — a small town set amid rolling hills and tranquil streams and a rugged farm town in the mountains — are beautiful, but tame and frictionless. They’re a pair of pastoral idylls that ask little of the player and rely on their activities and impressive aesthetic appeal to spark interest. Puzzles and platforming challenges are few, and instanced dungeon-like areas are straightforward to a fault. 

By the time the story reaches Stoneville’s Abandoned District, a place where stone trees tower over a massive lake, it’s clear Infold started feeling more confident in its world design capabilities, and the final area is easily Infinity Nikki’s best, Infold fully embraces whimsy there and sets Nikki loose to explore a bustling city nestled in the treetops and a cosmetics factory managed by a rather grumpy fairy. Everything’s fair game, from getting around via confetti cannon to using a new ability outfit that shrinks Nikki to minuscule proportions and puts the player in control of Momo instead.

There’s so much more imagination stuffed into these later areas that it makes up for the lack of challenge and makes one wonder why Infinity Nikki didn’t lead with this level of creativity to begin with. Infold should have trusted that its audience can handle tougher puzzles and obstacles, including combat, which never evolves beyond having Nikki hurl an orb of wind at embodiments of negative emotions to purify them. Still, the benefit of live-service games is that they can grow and improve over time. Judging from how Infold improved just between the launch version’s first and last areas, Infinity Nikki’s future updates might resolve all of these issues.

Regardless, what makes Infinity Nikki’s open world remarkable, even in its simplest areas, is that it invites exploration by making every action feel worthwhile. When it’s not throwing materials and pattern sketches up — which it frequently does — it rewards with a beautiful new vista or a crumbling ruin begging for a midnight photo session when the light’s just right. Infinity Nikki’s world is the stylized fantasy counterpart of something like Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), where everything is so exquisitely rendered that simply walking around the forest is rewarding in itself.

Gotta sew ‘em all

Unlike Red Dead protagonist Arthur Morgan, Nikki is more interested in using spare fur from a squirrel to make clothes than she is in shooting and eating it. Crafting outfits from patterns requires materials, and that means finding them in the wilderness — picking flowers at certain times of day, tracking down the best fishing spots, and convincing skittish cats to part with their excess fluff for a good cause, among other things. Gathering dozens of items sounds like a grind, but it’s hard to overstate just how powerful the allure of new clothes and making new outfits with them is as a driving force.

Infinity Nikki awakened a burning desire to collect every pattern and piece of clothing. It’s Pokémon for fashion, and that’s not just an exaggeration. There’s a clothing compendium, which records information on outfits like a Pokédex does for Pokémon and even a set of “sovereigns,” leaders of stylist guilds that function like Pokémon’s gym leaders who Nikki has to compete against in stylist contests.

Infinity Nikki handles these and other styling competitions in a slightly baffling way. The basic idea is that someone sets a theme, and the goal is picking an outfit that matches that theme, regardless of whether any of it actually looks good together. Only numbers matter. Appearance is unimportant and, apparently, so are some of the themes. One contest theme saw Nikki challenge a dancer, and the competition had a dance-themed name with “elegance” as the main category — but the actual requirements were no different from any other elegance competition. 

The same was true when a shepherd threw down and demanded a “chic sheep” contest. Surely, this is an opportunity to put footwear at the forefront for dancing or to add a requirement that at least one clothing item is made from sheep’s wool for the shepherd battle. The Nikki series’ style mechanics have changed little over the years, and while it’s understandable that Infold’s main focus was Infinity Nikki’s open world, it’s also probably time to shake things up a bit.

Strangely shallow though these contests might be, it helps that Infinity Nikki allows for a broad range of aesthetic sensibilities and encourages experimentation. Infold wanted to make Infinity Nikki as inclusive and accessible as possible, and that shows in how it values every mode of creative expression.  A modest pants outfit can win an elegance contest the same as a chic dress, and Infinity Nikki considers an evening gown with the right accessories just as cool as a biker-inspired fit. 

That said, the overall selection still leans toward more conventional femme clothing and styles. Elaborate dresses with ballroom or ballet themes make up the spotlight outfits, and masculine clothing options are comparatively few anywhere in Miraland. Infinity Nikki also only caters to one exceptionally thin body type, which is the biggest disappointment. How ironic that a game about beauty’s different forms should refuse to extend that idea to different physical forms.

The price of fashion  

The urge to collect is what’s helped the Nikki games make money for Infold. These are gacha games, in the same vein as HoYoverse’s Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail (2023), where players use in-game currency — which they can earn, but also purchase for real-world money — for what’s colloquially known as “pulls.” A pull might result in a common item or an ultra-rare one, but even with set drop rates, there’s no telling what might be in store in most cases. 

Infinity Nikki is about as generous as the likes of Genshin Impact with how much gacha currency it rewards for exploration and quest completion, though it’s also less predatory with how it doles out items. Every 10 pulls guarantees a 4-star, which is standard for this kind of game, but every 20 pulls guarantees a 5-star item. Most outfits have nine or 10 pieces, and it can take up to 180 pulls to get a full set. That’s a lot, but Infold smooths out some of the less savory elements by letting players choose which 5-star outfit they want. They only get 5-star items in that set, and there’s no chance of getting a duplicate item, either.

All that is to say: Yes, the gacha element is present and is still gambling, but it’s markedly less insidious than in some popular games. It’s completely possible to ignore, too. Five-star pieces make winning difficult styling competitions easier, but they are inessential. Infinity Nikki even has a leveling system that bumps up the stats for common items, so they aren’t automatically outclassed.

Even with its lack of confidence in the first half and a stubborn refusal to evolve its dress-up systems, Infinity Nikki captivates the imagination. It’s a sandbox for creative expression that always reinforces just how important the simple act of creating something is, no matter what anyone else thinks of it.

Impressive as Infold’s first attempt at making dress-up games on a large scale is, Infinity Nikki’s best days are probably ahead of it. Infold has a home decorating mode under development and plans to release new regions every six months, where lessons learned from this launch version will undoubtedly help the team create an even more exciting world. “Exciting,” as if flying around tornadoes on a flower and fighting the fairy servants of a god isn’t exciting already.

Infinity Nikki is now available for PlayStation 5, PC, iOS, and Android.