#at least by the standards of ‘people who have never played our beloved niche fashion/shop management series’

[regallibellbright]

Played Fashion Dreamer until my Switch battery went low, so at least for short-term entertainment I suspect I’ll be able to get my money’s worth out of it personally, and spent some time afterwards reflecting on what I think it’s doing good at and where it’s falling.

As predicted I log into Online Mode and I am greeted by a vast and wonderful array of lolita clothes fitting into at least two distinct subgenres. Since I played more online than off, I’m pretty sure I got an overrepresentation of that branch of the design options, and the comparatively understated but still distinctly dainty stuff, but I saw at least a couple people preferring the more professional or cool looks, respectively. Relatively little of the cutesy pop stuff, which I’ve always had a soft spot for, but I DID get a very cute oversized sweatshirt dress with a polka dot stegosaurus on it in several colors, and that served me quite nicely.

You’ll notice all of this is talking about women’s fashion in a game that also has playable men in a first for Syn Sophia’s fashion games. The gender lock’s aggressive and annoying, and the fact that fucking SOCKS are gendered when headwear and earrings aren’t is baffling. I have to assume it’s something to do with the modeling by this point, because you can give a Type B body a bunny-eared maid headband and whatever earrings your heart desires, and I have. I struggle to see why you would then draw the line at equal opportunity fishnets. Hair isn’t gender-locked, awesome, and Type A bodies can actually have facial hair, which surprised me because my expectations were in the toilet by this point.

But yeah. The menswear. It may just be because I was playing mostly in online mode and therefore more at the whims of player choice the way I could recognize the heavy weighting towards lolita style for the women’s fashion wasn’t representative of the game as a whole, but all the Type B characters I ran into were generally dressed in an aesthetic I’m going to call “slightly generic 2020s boy band”.

Which sounds unflattering, yes, but I consider this a genuine improvement, because the 3DS games’ menswear was mostly an aesthetic I struggled to place for a bit before settling on “totally generic stock photo model.”

I’ll get comparative pictures for you all at some point, but genuinely. Legitimately. The 3DS games were bleak. There were maybe eight aesthetic categories for men’s fashion, total, to the fourteen non-bag women’s fashion brands with corresponding aesthetics. (Granted, one of them was “costume”, so you could argue thirteen, but especially in the later two games there was still a fair bit of depth to that brand such that it had a defined aesthetic.) All of the women’s brands and aesthetics were very distinct - you could tell the difference between “professional officewear” and either “preppy” or “luxury” at a glance, even if there were items that could fit into one of those aesthetics secondarily. With the men’s brands, you had four or maybe five, and there was heavy bleedthrough of the aesthetics they listed. Both the men’s and women’s fashion had categories for “bold” and “edgy”. For the women’s fashion, “bold” is clearly inspired by gyaru fashion and “edgy” is clearly punk rock. They have different brands. For the men’s… “edgy” is SLIGHTLY more punk, but it’s by degrees, and it’s not going nearly so far as the equivalent women’s fashion. They share a brand. In addition to those two, you had “basic” (simple items, solid colors and maybe some stripes,) “preppy,” (school uniforms and stuff, self-explanatory,) “bohemian” (also pretty self-explanatory, but you never saw it in the international versions - it was cut outright for Trendsetters and while some vestiges of the style existed in Style Star, no customers ever asked for it there,) luxury (you want suits? Here’s your suits,) and “contemporary” (more patterns and material textures than basic but the same general aesthetic.)

So: You could wear a suit, you could dress a bit like a rocker but a pretty mediocre one, or you could dress like, as I said before, a stock photo model. With an above-average tendency towards vests in Style Star, but still very much a stock photo model, or maybe a midbudget CW show.

And the more I think about it, the easier it is to articulate the issue with how the men’s fashion has been treated in Syn Sophia games. The women’s fashion has all these distinct and recognizable styles, including a bunch of varieties of streetwear - you’ve got gyaru and punk styles, you’ve got Decora/Pop Kei, you’ve got girly fashion that’s somewhere around cottagecore/mori aesthetics, you have stuff that would be suitable for an office. Gothic and sweet lolita have their own separate brands. While Style Star folded its athletic brand into the pop one, the first three games all had a dedicated brand for that… for the women’s fashion.

The menswear never had a dedicated athletic aesthetic. Not even a brand, since as mentioned there were like four of those. It didn’t have an aesthetic. And THAT is why Fashion Dreamer feels like an improvement to me already, because as sparse as my options are for the men’s fashion there are at least plenty of sweatpants at long last. (I am however struggling to find men’s jeans, and it took me WAY too long to figure out where the bit specifying what type a pattern was for was located.)

The men’s fashion in Style Savvy was consistently an afterthought. And you can tell, because athletic/athleisure clothes were a staple of the women’s fashion for the first three games and still present in the fourth, but totally absent in the men’s fashion. I can trust that there’s more variety for the women’s fashion in Fashion Dreamer and that I was getting an overrepresentation of the lolita stuff because that’s what’s most popular with the playerbase, because I know from past games that there was that depth and that the lolita fashion was particularly popular. I don’t have that same trust for the men’s fashion, not yet. And honestly I doubt the game will deliver for me, much as I’d love to be proven wrong.

But hey! At least this time around, I’ve yet to see an outfit that makes a male character look like the Distracted Boyfriend meme!

#regalli plays fd #style savvy #since this is a reasonably deep dive into how the fashion aesthetics work there #and how the menswear in those games was so aesthetically limited #at least by the standards of ‘people who have never played our beloved niche fashion/shop management series’ #but yeah anyway 1) I think the fashion should be un-gender-locked; let dudes wear dresses and heart stockings; #let girls wear less fitted stuff; 2) it does at least genuinely seem BETTER #3) all of this is just my thoughts on the men’s fashion options. #I think the best way I can get across my experience with the UI is thus: I want to make my game dev brother who does UI play this #I want reassurance from an expert that I am not just oblivious; this is badly designed. I want him to feel better about his skills. #because I’m enjoying this game but HOO BOY it is in SPITE of how unintuitive it feels to play. #I will talk more about that later. #m