Fashion Dreamer Review

Fashion Dreamer is an online multiplayer dress up game for the Nintendo Switch.  If you don't have reliable wi-fi, you're gonna have a bad time.  Also, it has no story, and is grind-tastic.  If you were looking for a Style Savvy successor, you will be disappointed, like me.

You start in a single player tutorial.  You make your first character (you get 3 more after the tutorial).  This game features the option to play a masculine character, but be warned, most of the clothes are gender locked.  Masculine characters can have long hair and wear makeup, but they cannot wear dresses at the time of this review.  The feminine body category has 9 presets to choose from, but it mainly just adjusts height.  You can be very tall or very short in this game.  There are a good variety of skintones and a few hairstyles with different hair textures, but not a lot.  The eye range is limited and weird.  Makeup is limited at the beginning too.  But, as an added bonus, women can have beards and mustaches.  This may have been an error, but I'll take it.  

After you agonize over your first character, you get dumped into a 45 minute tutorial, talking to strange non-player characters, and giving your best guess at what they want.  Some will give you a clue, like a favorite color or wished for item, others give you nothing and you just have to guess.  When you finish the tutorial, it dumps you back to the title screen, suggesting you try online mode.

This upset me greatly, I really didn't want to have to rely on an online mode to have dress up fun.  However, I have good wi-fi at home, so I gave it a shot.  Online mode has several advantages over offline mode.  For starters, there's more free clothes to get, like way more.  Also, instead of dressing up nonsensical NPCs, you're dressing up NPCs based on other people's accounts, so they have clear guidelines and wishes for what they want, and it's a lot easier to get a good score on giving them a makeover.  There's a little profile questionnaire that you fill out for your character after character creation, just little things like favorite color and preferred style, and those make up the fashion quests you have to do in online mode.

Aside from giving makeovers, you can also color pieces you've unlocked to make new pieces for your wardrobe.  For now, all I can do is recolor things.  I might be able to add spots or stripes at higher levels, but for now, it's very limited.  On the bright side, you get a pretty extensive color palette to work with, choosing the hue, saturation, and value.  I immediately made a bright purple outfit as soon as I could.

Now, since this is s fashion game, I will judge the fashions!  Most of them are very boring and painfully modest.  No one is allowed to be sexy in Fashion Dreamer Land.  High necklines, long skirts, baggy pants, lots of sweaters, kinda like everyone's going to Sunday School.  There is still some Lolita fashion sprinkled in there, but it's rare.  I haven't leveled up high enough to recolor my own Lolita dresses yet.  So yeah, for a fashion game, it's really limited.  You can make the basics any color you want, but most of the time you're just stuck with the basics.  Everything is incredibly modest and plain.  It really lacks the imagination and energy the Style Savvy series had.

So yeah, no big story, requires online mode really, clothing is boring, leveling up is super grindy, congratulations for including men, but you won't let them wear most of the clothes because everything but accessories is gender locked, I'm not sure I'm down for this grind.