Love Nikki and The Mobile Game Industry

The only mobile games I’ve really played in a serious way are Piano Tiles 2 and Love Nikki. (Piano Tiles 2 is currently ad-choked, ugly garbage that overheats my phone after like 10 minutes using it, so I won’t be talking about it too much. The design is godawful though, unintuitive and difficult to navigate, and burdened with a bunch of useless features and mechanics that add nothing of value to the experience of the game. Do not recommend.)

Love Nikki is the version of a Chinese fashion game app, Miracle Nikki, that is most popular in America. There are 4 or 5 different versions, each with their own server and some slight variations, worldwide. This is not your average dress-up game, though. It has a whole plot, some of which is laughably silly and some of which is actually very sad and touching. The basic premise is this: this pink-haired girl named Nikki from our world is randomly teleported to the world of Miraland with her talking cat Momo. In Miraland, there is a long tradition of using fashion as a way of fighting instead of using actual violence. Physical violence does exist and does happen, but styling battles are the respectable way to fight. The world of Miraland has different countries that have different styles, such as Lilith Kingdom which likes cutesy stuff, Apple Federation which likes sleek modern stuff, and the Cloud Empire which favors Chinese clothing from across time. (There’s also a super racist country called Wasteland that is some unholy combination of every indigenous population’s stereotypical clothing worldwide with some traditional Romani and Jewish styles thrown in as well, so that’s pretty bad. Watching the company try to change it up to make it palatable to US audiences is kind of amusing, though.)

But anyway, it really is the height of the dress-up genre and I hope you are all willing to try it out if you like dress-up games. It is also a mobile game, of course, and so you can expect microtransactions. It is surprisingly good about those, though. While spending money makes your experience better and easier, and there are events designed to make you feel pressured into spending money, it is also completely possible to be a very high ranking player and not spend anything ever. This is unusual in mobile games, which are very often pay-to-win and exert a lot of pressure to make you feel like you have to spend money after they’ve used their sketchy strategies to make you somewhat addicted to the game. If the game needs you to open it every 20 minutes or something similar, it is working to create a pattern in your mind where you are naturally drawn to opening it often.