We received our review copy of Style Savvy: Fashion Forward after the embargo dropped, so in an effort to provide some coverage in the lead-up to our review, Zach Miller will be discovering his inner fashionista in real time, posting daily journals until he feels comfortable enough to write an actual review.

Dear Diary,

Today I got a cool new game called Style Savvy: Fashion Forward, the third game in a series that I’d always heard good things about, but never experienced. The game’s setup is a little bizarre—you’re given the key to a magical dollhouse from which a living doll emerges (Sophie). Sophie invites you into the dollhouse as well, and the dollhouse’s front door is really just a portal into a Brave New World where fashion is on everyone’s minds. You might say it’s like Tri Force Heroes in that way.

You create an avatar without actually seeing the avatar you’re creating, and then, once you’ve made your selections, the avatar shows up and you can tweak as necessary. I felt this was needlessly complicated, as I pretty much changed every aspect of my character (Selena) once I saw the outcome. Selena was given a starting outfit and shipped off to Sophie’s boutique, where she was immediately put to work.

Fashion Forward eases you into working retail with easy requests (“I’m looking for a pair of shoes”) and a handy encyclopedia of keywords. When somebody asks for something “girlie,” they mean one or two specific brands of clothes. When selecting clothes for your customer, you can actually pare down the selection by brand, clothing type, color, pattern, etc., and you’ll be limited to clothing that the boutique actually has in stock (more on this later). Each customer also has a spending limit, but you can go a little over and they won’t really care.

So a girl may come in looking for a “bold top,” or a “checkered skirt.” If you don’t have that item in stock, you can turn the customer away and they always promise to come back. You have three chances to impress a customer—if they’re not satisfied, they will leave…but promise to come back later. Once you figure out how things are sorted and “coded,” though, you will rarely have an unhappy client. If anything, selling clothing becomes dangerously rote, so I was happy that, after earning just over $2,000.00, the game pivoted to discuss the Exhibition Hall.

This is where you buy clothes for your store. You choose a vendor (one of the many brands) and go through their stock, tossing things into your cart. I was surprised to see that each vendor gave Selena a “sample outfit” which she kept. After deciding on which items to buy, you can then increase or decrease how many of each item to buy (I wish there wasn’t a separate step for this) then head to another vendor. Every once and awhile, the Exhibition Hall manager will come by your boutique and ask you to decide what kind of vendor should open up shop next.

You’re also quickly introduced to the Dollhouse (yes, a dollhouse within a dollhouse). Here, you basically get to play Animal Crossing with a small room and miniature furniture. Miniatures are acquired throughout your game either by receiving them from NPCs or buying them from a miniatures shop (but they are stupid expensive). If you like home decorating, you’ll like the Dollhouse. NPCs will also rent out your dollhouse room, which earns you some money on the side. It’s pretty clear the Dollhouse will become relevant to Streetpass, but I obviously haven’t passed anybody yet.

Eventually, after a lot of selling and buying, the game gives you an actual story beat: the demo. There’s a girl in town who wants to look just like local celebrity Callie (who is neither a kid nor a squid). After you sell her a sufficiently bold outfit, she’ll ask you to do her makeup and hair. The salon and beautician are separate locations from the boutique. If you’ve played the demo, you know how this goes down. If not, here’s the skinny: makeup and hair are more involved, and more enjoyable, than merely selling clothes. The customer has actual preferences (except when they don’t at all, which can be frustrating) but you’re always given some leeway. They want red lipstick, for example, but there are four shades of red. They want short hair, but there are four or five cuts to choose from. Makeup is more complex than hairstyling, and both pull in more money, on average, than selling a piece of clothing.

As I turned the game off for the night, I was juggling boutique, salon, and beautician customers. Fashion Forward is exactly the kind of game that’s dangerous for me: it offers short quests that you can complete in about five minutes apiece, so I’m constantly saying “Oh, just one more.”

There appears to be Miiverse stuff but I haven’t explored it yet. There’s a “?” icon on Selena’s phone that I pray to Arceus becomes a Twitter app. If Tomodachi Life had one, this game deserves one too.

I am, however, mildly put off by the game’s aesthetic. Every character has the exact same body type, and individualized features (of the face, mainly) don’t differentiate as much as you’d think. The Mii Maker app has more customization options than these Barbie dolls do. Sure, you can choose from different skin types and hair color, but how about body type? Why don’t these characters have noses? I understand that fashion is the focus, but everybody’s a clone, which I find distracting.

But the game is fun. My fashion forward journey continues tonight.

P.S. None of those pictures are from MY game. Those will come later, assuming I can figure out how to pull images off the MicroSD card or send them to myself--maybe via Twitter? Eventually? That'd be swell.