Dress Up! Time Princess
Nov. 27th, 2020 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynAs I mentioned in my month-end October update, I started a new dress-up game towards the end of October. I've been playing it for 36 days now, and I have Thoughts about it. So many thoughts.
I won NaNoWriMo yesterday, which means I can do Whatever I Feel Like today. This has resulted in a ginormous write-up of all my Dress Up! Time Princess thoughts. Also lots of comparisons to Love Nikki, which obviously inspired it.
Tl;dr: DUTP is a fun game, highly recommend. LN: no longer recommend at all due to lack of account management. Also not as much fun as DUTP. I'll break down the various aspects into sections.
Story
Instead of a strictly-linear story, as with Love Nikki, Dress Up! Time Princess's gameplay is centered on branching stories where the choices you make influence the direction the story takes. I love these kinds of stories; I find them far more immersive than linear ones. Like Love Nikki, DUTP is an Asian game translated for English-speaking audiences, but DUTP has an excellent translation team. (Love Nikki sometimes feels like they used Google Translate on the original Chinese text and said "eh, good enough.") All of the DUTP stories have a main plot involving some mystery and action, and an M/F romance subplot with two choices for romantic hero, very loosely classified in the "good boy" and "bad boy" molds.
One of the things I like about the way DUTP handles the romance options (in the two stories I’ve finished) is that the men do not fight over the protagonist. They are on the same side, and they respect one another, and they respect the protagonist’s right to self-determination. It avoids all the tropes I hate about love triangles.
I also found the first story, "Queen Marie", to be an amazing choice. The story is based on actual events and people from Marie Antoinette's life and times, and the writers put some effort into research for it. It's full of little historical tidbits about the era. And the concept -- "take control of Marie Antoinette's life and try not to have it end with her and everyone she knows executed during the French Revolution" -- makes the stakes high and also gives a sense of the miraculous to any other ending.
I reached the happily-ever-after ending that I wanted in Queen Marie after about a week of playing. I have a lot of unexplored routes in the storybook that I could go back and do, but I like the ending that I reached and like having it as my personal canon.
I started two of the other books, "Gotham Memoirs" (Prohibition-era America historical fiction, about a reporter tangling with the Mafia in NYC) and "Magic Lamp" (fantasy inspired by 1001 Arabian Nights, but not mirroring any specific story), and eventually decided to finish "Magic Lamp" rather than pursuing both at once. I ended up going through a lot more of the branches on "Magic Lamp" than I had with "Queen Marie"; it was much easier to make a seemingly unimportant choice early on that ended up dooming you later in the story. Also, I wanted to get both of the romance options. (Where is my story game with queer polyam options? Clearly I am not looking hard enough.)
I mostly finished "Magic Lamp" some time last week, but got gated behind some requirements that took several days to fulfill. I didn't get the actual ending I was trying for until Tuesday or so -- so about 23 days in all. I'm 38% on "Gotham Memoirs", which is probably halfway to one "good end" or another, but since the early stages are easier to clear than the later ones, I suspect it'll be a few more weeks before I achieve a good ending.
While "Queen Marie" remains my hands-down favorite, I've enjoyed the other stories as well. I like most of what I've seen of the romance options, with the exception of Edmund Davis in "Gotham Memoirs". I normally much prefer the "good boy" trope, and Davis is clearly meant to be the "good boy" in the story, but I find Davis so insufferable that when the story demanded I pick a man to ask for assistance, I chose a literal mob boss over Davis.
Love Nikki made dress-up integral to the story as well as the gameplay -- in Love Nikki, you are made to feel like a warrior-queen or a superhero for your ability to pick out and wear the correct outfits. This is not the case with DUTP, which doesn't attempt to explain in-story why the game requires you to gather specific clothing items. (In some cases, it does the exact opposite, like having an entire story section where Davis makes you go shopping with him so that he can "buy for you" the outfit that you-the-player have already laboriously crafted for the stage. I hate Davis SO MUCH.) This is one of the few areas of story where I found Love Nikki's approach more engaging, but I understand why DUTP wanted their stories to feel more grounded and less over-the-top fantasy.
Anyway, as a general matter on DUTP: love the stories, kudos to writers, keep up the good work, looking forward to playing this game for months to come and reading them all over time. The little tidbits of historical research are especially charming. Seriously, good stuff. <3
Gameplay
Like Love Nikki, this is a dress-up game where you have to assemble an appropriate outfit for most stages before you can pass to the next stage. DUTP has four ratings: Fail, Good, Great, and Perfect. “Fail” dumps you out of the stage. "Good" lets you finish the current stage and go to the next one. "Great" gets you a few of the unimportant drops for the stage. "Perfect" gets you all of the drops, including a blueprint that you will probably need to craft for some later stage.
The description for each new dress-up stage includes the two style tags you will need on the clothing you wear for it, and any specific requirements for that stage. There's also a "stage hints" section above the description, which you can click on to see suggested items to wear for each stage. The first chapter of Queen Marie is largely a tutorial level and you can ignore the hints because the game hands you enough clothing to get a perfect on most stages. After that, you'll generally need to craft stuff to pass/get a perfect. In some cases, the recommended items aren't enough to get a perfect, and in a few cases the recommended items are not even good for the stage and you're better off using other pieces.
Also like Love Nikki, clothing items have tags drawn from a pool of 10 different possible "style" tags, an optional "setting" tag, and a star rank. Using items with the right setting tags is generally not as important as using items with right style tags.
Unlike Love Nikki, there are no "hidden tags" or "hidden grades". In DUTP, each clothing item shows you its star rank and tags, and a 4-star clothing item with the same tags shown as a 3-star clothing item will always get a better score. DUTP also doesn't have LN's "skills" system, which adds randomness to LN's scores. There are things in DUTP that will give you bonuses -- relics and attributes -- but these are not random. If you do the same competition twice in a row with the same outfit in DUTP, you will get exactly the same score.
Because DUTP is newer and less popular than Love Nikki, it doesn't have the fanbase or support that Love Nikki does. There is no equivalent for ln.nikkis.info. But because the dress-up system isn't incredibly opaque and arcane, you don't really need an equivalent of ln.nikkis.info, either.
Overall, I prefer DUTP’s straightforward approach here.
Aesthetics
DUTP is a 3D game, with fully-rendered, poseable outfits. It has far fewer total outfits than LN, and the dev team has marked items that clip excessively with one another as incompatible: it will show an "incompatible" icon over anything that doesn't work with what you're currently wearing, and if you put it on anyway, it will remove the other incompatible piece(s). Also, all items from a given suit have the same tags.
They also have 5 categories of accessories instead of the -- seventeen? I forget -- that Love Nikki has.
The result of this is (a) your outfits tend to look pretty good together, with some exceptions from wearing items of clashing eras, and (b) you cannot assemble the unholy abomination outfits that are ubiquitous to high-scoring outfits in Love Nikki. I am particularly grateful for this because you have to look at your avatar in her latest outfit every time she shows up in the story.
Whether you like the art better in one game or the other is purely a matter of taste, but overall I enjoy looking at DUTP much more.
Racism
DUTP is pretty meh in their handling of race. The characters in "Magic Lamp" are clearly intended to be Middle Eastern but most of them barely have darker skin tones than the white casts of the other stories. And the member of the "Magic Lamp" cast with the darkest skin tone is the villain. x_x In all of the story books, there's only one definitely-brown-skinned person (she looks Indian to me but the story doesn't say AFAIK, and yes I mean "from India" not "indigenous to America"). Almost all the makeup was designed assuming you'd have a white avatar and looks clownish and awful on darker skin tones.
HOWEVER, this said, you do get to pick your avatar's facial features and skin tone, so we're already like 70 years ahead of Love Nikki here. And while the various casts tend towards light skin, there is some variety in skin tone and the characters are generally treated like lovable, interesting people and not ethnic stereotypes. It's a low bar but you cleared it, DUTP, good job.
Grinding
Both DUTP and LN gate their later stages behind crafting, which becomes more expensive as you progress in the story. There are three ways that Love Nikki slows down progress through the story:
- Stamina: You regain stamina at a rate 1 every 5 minutes, plus a few other daily methods of getting extra stamina. You need 4 or 6 stamina to do each stage, and you need (generally) a lot more stamina to grind for the clothing you need for each stage.
- Princess drops. For free, you can only get about 1 princess drop of any given type per day. Starting with chapter 11, every third stage or so requires at least 6 princess drops of a given type.
- Star coins. For free, you get about 325 star coins per week. Starting with chapter 11, it takes several hundred star coins to finish any given chapter.
DUTP has stamina and uses it in a similar way, but it doesn't have anything equivalent to princess drops. It uses diamonds in place of star coins, but even if you're not spending any money on the game, diamonds are much easier to come by in DUTP than star coins are in LN. The only other gating mechanism DUTP has is "companion affection", and the amount of progress you can make in one day with your companions is pretty large.
Love Nikki is much older than DUTP -- the USA localization of Love Nikki was released in 2017, while DUTP's localization came out about 5 months ago. LN has 24 chapters, each with between 10 and 17 or so stages. DUTP has 6 story books with gameplay, each with between 1 and 4 chapters, chapters being around 15 stages long. There are two more story-only books, with no gameplay, just stages that you read through one per day until you reach the end. It's difficult to strictly compare the story content in DUTP to Love Nikki. Most of the stages in DUTP are longer and more involved than a Love Nikki stage, and do more to further the plot. So far, I've found that I can usually complete all the crafting needed for a single stage within 24 hours. The last stage in "Magic Lamp" was the only one that I had to wait more than two days to pass (and then a few more days to pass with the ending that I wanted.) Contrast this with LN, where whenever I had to stop to craft, it took a week or more to finish the needed crafting. In 36 days of DUTP, I've completed 73 stages total in the game, 72 of them with a perfect.
That all of the story books have endings also makes the stories in DUTP feel much more satisfying. When I started playing Love Nikki, I was deeply invested in the story. But as I got farther into it, it felt increasingly convoluted and unrewarding. I have long ago passed the point where I felt like Love Nikki was making progress towards any kind of conclusion, or even towards some meaningful intermediary point. As an example: chapters 13 & 14 are a sidequest to find a particular item. At the end of chapter 14, as Nikki is preparing for the next and purportedly final leg of the sidequest, she finds out that one of her friends is in trouble and drops the sidequest to run off to help her friend. Ten more chapters have been released since and they never reference the dropped sidequest. You could remove both chapters from the story and nothing would change. Why were they even here. We don't know.
Anyway, my overall impression of DUTP is that there's still a significant amount of grinding to make progress in the stories, but that it is SO MUCH less grindy than Love Nikki.
The weird thing about this is that the tiny DUTP reddit community feels the exact opposite from me about this -- they're always complaining about how DUTP has too much grinding. I can understand this in the abstract -- any grinding generally feels like too much grinding -- but then someone will pipe up to say that Love Nikki is somehow better and involves less grinding. Even granting that I've only been playing for a little over a month and have plenty of content left to reach, having seen the bitter, angry complaints about non-story bonus clothes that take -- gasp -- over a week! -- to craft , I find it unlikely that DUTP is ever going to reach the levels of grindfest-just-to-unlock-stories that Love Nikki has.
Also, we tend to perceive grinding as TEH WORST, but in some ways I like grinding. First, it makes getting things feel like an accomplishment. It is a meaningless accomplishment but my brain gives me dopamine for it ANYWAY so hey, let's not knock it too much. Moreover, it keeps me from just playing the game as much as I want until I'm sick of it and get a new game. For some people, the sort of people who have good self-control, this is purely a negative. But for me, it's convenient to have a game that forces me to step back and wait and enjoy it more later.
Anyway, my biggest complaint, grinding-wise, in DUTP is that the recommended clothing for a given stage sometimes requires you to unlock a completely different branch of the story. Eg, you took a branch in 1-10 that took you directly to stage 1-13, skipping 1-11 and 1-12. Then in 2-1, the recommended clothing will require a blueprint from 1-11, so you have to go back and do a different branch of the story. And taking that fork may change how characters act or what your character knows in later stages. It's confusing and I'd rather be able to play through the story in a single continuity on my first run.
My second-biggest complaint is that DUTP didn't make a decent clone of the tracker from Love Nikki. It copied so much else! Most of it better! But not this. Both games have an "outfit goal tracker" that lets you set target outfits and then helps you see what you need to complete them. LN's pretty much tells you everything you need for the entire outfit, or for all the pieces you selected if you don't want the whole thing. Then you can click on each item you need and it'll take you to where you can get said item.
DUTP's gives you a list of each item in the suit, and lets you expand it to show how much you need of each thing and where to find it. But it won't take you there with a click. Worse, if you need to craft A Shiny Hat in order to make A Shinier Hat, it won't tell you what goes into "A Shiny Hat". So let's say you want to make A Shinier Dress and A Shinier Hat. It tells you that you how much you have (before the slash) and how much you need total (after the slash) as follows:
- A Shinier Dress: 2/5 Shiny Toys, 3/5 Shiny Cameras, 0/2 Shiny Dress, 10/28 Silk, 8/25 Wool, 0/1 Blueprint: A Shinier Dress
- A Shinier Hat: 2/3 Shiny Toys, 3/8 Shiny Cameras, 0/2 Shiny Hat, 10/15 Silk, 8/12 Wool, 1/1 Blueprint: A Shinier Hat
Now you have to look up the components of Shiny Dress and Shiny Hat elsewhere, double those reqs, add those to the components you need for the final form, and also add the two different components together because they need overlapping things, and OI VEY.
This is worsened because grinding in DUTP depends on finding an encounter that has the stuff you need. So you find Charlotte and get 5 Shiny Toys from her, then you refresh (which costs a little gold) or do encounters (which costs stamina) until you find Davis and get 10 Shiny Cameras from him, then you find someone you can get silk and wool from, then you go to craft and realize you counted wrong and you need another Shiny Toy from Charlotte and so you have to find her AGAIN and oh did you forget that the Shiny Dress(es) needs a separate allotment of Shiny Cameras YES YOU DID.
The crafting is confusing (it is also confusing in LN, granted) and the tracker doesn't help much, is what I'm saying.
Events and In-App Purchases
Love Nikki manages its revenue stream by having a variety of events, tied to cash purchases, running at any given time. These can be fit into four categories:
- "Welfare" events: bonus free things for the player base in return for playing the game. No special cost beyond “you have to log in and play.”
- Diamond events, generally ranging from ~1500 to ~6000+ diamonds per suit: Diamonds are Love Nikki's premium currency. The game gives you a lot of diamonds for playing, but there are far more events that cost far more diamonds than you can possibly get without spending $$. But if you're selective, you can participate in some of these without spending money on the game.
- Inexpensive $ events: LN regularly often offers suits or a few pieces of clothing for between $0.99 and $4.99. These purchases also come with a few diamonds. The $4.99 purchase usually comes with a monthly card, which gets you a bonus 60 diamonds per day for 30 days. Monthly cards are the cheapest way to bolster your diamond income beyond what you can get through normal daily play.
- Expensive $$$$ events: Periodically, Love Nikki offers suits for $15-$100. These suits come with diamond purchases, and LN usually offers these packages at the same time as an expensive diamond event, to encourage players to buy the massive amounts of diamonds needed to complete the event. Love Nikki is pretty much always running one or more of these time-limited events. You might have one day a month with zero events. It's rare that there isn't some time-limited thing going on.
By contrast, DUTP has: * The Season: a 60-day event . You get a few goodies for free as you progress in the season by completing dailies, more goodies if you spend 2000 diamonds on a "fashion pass" (by the time you finish the last tier in the season, you will have earned your 2000 diamonds back, so this is really just a “bank account that pays you interest” kind of thing), and Even MOAR goodies plus a suit if you spend $15 for the "fashion booster". The Season is similar in net effect to Love Nikki's dailies, with the "fashion booster" replacing the "monthly card". At the end of each season, a new season begins and you can buy a new fashion booster and earn a new suit through it. * Super-expensive diamond & $$$$ events mixed with a bit of free stuff.
An example of the latter: they're doing a Thanksgiving event right now, which has daily purchases that unlock each day for 14 days. 1 of them is free. 3 are "sale", which will probably be 500-1000 diamonds. Most will be $5-$20, which will get you a goodie bag and one blueprint. The blueprint will probably take 10 days of grinding in order for you to craft a single clothing item from it. There's also a three-day stamina event. If you want to spend 2000+ diamonds (approx $20 of diamonds, if you're buying diamonds straight up), on stamina, you can get the least expensive piece of complete clothing item out of it. Most of the clothing items would take 5000-8000 diamonds.
Anyway, the thing that surprises me about this is that DUTP is mostly aimed at players who want to spend $0-$7.50 per month, or players who want to spend $400+. So far, I haven't seen a lot to try to tempt anyone in between. I am an easily temptable person -- I will happily justify spending a few bucks on a mobile game on the grounds that I have not gone out to an Actual Coffee Shop and spent a few bucks on a drink. But I look at what's for sale for a few dollars in DUTP and then I go "meh" and don't get anything.
Overall, this is good news for my wallet, because it's hard to coax me into spending +$20 for a pixel outfit, much less +$400. I think DUTP's philosophy on "selling pixel clothing" is "it takes our team a long time to design and implement new clothes. We can't make it cheap for the players because we'll run out of things to offer for sale Really Fast." The stamina event clothing they've offered in the events I've seen so far has been mostly repeats.
I don't know if there's any way out of this mire for DUTP. They've set their baseline price as Very High, and they may find it hard to justify creating and selling outfits in a mid-range without alienating the consumers who were willing to spend $400 on a different and equally-high-rated outfit. So mostly just hoping that the model works for the game as a whole, and that their parent company doesn't shut them down for not being as effective at extracting money from customers as Love Nikki is. :|
Account Management
DUTP lets you set up your account in a variety of ways:
- Login via IGG account (IGG being the company that makes DUTP)
- Login via Facebook
- Login via Google
- Login via email address
You can set up redundant methods if you want; I login via one of my google accounts and have it connected to my other gmail address for account recovery. You can also change methods if you like.
This is all pretty normal, but I feel I should note it in contrast to Love Nikki’s complete lack of account management. With Love Nikki, you can connect to an email address with a password that you better remember because you can never change it and LN support can’t reset it. Or you can connect to Facebook (and hope Facebook never takes a dislike to you) or Apple ID (if you haven’t connected to any other method yet and currently use an Apple device and never intend to leave the Apple ecosystem). All decisions are permanent and unchangeable. I don’t have a Facebook account and don’t remember my LN password, so whenever I switch phones, or if my phone’s memory is lost, I will lose my account and it will not be recoverable.
Social Media
DUTP does various promotions via Instagram, Discord, and Facebook, and also sends out Google-form surveys where you provide your account id # and then they give you a little in-game gift for filling out the survey.
DUTP also has an in-game “friends” system that lets you friend random people (or any actual friends you have who play DUTP) and get daily stamina from them, and you can lend each other clothing.
This is another manner in which they’re far superior to LN, whose overriding goal is to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Facebook.
I was thinking of putting in “tips for newbies” to this, but this is redonk long so I’m stopping here. Weirdly fun dumping it all out of my head, though. :D
no subject
Date: 2020-11-29 09:58 am (UTC)Can't see myself getting into a virtual dress-up/branching storyline game anytime soon, but if it ever comes up - and who knows, it might, life is pretty weird - I definitely know which one to take a poke at.
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Date: 2020-12-02 06:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-02 01:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-03 06:32 pm (UTC)I haaaaaaaate those! 😭
Sent from my iPhone
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Date: 2020-12-03 06:42 pm (UTC)