Style Savvy: Trendsetters

I have a confession to make.

I fucking love "girly" games.

Continue at your own peril.

I borrowed Style Savvy: Trendsetters from the store because I've never played anything in the series, and it's good to play the stuff people will be asking you about. Also, I fucking love that shit. I had more fun playing My Sims than I probably have ever had in my life ever. Sometimes, a girl just wants to help some fake people decorate some fake houses, you know?

Style Savvy is a pretty ordinary style of game, where you run a fashion boutique. People come in and they're like "OMG, I need a cute outfit for my date with a boy" and then you find them an outfit and then they pay you. Then when you run out of cute outfits for dates with boys, you get to go to the supplier and buy more. After you make a certain number of customers happy with your bitchin' stylings, you move on to the next "level" of the game, where everything is the same but you have more fashion options unlocked.

That's pretty much the structure of all fashion games, by the way.

This game is basically The Sims, if the game stopped right after you design your characters and build your house, and made you keep designing new characters. Which is pretty much all I did when I played The Sims as a kid anyway, since we didn't have no fancy "downtown" back then and you had to make enough background Sims for your good Sims to be friends with to advance in their super awesome careers.

"Oh, I'm totally qualified for this promotion, because I'm BFFs with the eight people who live on the empty plot of land next door."

"Great! Take our money!"

In Style Savvy, after you get hired on the spot while checking out a trendy boutique, it only takes a few days for the manager to split and leave you in charge. She gives you the privilege of renaming the store you now run. It took me a few tries to beat the profanity filter (my first choice was Ballsack), but eventually the filter and I settled on a name that could work for us:

"Congratulations! Your very own shop, Satan Taint, is now open!"

Yes, all the pictures in this post are photos I took of my 3DS screen. Don't worry about it. This isn't a professional operation.

Once I was put in charge of Satan Taint, I was also in charge of remodeling the store. The customers who come to your establishment are affected by the store's design. Here's a shot I took of Satan Taint's "princess" phase:

A picture of Satan Taint, decked out in pink frills. It's hot in there.

"But wait," you might be saying, if you've managed to make it this far into a post about the time I've spent playing Style Savvy: Trendsetters. "Princess? Really?"

There are a bunch of different "styles" used in the game. The familiar ones are basic attire, professional, 60s retro, boho chic, trendy, cute, punk, bold, and sporty. Some of these are kind of redundant- pretty much everything in "bold" and "punk" overlaps with each other. But we also get "pop," "Asian," "princess," and "gothic princess."

Because this game was made in Japan!

Apparently the lolita style is too confusing for an American audience, so it was renamed to "princess," even though the style is Victorian and has nothing to do with princesses. The pop style refers to the mishmash of bright colors and patterns we're all used to seeing on cute Asian pop stars. And even though your average American would consider all of the above "Asian style" if he or she stopped to think about it, the Asian style in the game are clothes with traditional features, like shirts with mandarin collars and jeans with crane or cherry blossom prints.

Style Savvy: Trendsetters taught me knowledge. Like the fact that boho chic has tragically infected Japan. Who knew? At least they don't- according to categories established by this game- have any fucking hipsters.

You can style guys, too, but all the man stylings look totally ridiculous. Check out this guy:

There is a man in this picture. A man with a creepy soul patch who is wearing a pink shirt under a blue and black checked puffy vest that has leather shoulder pad things for no reason, and also green dress pants. He just showed up in my store looking like that. This man and his clothes are the stuff of nightmares.

Every single dude in the game looks like that. Luckily, it's not one of those games where you have to pick up a boyfriend on the side, because barf.

The game, unsurprisingly, is pretty repetitive. Everyone looks and sounds the same. Dialogue is canned and repeated with dozens of different customers. A good chunk of the different styles are just the same cut in different colors. You can enter fashion contests, but I'm pretty sure you just win them by default. (But that might be because I'm about fifteen years too old to be playing this game.)

Corners were cut, as it were.

The problem with "girly" games (for lack of a better general term) is that, well, they're marketed towards girls, and no one gives a fuck. There's no objective reason why a game about running a fashion boutique has to be repetitive and poorly made. But since the game is marketed to a "casual" (read: female) audience, budgets are nonexistent and developers are pressured to put out a product as soon as possible. "Who cares if it's bad?" say the publishers, with their actions if not their words. "It's about running a fashion boutique. And people who are into that will buy it no matter how terrible it is, because there aren't any other options."

Speaking of customers, I was playing Style Savvy while my friend groomed my sister's dog. He used to work in the electronics department at Another Retailer.

"Oh my God," he said. "You're playing Style Savvy: Trendsetters!? What is wrong with you!?"

"I like picking out outfits and running a fake store," I said. "Besides, these customers appreciate my input."

"What you just said is probably evidence that you have some sort of condition," he said.

This entire blog is evidence that I have some sort of condition.

Retailitis.