Review - Infinity Nikki

This is my review of Infinity Nikki after about 10 hours of gameplay, as well as 40 or so during CB2.

Story- 6/10. Coming into this as a fan of the Nikki franchise, I am unimpressed. I've only finished two chapters (excluding how far I got in CB2, but it doesn't really seem like they changed anything anyways), but so far I am extremely bored by the story. I don't know if it's the characters, the constant cutscenes for no reason, the soulless facial expressions, I'm not sure. The story doesn't do it for me.

Graphics- 10/10. Extremely high quality graphics. No gripes whatsoever, everything in the game looks absolutely beautiful.

UI/Optimizations- 8/10. The UI is fine. As far as optimizations go, I've had zero issues personally (besides a glitch in the story cutscene where two characters were standing through chairs and they were supposed to be sitting, which also existed in the beta. devs already don't listen), but I'm also on a pretty high quality rig (4070 Super, 32GB ram, AMD R9 7900X) and I know when I played CB2 on my phone it looked terrible. In CB2 I did also (in every survey, might I add) request they add a favorite button for clothing pieces to be able to sort through clothing pieces I like and don't like, which they still haven't added, which was extremely disappointing.

World Design/Music- 10/10. The world design is incredible, and so is the music. I wish there was more put forward as far as world building goes, as this game doesn't exactly build from the same storyline for Miraland as the two previous games, but I've found some info from investigating books in the overworld, so I guess it's fine.

Clothing Design - 10/10. Usually this is my character design category, but since the gacha isn't characters, it's now clothing design! Which of course is amazing, huge quality improvement from both previous installments of the franchise.

NPC Interactions & Voice Acting (Eng)- 7/10. This is the first gacha game where I prefer the Eng VAs. I have to give it credit there. NPCs are the main focus of the story and other quests since there are no playable characters like in other games. As far as those go, not many that I've completed on the live server or in CB2 have been interesting to me.

Gameplay- 5/10. They could have done so much, but they failed miserably. It's as barebones as it gets as far as gameplay- by which I mean, there is no meaningful gameplay. And also the story is not that good. Why am I collecting these outfits again...? Anyways, I would love to see them add multiplayer interactions similar to things that have been previous games, like styling competition where players dress up according to a theme and are voted on by other players (nothing to do with scoring of the pieces, just community voting) for certain currency that can be used to unlock other outfits, or the social media feature where players can share outfits they made to an instagram-like program built into the game. I don't see them doing either of these things as they don't seem to fit the "theme" the devs are going for here, but I'd like to see something.

Progression- 10/10. Progression is mostly entirely up to the player. Repetitive annoying stamina tasks are also not an issue since you can use all your stamina in one go regardless of what you choose to do, so that's really nice.

Gacha- 3/10. The gacha is absolutely abhorrent. 20 pulls for one 5 star piece. That's about 180 pulls if you go to pity every time. The one nice thing is you are able to choose one piece to get within five 5 star pulls, which is nice I guess??? Personally, I did already drop a good sum of money on the game, and I got the blue butterfly outfit in 150 and the other limited outfit in 170 pulls. If you were to spend just on raw currency with no double top-up to pull an outfit, that's $300 by the way. But I'll discuss that in the next section.

In-Game Purchases/F2P-Friendly- 1/10. Absolutely not at all in any way F2P friendly. I didn't think this franchise's monetization could get worse but they prove me wrong every time. $300 for a single 5 star outfit, not including the recolors which require you to get every single piece again (up to 4 times)! Amazing! Not to mention, there's two limited banners going on at a time, lasting for 2 weeks, so that's would be 4 banners per patch if they keep this model up. That is $1200 if you wanted every outfit. I'm not saying you should be able to get everything for free each patch but come on. This is just pure greed. There's also the fact that a 4 star outfit in the story is nearly $50 just to buy outright, which is absurd for something that is virtually meaningless.

Overall Rating- 7/10. I love this franchise a lot, so I will be continuing to play despite some MAJOR issues I have with the game, especially monetization. I'm hoping they adjust this in future updates. I really hope they add some multiplayer aspects as well, and wardrobe optimizations to find what I'm looking for/what I like more personally (maybe even folders would help! definitely that favorite button though).

All I can say on this one is good luck 😭