I'm not the typical demographic for these female-marketed games but the previous game (Trendsetters) sucked me in. My review is primarily intended for people familiar with the series.



Just as great as the previous game, but with more to do. Sort of. You can take clients at a salon and beautician in addition to your boutique, they're separate buildings though. You can't customize as much about your shop in this game as compared to Trendsetters and what you can customize is more vague about its effects (does X storefront boost your appeal to rock or bold customers? Who knows!). You can't customize your apartment, the salon or the beautician's at all.



The core gameplay loop is the same as it's been the entire series; you make outfits for customers within the confines of their price and taste. I'm finding price is a bigger deal for customers in this game, their budgets are generally lower. I'm not sure if that's a localization problem or a balance tweak.



The world is bigger, with many more places to visit. Most of them you can't do much but meet customers there or look for 'colors'. The game has this annoying system of giving you a limited pallet of colors for makeup and hair. To get more, you have to find new colors out in the world and take a picture of them. New colors are usually unique landmarks or features in a scene, such as a cat, a bike or an interesting-looking sign. This wouldn't be so bad if you could crank it out in one evening and be done with it. Some of the colors are seasonal, so you'll have to change your system clock to get them all. Cool idea, horrible execution. That said, you have enough colors at the beginning to do your job.



The fashion design feature is kind of boring, you're not actually designing much, you're just applying stock textures to a pre-made mesh. You can change the color of the textures but you cannot rotate them or customize in any other way. There are different versions of meshes to give the illusion of more options, but it's ultimately a really limited feature.



Hilariously lazily localized. This is just the EU version with all references to money changed to dollars. Everything else, including colloquialisms and other cultural references are unchanged from the EU version. If you don't know EU slang, you're going to know a few things by the time you get a few hours into this. The styles and brand names are still their EU names as well, even though they use the original names in a cutscene that NA players would be familiar with. Edgy became 'rock', luxury is now 'chic', pop is now 'lively', etc. A little annoying but not a big deal.



The art style is more cartoony than Trendsetters. It took some getting used to and I still don't... quite like it. The people and clothes use the same models, but the buildings look like toys. It doesn't fit.



But with all the negative things I've said, I still love this game. I expect I'm going to pour a couple hundred hours into it as my wind-down game before bed.