YMMV / Love Nikki - Dress Up Queen

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Despite losing prominence after being the Arc Villain of the first chapter, Mela is well liked for obvious reasons.
  • Starlet/Starphenie has a lot of fans despite being introduced much later than most recurring characters, likely due to her airheaded tendancies and adorable appearance.
  • Of late, Shade, whose faction in Dawn Front events tends to overwhelmingly trump the others due to the sheer volume of users who side with him.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Helix Waltz is a similar game to Love Nikki, with a dress-up system, battles, crafting, and a deep storyline. Naturally, because of social media algorithms, Nikki players see this game advertised to them a lot, and while some play both games, there's also a lot of enmity between the two fanbases over who made the better dress-up drama.
  • A similar rivalry exists with Dress Up! Time Princess, another fantasy mobile dress up game. It doesn’t help that Love Nikki and Helix Waltz players are both bombarded with irritating Time Princess ads, most of which try to be as dramatic and crazy as possible without being remotely representative of actual gameplay. (Not that official Love Nikki ads are much better, though.) Like with Helix Waltz, there are a small subset of people who play both or even all three games, but there are also regular fights about which game has the best story, play mechanics, and art style.
  • All three of the above fandoms have an ongoing rivalry with the playerbase of Legend of the Phoenix, a historical otome game, because many of its clothing pieces are either obviously ”inspired by” or outright stolen from Love Nikki and Helix Waltz. Arguments over whether the art theft was justified, whether the players should care, and how it impacts enjoyment of the game are common.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Nikki/Kimi is easily the biggest ship in the fandom. Royce/Neva also has its share of fans, and some support for Nidhogg/Yvette has also been spotted here and there.
• Fridge Horror: One has to wonder how all those civilians we challenged in the early chapters like Aron, Timi, Vivi and Kaja are doing now that the nations are at war, especially since the latter two are likely around enlisting age...
• Friendly Fandoms: Due to both games being distributed in the West by Elex, the fandoms of Food Fantasy and Love Nikki have a lot of overlap.
  • There's also some overlap between Love Nikki and Mr. Love: Queen's Choice, mostly because both games have the same developer. Mr. Love also includes a great deal of sly Love Nikki shout outs.
• Narm: In the English localization the script and dialogue are littered with blatantly obvious spelling and grammar mistakes, ruining many moments that are supposed to be touching or dramatic.
• Sequel Displacement: Despite the fact that both of its prequels came out in English, most people outside of China don't even realize that Love Nikki Dress Up Queen is the third game in the NikkiUp2U series. At least part of this is down to the first title, NikkiUp2U having only received a quiet Android release, so the large iOS player base will have never even heard of it. On top of that the second game (titled Hello Nikki - Let's Beauty Up! in English) shut down its global servers in 2016 (without resolving the story of whether or not Nikki found her father). So by the time Love Nikki - Dress Up Queen launched in English and received both an Android and iOS release with a different international publisher at the helm, there was no way for the many, many new players to even play the better known of the two previous titles. They are so obscure that many fans haven't even realized that the huge "NIKKIUP2U3" logo in the main menu of Love Nikki is referring to this game. That said, the English script still retains many ShoutOuts to the previous game, such as Nikki noticing that the Fantasy Envoy looks familiar, and several Hello Nikki outfits are included in the sequel. One of the anniversary events even included Nikki experiencing a dream sequence where she was back in her home and trying on dresses in the same bedroom from Hello Nikki.
• That One Achievement:
  • Many players have expressed their frustration with the criteria set for winning the "Crystal Rose" ballgown. All pieces of the "Crystal Rose" suit are awarded based on achievements, like challenging in the stylists arena for a certain number of times or participating in a certain numbers of weeks of competition, but to win Crystal Rose a player must rank in the top 10 stylists at the end of a week's worth of competition in the arena. This has been cited as impossible for players with a V-level of less than 8, thus making it impossible to achieve without spending any real money on the game.
  • Some suits required to complete chapters can be a pain to collect, especially Mechanical Heart in Chapter 12 and Heidi Song in Chapter 13.
  • Trying to craft a "Hell Suit", i.e. a suit that takes a large amount of Princess stage items, coins, diamonds, and Star Coins/dyes to create. Star Sea ^note A replica of the Star Sea ballgown worn by Sofia in Chapter 3 is the least painful to complete, just involving a boatload of coins and the costs of the recipe ^note The dress alone is 353 Star Coins, and players must craft every other part of the suit (those being the shoes, the gloves, the wig, and the necklace) before they can craft the dress. While both Stunning Beauty ^note A classical Chinese dress and set and Marionette Grice ^note A creepy, broken marionette suit are considered terrible to make (since they involve large amounts of items only available in the Princess stages and a ton of dyes on top of the costs to buy the recipes themselves), it's generally agreed that the worst one by far is Grice ^note The non-broken version of Marionette Grice, which requires players to evolve certain aspects of Marionette Grice. In order to craft Grice, players have to go through with crafting some parts of Marionette Grice three times over (if they want the recolor, it becomesfive). Hence, any player that's made Grice loves to show it off because the suit is considered so difficult that it proves their commitment.
• That One Level
  • Level 8-2 Princess was considered this before more items were added to the "rock" tag. Players better have had the "Sexy Bad Girl" suit completed ^note The hair does not have to be fully evolved, and the necklace is optional, or else they wouldn't be able to pass the stage. In fact, putting on any other piece of clothing not related to Sexy Bad Girl would cause players to drastically lose points, even items suggested by the in-game guide!
  • Level 12-1 Princess has given many players headaches. A lot of players will get stuck on just getting an A rank, even when they follow Momo's Guide.
  • Level 7-S3 requires the majority of the Northern Soldier suit (or other clothes with the rare Army tag) to even pass, making it a pretty steep difficulty spike for players at that point in the game.
  • Level 3-S2 requires a dress with the Wedding tag to pass, which isn’t so bad if you’ve been playing long enough to do the Happiness event, which is recurring and has many dresses with the tag. But for newer players, the only option is to craft the Realized Dream dress, for which the recipe costs nearly as many Star Coins as Star Sea.
  • Likewise, Level 9-9 requires items tagged "Swordsman", which seems easy at first... but Assassin Faith - Rare, the highest-scoring dress for that level, requires a high amount of Princess drops, dyes, and gold. Besides that, the level also has 3 different themes, with a separate outfit required for each. Thankfully, "Heroine", a dress purchasable from the Association Workshop, is much easier to obtain and scores high enough for an S-rank.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The dub name changes weren't well-received by players who were around before the changes. But mobile games have massive user churn, and the vast majority of current players are not aware there was a script alteration and thus have no opinion on it.
  • Nidhogg seemed to take the biggest criticism as some players felt that his "new" name sounded too menacing, seemingly making his Face–Heel Turn too obvious (whereas "Henry" is a very neutral name.) On the other hand, as the game has progressed, the mythological reference in his Chinese name appears more with dragons appearing in suits and lore related to the character, so reverting his name back makes these allusions easier to catch.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Despite being a smartphone game which is mainly tailored towards adults, the game may seem to be nice, beautiful and completely child-friendly because of the aesthetics, Costume Porns, and genre of this game. But it turns out it's not so child-friendly because of few nudity / suggestive themes, it’s also not completely heartwarming as Nikki, the main protagonist in this game got separated from her family and Trapped in Another World in Miraland at the beginning of the story, not to mention the Darker and Edgier progresses of the main story as some hardships occurred to Nikki and her otherworldly friends such as threats of imprisonment, kidnapping, coups, death of Cloud Kingdom Emperor by some of his soldiers, etc., and the worst of all, which triggers a major Break the Cutie for Nikki: The onscreen death of Lunar (killed by Nidhogg), who was an important character and one of her friends she had made in another world. Resulting in Nikki witnessing her dying in bloodbath in Chapter 15 as a result of the failure of fashion contest that Nikki believes that it can stop the war. Nikki cries for the first time in this chapter, realizing that Miraland (the world where she resides now) isn’t completely violence-free and not everything can be solved with fashion contest.. To make things even worse, this fashion contest solution which was hoped for stop the conflict didn’t work. Instead, it triggers the end of 600 years of world peace between 7 countries in Miraland (which Nikki presently resides in) because of this failure. This is why this game is rated 12+ in AppStore and Google Play!
  • It’s also worth mentioning that almost none of this stuff appears until multiple chapters into the game. The first couple of chapters are largely straightforward dressup game levels, with plot lines like “help your friend get her stolen designs back!” Lunar’s death doesn’t happen until chapter fifteen, which takes a while to reach. Because it takes so long to get to the genuinely dark parts, multiple online reviewers have treated Love Nikki as a lighthearted kids’ adventure that happens to have some age-inappropriate Fanservice, not even realizing that it was never aimed at children. A parent could easily be forgiven for handing the game to a child and not realizing how dark it would eventually get—especially because it was, inexplicably, rated for ages ‘’4+‘’ for a while.

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