- The popular Nikki series has gone turbo powered as an open-world cozy-game
- While you’ll fight bosses and more, this is more about helping peaceful villages and completing mini-games and tasks
- You’ll collect bees, craft clothing and compete in style battles to become the best stylist in all of Miraland
Infinity Nikki is a once-in-a-generation moment in games. It’s an evolutionary leap to the scale that used to only happen when first-party support was strong around a new console launch; it’s a Gears of War, God of War, Halo, Breath of the Wild moment…for the dress-up genre.
I know, I know.
This is the fifth entry in a series that we’re talking about, to clarify, and while that’s certainly more common than it used to be, simply looking at the previous entry in the series shows you the massive step that the developers have taken here. Shining Nikki, the fourth entry, was – and I mean no offence with this – a narrative adventure similar to a visual novel, with its defin ing feature being the fashion-focused challenges that have run throughout it. You unlock clothes and assemble outfits that hit markers like Cool, Fresh, Sweet, and Elegant, and then do style battles against others to advance the story.
This appeals to a generally untapped audience – the same audience that had kept the visual novel genre going, and whose enthusiasm resulted in FFXIII becoming the first ever trilogy-entry in the long-running Final Fantasy series. However, I’m confident that this visual and gameplay upgrade is going to not only reach out to more players in general, but that it will create even more players and encourage more people to explore the video games space.
The story of the series is sweeping and vast – with strange gods and beings messing with the world in several weird ways that ultimately resulted in a kind of blood curse that means people can’t hurt others. Before that, a whole bunch of people died too – however, that particular plot twist doesn’t seem to have made its way into, self-titled cozy open-world adventure, Infinity Nikki.
That’s because Infinity Nikki has taken that graphic novel formula (with style challenges) and sprinkled in a lot of inspiration from open-world 3D platformers (recent Zelda ones are a clear example) and slice-of-life adventures (such as Animal Crossing: New Horizon). The final product is something phenomenal.
In Infinity Nikki, you’ll catch bugs, purify cursed creatures, go fishing, pet animals and parkour around the open-world map, all before you even get into your first style contest. That, and you’ll be introduced to a flood of characters who are littered all around the first region of Miraland – a timeless, dreamy, lakeside medieval-style village set in a beautiful meadow, surrounded by awe-inspiring mountains. People chat away with each other, linger around shops, call out for help from passing stylists, and generally look as though they’re living their lives.
It all looks like a living breathing world; in fact, it looks like one of the most vibrant, living-breathing worlds out there – the streets are teeming with people and there are merchants and things that you can interact with all over the place. In these ways, it feels closer to Yakuza or Shenmue than an exploration or crafting experience. But, crafting does play a major part here – you’ll catch bugs, gather flowers and seeds, and even catch fish, to help you make new pieces of clothing.
Now, I don’t often have much time for gathering in these kinds of things – it’s often a big faff, especially regarding bugs and fish which tend to be time (or tide) locked. It’s not the case here; in Infinity Nikki you can open up your map and simply put a tracker on the bug, pet, fish or plant that you need and it’ll give you a – quite precise, to be honest – area on the map where you can find it. 
The whole thing is held together with fantastic voice-acting, well-written narrative and, well, whimsy. Miraland is a dreamy place that channels the endearing innocence of early Nintendo worlds, and while there are some slightly sinister things at play (namely, the style-battling factions and a few corruption-style boss fights), there’s always a warm, soothing place you can call home.
Enough on the world and gameplay though. I’ve been saying that Infinity Nikki is going to be a record-breaking success for a while now, and while that’s mostly down to the setting and open world, I think there’s something else to it too. Namely, they’ve built this whole thing on an MMO-adjacent core – the hub towns, the smaller quests, the outfit shortcuts and the vast number of collectables. There are, simply, thousands of pieces of clothing already, with more to come in future.
As a fan of mobile games (and, to be honest, who isn’t?), I understand that these don’t cost us $40-60 a pop and that microtransactions, passes and the like are the alternative here. It’s easy to spend money in Infinity Nikki because of the way that the currency works, but also because it revolves around customisation and multi-part outfits. You can definitely ‘complete’ the core of Infinity Nikki without opening your wallet – but if you spend a little bit of money then there’s a lot of extra content here that will make your aesthetic senses dance.
Somehow the UI and menus all work perfectly fine on mobile, and it’s because the whole game has that kind of (similar to Genshin Impact, to be honest), MMO attitude to its whole interface. Menu items are clear, distanced enough that the buttons don’t knit over one another, and the camera feels easy to adjust when needed. Critically, as Infinity Nikki lacks combat, the camera-tweaking is only really used during the platforming challenges, and I had no issues with that whatsoever.
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