Nintendo Presents: New Style Boutique 3 - Styling Star (Nintendo 3DS) Review

It's clear as soon as the game boots up exactly who its target audience is, with a cheesy pop song accompanied by vibrant animations of a female pop star in a cute outfit setting the scene for the game to come. This is followed up by a surprisingly deep character customisation screen - there's only a female character on offer here, but there are a number of options for her design, and after a short amount of dialogue, it's straight into the action.

New Style Boutique 3's core gameplay doesn't differ from its predecessors - the player is given a request from an NPC to design an outfit according to specific criteria, such as a "feminine pink skirt," or a "gothic jacket." There's a fair amount of leeway and freedom here - these specific criteria never lead to just one outcome, especially with such a large number of clothes and the brands to accompany them on offer here. Most of the fun, of course, isn't just in making an outfit that satisfies the computer's algorithm - some particularly heinous combinations are considered acceptable as long as they fit the baseline request - but in making one that looks good to the player.

There are no major repercussions for failing to meet a customer's request, although progress in the main story may be slowed down a little, meaning that the extent to which Styling Star feels rewarding depends on the player's own investment in their creations. The ability to take in-game screenshots and share them with the Nintendo 3DS Image Share service is a nice feature that incorporates a more social aspect to the normally single-player-restricted action, although its clunky interface does also demonstrate how archaic the 3DS' hardware feels in 2017.

To label New Style Boutique 3 just as a dress-up game would be doing it a disservice, though; there's a much deeper game behind the surface. The main plot revolves around the main character being placed in charge of their uncle's old fashion boutique, and as a result, there's a surprising amount of business-brain required behind the scenes. Stocks have to be managed correctly, and new clothes have to be bought from the nearby Exhibition Hall to be sold at the boutique; it's difficult to know exactly what clothes will be in demand in the near future, making large purchases into a genuinely quite exciting game of risk.

This instalment does bring in a particularly clever quality-of-life upgrade, however, that allows the player to check if a customer's requested outfit is in stock before agreeing to the sale - and, if it's not, giving them the ability to rush off to the Exhibition Hall to quickly stock up without losing the customer entirely. There are other features on offer here, too, including the aforementioned music performances, but they are limited in scope and don't feel as fully realised as the main gameplay - New Style Boutique is at its best when it focuses on its original forte.

When it does maintain its focus, however, Styling Star is a polished, addictive romp. There's a more than satisfying amount of clothing to pick from, in countless styles and types, although some doesn't feel all that useful - headphones feel like a bizarre choice, while the inclusion of bracelets and wristwatches feel less than useful as it's difficult to actually zoom in on them when looking at the outfit as a whole - although they are handy when trying to pad out the total bill for a particularly wealthy customer.

Graphically, meanwhile, everything is very clear. The writing is great, and the models are animated fairly well, although one minor gripe is in the lack of diversity; there's a great variety in the skin tones of the models and customers in the game, although they all seem to share one body type. It would be interesting to see the series follow the recent trends of the real-life fashion industry and appreciate different body types, such as plus-size models, especially in a game so clearly aimed at girls of a particularly impressionable age.