On my way to work, I see multiple advertisements for Avengers: Endgame. I can hardly scroll through any of my social media accounts without a friend or acquaintance offering their hot take on the movie, even if they haven’t seen it yet. I thought maybe one place I’d be safe from the hype and the take making was one of the mobile games I play, Love Nikki. I was wrong. But I don’t mind.
Love Nikki is a dress-up game, but just describing it that way sells it short. It’s an incredibly complex game with a convoluted, silly plot where you put together outfits and battle other characters. It can be pretty challenging, especially because some of the important text can be vague or poorly translated. I like to think of it as like Pokémon, if it were a gacha game (with all the random number generation nonsense that implies), and also the Pokémon are clothes.
One of my favorite aspects of the game is the Competition feature. In all other aspects of Love Nikki, you’re playing against characters in pre-set outfits. Competitions are costume contests for every player in the game, and the results come from community members voting for the best looks. Everyone’s match ups are presented in pairs, and you have to decide to give one point to one of them. Whoever gets the most points wins the Competition, and usually gets a prize chock full of in-game currency.
The last competition was themed “Go Green,” and I did miserably. The one currently going on, I discovered yesterday when I sat down to enter it, is called, “Avengers Are Back.”
I have never seen Love Nikki theme a Competition around a media event, so that was pretty surprising. I tried to think of ways it could be about something else, but as I looked through the entries, I saw that people were either making their own superheroes, or trying to recreate looks straight out of Avengers.
The highest-rated looks so far are all recreations of the red-haired Black Widow. I’m not complaining when they look this cool:
But what I really liked was seeing how people made their own superheroes. Here’s my attempt, which I’m not totally in love with, but I was just working with the wardrobe I had:
Here’s a few of my faves that I saw just from participating in judging:
When mobile games like Love Nikki give players the chance to showcase their creativity to other players, I love seeing the diverse variety of ways they interpret prompts and challenges. To a lot of people, “Avengers Are Back” means, “Black Widow, With Some Guns.” To other brilliant people, it means pink mech suits, magic powers, and a female version of Thor. I wonder if Tony is gonna get a pink mech for Endgame? I certainly think that would improve the Marvel canon.