A lot of my boutiques I've had across the games are now lost to time - mostly because of physical games being lost or savestates being unknowingly deleted and what have you. Still, I wanted to dedicate a page specifically to how I play Style Savvy, and the specific things I like and don't like about the game that haven't been addressed elsewhere in the site.
Style Savvy is a game incredibly near and dear to my heart, if the site didn't make it obvious. I can't for the life of me remember how old I was or when I had gotten the game, but I was still a kid. My parents had this system set up where if we had gotten good grades, they'd get us a new game of our choosing at the end of the eight weeks (or for those unfamiliar - the end of each half semester, typically in October, December/January, March/April, and May/June depending on how the days landed). This meant I got a new game and undiagnosed, unregulated autism and ADHD that would affect me negatively throughout my teens the first few years of adulthood because my mom thought I was "too smart" to actually get the formal word from a psych (thanks, Mom...).
Anyway, I got Style Savvy after acing some third nine weeks, some rainy April day or something. And I kind of just fell in love with it. I was already well-attuned to the likes of the numerous Adobe Flash dress-up games I'd waste dozens upon dozens of hours playing with my sister. And it was soooo unlike any of the other girl games I played - it was actually really fun! It was also the game that made me learn about different styles of fashion, and my eventual - if observational - love of Lolita fashion. I'd play it practically constantly. Unfortunately, one divorce and a move later, and I lost my original cartridge. If I had to take a wild guess, my father probably sold it along with my DS and Wii :(
Fast forward a bit. Freshman year, 2013. I got my first smartphone - a Samsung Note 3 (not to be confused with the exploding models that came out a few years later). And with it, a pirated (and eventually legitimate - because it was a fantastic app!) copy of Drastic on it. At the time, I was very deeply interested in modding games and playing emulated versions of games, and most dress-up games were rather rudimentary or microtransaction hell (Love/Shining Nikki my beloathed) so needless to say I played Style Savvy on my phone. It ran like a dream! It's wild to me how well that game played on my phone at the time. There would be quite a few bus rides home from playing in the marching band making the funny anime women dress silly. If you can't get your hands on an old DS/3DS and a copy of this game, but you have an Android phone - it's seriously one of the best ways to play DS games.
Fast forward some more and - ope, it's 2023, I'm several thousand miles away from my place of birth, and Fashion Dreamer is announced. And it's made by Syn Sophia! But hold on - it's not actually Style Savvy. It's its own thing. And unfortunately, the things that I liked about Style Savvy aren't present in that game. I still plan on playing the game when it comes out, but I had a bit of a yearning for what could've been, so I cracked open a copy of MelonDS, upscaled the shit out of the graphics to really make use of that EVGA 3080TI Hybrid I shelled out more than I'd like to admit for and then proceeded to only use for Minecraft, and played some old as shit dress up game.