Despite appearing as among the usual girl-focused shovelware that plagued the Nintendo DS, Style Savvy stands on its own as a competent, if basic, fashion-centric business simulation. You have to manage your funds accordingly, and some types of fashion including luxury or lolita are significantly more expensive than others - you can easily blow a good grand or two purchasing stock for your boutique that way and make the game difficult. Not to mention, specific customers may only want specific brands or specific styles of clothing, and if you're unable to meet those specifications, you risk losing a sale. In addition, the fashion contests that you compete in rise in difficulty the further in you are.

That being said, while Style Savvy isn't the Dark Souls of fashion games, it isn't meant to be. Fashion is the name of the game, and the game provides ample styles and clothing items to express yourself with and sell to customers. You can also get your hair done at the hair salon, and purchase makeup at the cosmetics store to further dress your avatar up. The customers that appear in your store, while can be narrowed down based on your store's style and the inventory you carry, also wear a wide range of different styles. It is a wholly cozy gameplay loop of customers coming to your shop asking for clothes, finding those clothes and selling them, and restocking your inventory at the Buyer's Center - and every item you purchase at the Buyer's Center, you get a copy to keep and wear for yourself.

The game is somewhat easy to find copies of for very cheap, and if you aren't against emulation, is a great game to emulate and one of my personal favorites on the Android DS emulator Drastic. I have very fond memories of playing the game on my Note 3 while on busrides to away games when I was in my high school's marching band years ago.

I made this shrine entirely out of nostalgia - I'll get into it more in the My Boutique section, but the first Style Savvy has a lot of aspects that I don't feel are replicated as well in future games. The art style, while still very anime, is a more cel-shaded affair that still looks great even on high-resolution emulators. And while the animations are still very stilted (this IS a DS game, after all), the art in general more pleasant and mature and not overly childlike compared to later games in the series. Many of the fashion styles reflect upon the J-Fashions of its time, whereas future games tend to be a little all over the place.

On the topic of art styles - I also think that, outside of Daizies/April Bonbon and Sonata/Epoque, every brand has a distinct aesthetic that sets them apart from the other brands in the game. In later games, many of the styles the brands carry are far more subdued and not as distinct. The brand Capsule is unique as in it's the only brand whose entire fashion subtype is omitted in future releases, with its 60's mod styles being replaced by the 60's/70's inspired PopQuiz and entirely supplanted 70's/80's brand RetroBeat.

The first game is far more slow-paced as it functions based on your DS's internal clock, rather than a player-driven clock where you can just sleep until the next day. While this does make it less bingeable (and can be circumvented by just changing your DS's time/date), it makes the gameplay more Animal Crossing like, where you play it for small bursts each day to see what's in stock in the Buyer's Center area, which changes stock each day.

While the game is very much wish fulfillment, the overall plot is simplistic and somewhat more down to Earth compared to other games. No mystical adventures in a dollhouse, no becoming a fashionable popstar, simply a boutique owner working their way to the top of the fashion food chain competing in contests. I'm ambivalent either way personally - I love a fun fantasy romp - but for those looking for some simple fashion fun that isn't overly infantilizing, I think the first game does it best.

This isn't to say that the first game is the best game and that the others suck - far from it, in fact! I love all the games, and I think you should try them all if possible. I simply think the first Style Savvy game is my favorite :)

Like I said, the game can be basic at times gameplay-wise, as well as rather formulaic - for example, customer A who likes AZ-USA will take any item that meets their specifications if it's an AZ-USA branded item, even if it ruins the cohesion of her outfit. You can end up gaming the system this way as a means of making money. On the business simulator side, it's incredibly basic - you buy your stock, sell it at a set profit that you cannot control, and you profit. No taxes, thefts, or other typical worries involved with businesses. As such, the gameplay loop will likely bore players who aren't fully interested in the fashion offered.

The game can also be basic at times in terms of fashion as well. While there are sixteen brands with tens of thousands of clothing items, the items are pretty "what you see is what you get" - no french tucks or sleeve rollups here. Many of the items in the game tend to reflect the fashions of the late 2000's - for example, most pants in this game are VERY low-rise, so options for, say, cute high waist shorts are nowhere to be seen. Likewise, options for hair and makeup are very basic - you can pick between a variety of hairstyles (and unlock more as you progress the game), and change its color as well as add two highlight colors. Some hairstyles let you put it up. For makeup, you have eyeshadow (you can choose one color, and similar to hairstyles, you unlock more as you progress through the game), mascara (also one color, and comes in either regular or volumized), colored contact lenses (one color) and lipstick (one color). Later titles offer a little more customization in that you can change your brows and have your nails done, but it's still rather minimal.

Everything (and everyone in the game sans a couple token characters) is one size and one gender too, so representation for plus sized (or heck, even straight sized - all of the women capable of buying/wearing the clothes available in the game in this game are rail-thin modelesque anime girls), petite or tall folks as well as folks outside of the label of cisgender woman are mostly out of the question. I think this has more to do with the limitations of the game itself, however games such as the Sims breaking those limitations in terms of weight and gender expression in games show that the option is a possibility for games cut from a similar cloth to Style Savvy. While it may not be a big deal for the original game in 2008, I think in the current year of 2023 having different size and gender options are a no-brainer.