Style Savvy shows ‘games for girls’ can be as ruthless as their male-targeted counterparts

polygon.com:

It took me years to realize I was a gamer. Not because I felt any issue with the term, and not because I didn’t play games — in fact, I’d been playing games for as long as I could remember. But I never connected the dots between the games I grew up on and the newest Mario or Pokémon titles my friends played, because my games of choice revolved around fashion. It wasn’t until years later that I realized the games I grew up on had just as much merit as anything else on the market, and one franchise in particular had imprinted itself onto my psyche forever by inadvertently teaching a crash course on the capitalist underbelly of the fashion industry.

This all started with Syn Sophia’sStyle Savvy (also known as Nintendo Presents: Style Boutique in Europe and Wagamama Fashion: Girls Mode in Japan), which launched in Japan in 2008 before coming to America in November 2009 — just in time for my 10th birthday. The time I spent playing Style Savvy blew my young mind by fusing a standard dress-up game with a business simulator that never let me forget that fashion was a means to make as much money as possible, and players old and new saw that lesson play out over three sequel games (2012’s Style Savvy: Trendsetters, 2015’s Style Savvy: Fashion Forward, and 2017’s Style Savvy: Styling Star).

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In each of the Style Savvy games, you play as a young woman embarking on a career as a stylist at a trendy boutique. Unlike the hordes of fashion games for girls with mechanics focused on fulfilling creative briefs or endlessly designing clothes, Style Savvy games center on the player’s ability