The “retcon” alongside “time travel” (and “dimensional nonsense” to a degree) make up some of my most hated writing devices in all written and visual literature. And while the latter concepts can work in certain circumstances, the former is functionally useless to the reader. They serve nothing more than to have us adapt to the writer’s whims rather than a cohesive narrative—forcing us to suddenly change our understanding of a fictional world with rarely a true alteration of a work’s previous entries or versions unless said literature gets a reprint of sorts. In video games, however, we have the misfortune of receiving major story changes through patches and expansions and, in the case of Infold Games’ hit 3D dress-up adventure game ‘Infinity Nikki’, we’ve gotten one that makes a whole mess of the game’s story in less than six months after the game’s launch.
But before I delve into that, I want to emphasise how lazy a retcon is. A retcon, or retroactive continuity, is a change to a work’s previously established setting or events through sequels or reprints post the original publication. These may happen because an author (or authors with a slithering ess) has likely written themselves into a corner or maybe they just didn’t like what they wrote last time. Maybe they’ve been pressured by external forces to change preceding events because of fan demand or potentially government outreach, but at the very least I could excuse any other whose hands have been forced under such circumstances.
But on its own? It’s a copout: rather than write to the scale and flow of the established narrative, a writer can simply pick and choose whatever didn’t work last time and now tell their reader that “this is now how it goes”. Major characters can have their characterisations rewritten to become cheap villains, whole regions can become moot or pop up as they please, no matter what a retcon does it makes a story harder to follow if not potentially kill interest in a work of fiction. And I want to put emphasis once more that I’m strictly discussing post changes that impact a work’s previous settings and events—not “retcons” that can be used as a device that could best be used to describe its world a la “We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.”
Now, video games have plenty of works that have seen retcons be it through story or even gameplay. Sometimes (and admittedly) I’ll take them, like good ol’ Seargent Johnson getting to stick around for all three ‘Halo’ games. Other times, it’s Riot Games trying to sell a new series of skins and needed story justification for it for some reason. I find that, however convenient simplified patch systems have been, a downside to today’s gaming landscape is just how easy it is to rewrite events on the fly. And look, I can even look past them so long as they don’t break the bigger picture, or rather the player’s intrigue and agency to the overarching game world.
So, with this mind, I’d like to introduce you to a game that decided to rewrite its protagonist’s ambitions, wipe out any meaning to the journey players have been on for well over a hundred plus hours, all to do… I don’t know. I couldn’t really tell you what the point of it was. Welcome to Infinity Nikki’s 1.5 “Sea of Stars” update—an update so buggy and confusing in what it set out to accomplish it’s made me lose all will to keep playing and gave me a much-needed boost to finally start complaining about some of the literary devices I’ve been seeing in fiction these days.
If you’re not aware, Infinity Nikki is a free-to-play 3D open world adventure (available on PC, mobile, and PlayStation 5) whose main gimmick revolves around “style” AKA dresses. Some dresses are used for skills, but for many players, they’ll be collecting clothes to customize the titular Nikki—a young lady who has been whisked away into Miraland after coming in contact with a gorgeous red dress she and her lifelong cat-thing companion Momo find in the attic. The Nikki series of games has been going on for about a decade now and with Infinity Nikki, developer Infold Games has brought what was normally a mobile dress up game with a narrative focus to a fully realized 3D environment that is both gorgeous to look at as it is to take photos in with a plethora of clothes and dresses.
I’ll be honest, I was not expecting this game to be this good. I like Shining Nikki, the previous entry in the series, but how do you bring about a dress up game to an open world setting? Well, Infold pulled it off: by designing Infinity Nikki to be a cosy open world on its cover, whose challenges primarily involve platforming (to the “obby” degree), fighting off The Dark whose forms come as “Esselings”, and more importantly dressing up and beating other stylists in face-off challenges.
I’ve not even touched on the game’s narrative, which I consider to be the “Barbie film I’ve always wanted in video game format” to be a dream come true. Nikki has been to collect the “Miracle Outfits”, a group of outfits that would be the world’s best chance at combatting the ever-growing threat that is The Dark. But said darkness isn’t the only threat in Nikki’s world, however: across Miraland’s multitude of regions, there are local and governmental conflicts occurring that the young lady finds herself in.
On the face of a “family-friendly girls’ game” we have stories of refugees escaping conflict from a nearby warring kingdom, knights who’ve lobbed their own heads off to avoid being consumed by the dark, kidnapping and enslavement, the whole shebang. Fans love this aspect of Nikki’s games and, even though there have been complaints that it hasn’t gotten too dark (yet), as a live service game, Infinity Nikki was poised to tackle the uglier side of Miraland over the course of years of updates.
As you can tell, I’m infatuated with the game. I love dressing up Nikki, I love sharing those dresses with other Nikki fans, I love Miraland’s drop-dead gorgeous landscapes backdropped against a world on the verge of turmoil. It’s just a shame that it doesn’t matter anymore as, beginning with version 1.5, it’s all more or less been rewritten. Retconned. Like a fart in the wind, my hundreds of hours of gameplay completing the critical path and following the side quests for the last couple of months because once again, I have no idea.
See, this recent game update was supposed to be a rather large update to Infinity Nikki. It implements the long-awaited Sea of Stars long-time fans are familiar with and added two-player co-op to the game alongside a hub world where players could meet up with oneanother and become friends. A long-awaited dye system was also implemented, visual issues with the mobile game client would be improved, the game would be launching on Steam, etcetera etcetera. It was supposed to be a big update and perhaps a bit too big for a game that was set up to receive monthly updates like all the other free-to-play games on the market today.
Version 1.5 launched a broken, buggy mess across all platforms, leaving the game unplayable for fans on PlayStation 5 and mobile devices for hours or days on end (stop by r/infinitynikki to see for yourself). And it doesn’t end there: the latest “gacha” dresses saw their sets increase to 11 pieces (long story short, that’s more you need to “pull” the slot lever (gambling) to guarantee the latest dresses, the dye system is a clumsy and pricey mess, the Sea of Stars region is broken and has zero content despite being the “focus” of the update, “fixing” the visuals bumped up the minimum specs for mobile players, I could go on! This is the worst update to the game so far, which is a shame because everything up to this point in my eyes was grand. We were getting decently sized events and sidequests being added to the game every month and they were fun as they were a treat to experience be it the clothes (paid and free) that were added and the stories we as Nikki fans got to experience.
And look, game development is hard. Nikki is a gongeous and detailed game. Monthly updates with these many planned features, it is simply not feasible. I feel for the development team who had to prepare this version for release, and I roll my eyes at management who pushed for this broken update to ship the way it did.
But this update introduced perhaps the worst possible thing Infold Games could have ever done for me as a player. It is perfectly valid to rail against the company for trying to price out cosmetics with inane pricing schemes and it is valid to girlcott the developer for a broken update. But even then, I could ignore all these and continue to play Infinity Nikki—it’s a one-of-a-kind game, after all, and I still very much enjoy Miraland even with all its faults. But Infold Games, for seemingly no reason at all, took the extra step to muck with the game’s story so badly my motivation to continue playing the game has evaporated this week and it’s all thanks to the dreaded retcon.
Spoilers ahead, not that it matters anymore anyway.
When I first launched Infinity Nikki this week, I was forced into a segment that introduced me to the Sea of Stars. This is a 20-minute cutscene of nonsense that is both pretty and unusually janky, showing our beloved Nikki being tossed through holes and into the beautiful purgatory of the Sea of Stars. Here, I met the Seer, a tall lady with lush, flowing pink hair who tells Nikki that the world she knew for the last several months had gone kaput. Apparently the “Heart of Infinity” within her likes to explode and take all things with her. Naturally, Nikki is confused and shocked, as am I. The Seer continues to spout nonsense, more or less telling us “It’s all gone, it’s a shame. Oh well”. We’re forced to waltz the Sea of Stars region a bit more and then we can just head back to Miraland like nothing changed.
After wasting half an hour of my life with that area and being dropped back into the real world, I shrugged my shoulders and figured that the Sea of Stars was just a side event bit that’s cut off from the events of the current world. Not the first time a long-running game has done so (‘Granblue Fantasy’ has its own alternative world nonsense, but I do like that) and Nikki’s no stranger to time hopping and looping. Whatever, right? I finished up my work and closed out the game.
A day later, I find out that not only is this section forced onto new players but Infold Games had taken a hatchet to the entire tutorial section of the game and how it sets up Nikki’s portal to Miraland. All references to the beautiful red dress are gone, the illusive Ena the Curator has been pulled from her chains and leaves Nikki with a few words of nonsense before disappearing, the meeting between Nikki and the stylist guild at the old castle ruins had been glassed, everything was ruined. How Nikki got to Miraland changed as did her goal to find the Miracle Outfits, which Ena had requested of Nikki in the original opening sequence to save their world. With this change, as did the character assassination of Giovanni and his link to bringing Nikki to Miraland, my motivation was crushed into powder, put into a cup on the dining table, and knocked over to the floor by the single brain-celled organism that is my pet cat.
Upon realizing what Infold Games had done to Nikki’s story, I was a bit shocked. It took maybe an hour for the realization to hit, the one that said, “Everything you did these last couple of months, every hour you spent learning about Miraland was for naught”. “What was the driving force for such a bizarre change in script?” I wondered. Really, I don’t think I’ve ever been this rug pulled by a video game in recent memory. Sure, developers have gone back to improve opening sequences to their games, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a game whose story was retconned to support a broken multiplayer mode nearly six months after its launch.
At some point I contemplated that maybe Infinity Nikki’s management was hopped up on Adderall, but that’s being rude to Adderall addicts and I’m fairly sure even the most doped-up writer would hesitate to rewrite the very foundation of their own story on a whim, months after everyone spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars on their game(s).
There is no reason for that they’ve done here! I’ve spent more time contemplating the rubbish they’ve pulled here but I can’t imagine why they’ve chosen to handle the launch of the Sea of Stars story this way (even financially!). And by retconning Nikki’s origins with this recent patch, the developer has told me two things:
- Nothing I do will matter because the company has a vested interest in rewriting the main narrative to suit… Whatever nonsense they feel at a given time. Everything I’ve seen Nikki complete easily or through struggle, is up in the air for deletion.
- “Superhero Syndrome” (I coined this one, my trademark!) is in full effect. Apparently, everything is in danger at any given point because the Heart of Infinity within Nikki is poised to make Reach look like a joke when management declares that it needs to be so.
When a retcon happens, it might be to reverse a death or a plot point that the writer wants to walk back on. Be as it may, I can ignore trips in a continuity like this even if I don’t like them. I think one of the best things about our ability to create is to see things through even if we don’t like the events that have unfolded. Our imaginations are truly one-of-a-kind and that can be hard to put on paper, no matter how detailed we may make concepts to be. In itself, writing is a challenge, but it can be a fun one—by walking back to “fix” mistakes, I feel it takes away the agency of the world a writer builds. Blemishes are memorable, even if they are perceived negatively. Retcons make these blemishes moot and, in worst cases, just give the author an easy way out of a thread they want no part of.
But in Infinity Nikki’s case, the retcon is so major in its scale it has killed my motivation to keep playing. The original opening of the game is fantastic, introducing us to a fantasy land draped in gorgeous colours and bizarre struggles for new and returning Nikki players alike. That’s all gone now, leaving us with a game world that is haphazardly connected to new story sequences that make no sense to the original game’s contents. I love dressing up Nikki in all sorts of outfits, but part of that love for the game also stemmed from my connections to the character of Miraland and now they’re at the mercy of a plot device that not even Nikki knows when it’ll set off.
If I keep playing this game, I’ll be playing a narratively confused mess with obby aspects and a dress up minigame attached to it. Though pretty, I can just go to Roblox for either of those or run back to Style Savvy or those Miniclip dress up games—which I have already done so as I’ve deleted the game off all my devices. Sans a complete reverse course into the story retcons made here, I will no longer play the game, and I cannot recommend Infinity Nikki to anyone else lest the aspects of the game they might enjoy be trounced the next day for seemingly no reason at all. And above all, I feel for Nikki who is now being dragged by ear thanks to a directionless update.
Right, hopefully you’ve learned how powerful and awful of a tool the retcon is. I’d also like to cover why time travel sucks at some point along with some other writing sins I’ve seen trending with games and the young adult novels and works these days. Now the hole having no Infinity Nikki in my life right now is quite grande but I’ll find some other games-as-a-service to fill it with.
Sod this, ‘Arknights: Endfield’, where art thou?! ∎
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