People in the world of Shining Nikki are fashionistas who are defined by their Styling Power, their ability to show off their beauty. In fact, they even fight each other by expressing their beauty through styling battles. Styling Power is a quantitative variable that is extremely important to consider if you want to win styling battles. The one with the highest Styling Power will always win a styling battle.

In this guide, we’ll discuss some points of consideration when dressing up Nikki for a styling battle. Additionally, we’ll also talk about the various ways that you can buff her styling power such as purchasing better clothes and permanent upgrades.

Choose the Appropriate Clothes

Oftentimes, the key to winning a styling battle is selecting the most appropriate clothes. When selecting clothes, you must consider three variables: style, rarity, and score. Let’s start by discussing the score.

The score essentially tells you the raw amount of Styling Power additionally given to Nikki when she wears a particular piece of clothing. There are two factors that influence the score of clothes: style and rarity.

Before Nikki enters a styling battle, the game tells you the fashion style that Nikki is required to wear. As mentioned in this guide, there are five styles in the game with corresponding colors of icons.

The clothes that you pick must match the style required by the battle. Doing so, will add the most score to Nikki’s Styling Power and therefore significantly increase the chances of winning the battle.

It is one thing to choose clothes of the correct style, but it is also another to choose clothes of the highest rarity. There are four rarities of clothes in Shining Nikki: R, SR, SSR, and UR. The score given by the clothes also depends heavily on its rarity. R will give less score than SR, SR will give less score than SSR, and so on. With that, always choose the clothes with the highest rarity to attain the most score.

The Design Center

Choosing clothes can be easy but there will come a time where Nikki will face powerful opponents. In those cases, Nikki is going to need more extravagant clothes with a higher scores to ensure her Styling Power is at par with her opponent. She will also need some permanent upgrades. 

All these things can be taken care of in the Design Center.

Apple Apparel

This is the main shopping center for Nikki’s clothes. Apple Apparel offers plenty of clothes and accessories that you purchase with either gold or Pink Gems. 

When buying clothes from Apple Apparel, remember to apply the information you’ve learned previously; that is, always consider the rarity and the style of the clothes.

Workshop

Aside from buying clothes from Apple Apparel, you can craft fancy clothing sets for Nikki in the Workshop.

Each clothing set is composed of several separate pieces of clothing that you must craft individually to complete the set. Crafting one piece of the set requires specific materials and these can be garnered either from Apple Apparel or through the completion of certain story quests. You can click on the required material to know where you can acquire it.

Once the set is complete, you can then invoke it which means that you will summon the stylist associated with the set that you just crafted. Invoking a set comes with its own conditions that need to be satisfied. Upon doing so, you will unlock a new Designer’s Reflection that you can use for Styling Battles.  

You can invoke a set again to obtain Memory Echoes and this requires plenty of specific materials as well as gold.

Designer Intel Hub

In the Designer Intel hub, you accompany Nikki in conducting journalistic investigations on notable stylists in Miraland. 

For each investigation, you must complete six mini quests and completing each quest as well as the whole investigations rewards you with Exclusive Intel. Exclusive Intel can be used to buy unique clothes for Nikki and doing so also unlocks the next part of the designer’s investigation.

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When you complete all investigations to a particular designer, you unlock Mysterious Clues which can be used to unlock the next designer that will be investigated.

Stylist Academy

The Stylist Academy is where Nikki can receive upgrades to her clothing attributes, which essentially means that she can gain permanent upgrades to her Styling Power. Before formally entering the Stylist Academy, you will need to pass an entrance exam first. The exam is about general information about Miraland and its various cultures as well as the names of specific clothes in the game. You can take the exam multiple times so you can just keep retaking until Nikki passes.

You can select different courses and each course upgrades a different aspect of Nikki. Taking a course requires you to have specific items on hand. You can click on the item’s icon to know where and how to procure the required item.

Once you finish a couple of courses, Nikki will advance to the next term, and she will need to take an exam first. 

COLOURS Newsroom

In the COLOURS Newsroom, Nikki participates in modeling shoots for COLOURS magazine, and this is done by engaging in styling battles with the COLOURS’ judges. 

For every battle that Nikki wins, she earns rewards such as new clothes or gold and Pink Gems that can be used to buy clothes from Apple Apparel. Note that the rewards can only be redeemed once so that means that doing the challenge again will not give you the same reward.

Memory Ark

The Memory Ark is where you can upgrade Designer Reflections. Designer Reflections are important in winning styling battles in Shining Nikki as summoning it during combat greatly increases score and gives bonuses during particular rounds.

Upgrading a Designer’s Reflection

You can level up a Reflection when you garner enough EXP. Designer’s Reflection EXP can be acquired from one of three items: Poetry of Time, Memory Track, and Time Travel.

Awaken

Awakening a Designer’s Reflection is a way of significantly upgrading the reflection as well as obtain a new set of clothes called Awakening sets.

To Awaken a Reflection, you first need to complete a set associated with the reflection and rank up the Reflection to a certain rank. You will also need a specific item and you can know where to find it by clicking on the item’s icon.