Life Makeover Shrine
What I dislike about the game
It's expensive. It's just way too costly, all things considered. 10€ every 45 days for the battlepass, 5€ every 30 days for the vip, 7€ every 10 days for new backgrounds and a couple of other things. Those are the guaranteed cosmetic items. Then you have the gacha. If the gacha is a 6 star one, you'd have to spend at least 100€ to get all the items, and around 250€ for all of the items + dupes for the dyes. If the gacha is a 5 star one, then the cost is smaller, around 70€ for both 5 stars sets and I'm not sure how much for the full dyes.
The dyeing system. LM dyeing system works like this: you have 16 palettes. 8 are unlockable right away, and for the other 8 you need wind vanes (some slowly farmable item) to unlock, if they're not a gacha item. If they are a gacha item, you need a dupe from the same set to unlock, which basically means you're locked out of the 8 extra dyes unless you want to spend ridiculous amounts of money. When it comes to hairs, that means the best colors - white, light blondes and blacks are locked forever! When it comes to clothes, black is locked unless the clothes already come with a default black dye! I have come to terms with that fact sadly, although luckily my favourite clothes colors are unlockable right away... Another thing, to unlock any dye you need this item called Trend Color Chart, and sadly they're pretty hard to come by. Meaning you need to be smart with your dye usage, especially if you're completely f2p.
The skin tones thing. So, this game actually has a pretty wide array of skintones available considering the fact that it's a chinese game, and there's nothing more east asians hate than tanned skin lmao. This issue has been getting better in the recent years but... In LM a lot of makeup etc doesn't look good on dark skin - very similar to The Sims 4 if you know what I'm talking about. MIND YOU the example below looks ridiculous because you can adjust the opacity of the makeup so the makeup in the picture is saturated because it's adjusted for a white skintone, however some makeup looks like that on dark skin all of the time, which really sucks. You absolutely can have a dark skinned model but I'd say 40% of lipsticks and blushes will be weird. It's not just the makeup though, it's the lighting as well. All of my models are lily white because it feels like if I use other skin tones (which I have, when I started playing), something just looked... off. I'm not sure what it is, or maybe I simply conditioned myself to like this pasty skintone the most because it's so prevalent ingame. It just feels like the ingame lighting makes most skintones look weird. IDK! Which brings me to the next complaint.
The censor system. Sadly, as this is a chinese game, it follows china rules on censoring. The chat is extremely censored, so often times what you say will come out looking so weird people won't even understand what you meant. Or even better, it'll sound way more lewd than intended because the censor always cuts the word completely. Another aspect that gets censored are the clothes, actually. Often times extra short puffy skirts and dresses will have bike shorts underneath, and cleavage can never be shown completely - it's always covered by some layer of lace or see through material at least. For what it's worth, this censoring system actually seems to deter men completely, so despite being able to make pretty curvy bodies the amount of men taking creepshots is close to 0. So, thank you China!
