Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter
Review: Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter (NDS, Wii)
Let's talk about what we're going to do for a half hour, and then spend five minutes actually doing it!
Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter marks the follow up to the original title by developers 5th Cell, who you might be more familiar with from their more recent title on the DS, Scribblenauts. This sequel manages to improve upon a few issues of the original, most notably the controls and camera issues players seemed to have, but at the same time it doesn't feel all that inspired in design, and the whole create a character stuff feels more gimmicky and not quite enough to carry the weight of the entire game. Combine that with a needlessly long, and pretty boring, plot line involving bunny people called Raposa's, and you're left with a DS title that should be inventive and fun, but manages to miss that mark.
As the game begins, you're given a long intro into the world of the Raposa, who have the color disappearing from their world due to an evil ex-Raposa entity called Wilfre. Wilfre has possessed a young girl from the village, and with a magical wand has slowly been sucking the color out of their surroundings, causing the remaining villagers to hop ship to a giant sea turtle village, where the Mayor decides to call on the Creator (that's you) to bring a hero into their world and stop Wilfre from destroying it.
This is where the character creation process kicks in, making the touch screen into a draw tablet of sorts, giving you some tools to create a hero that you'll actually control within the game. It's a neat idea and well implemented as far as animation and style goes, just like the first game (and the Spongebob spin-off or that matter). You have a pretty large palette of colors to choose from, some simple line options like a paintbrush, pen, and a fill all paint bucket, and you can zoom in a bit to get some finer line work going on. It's not super precise, depending on how shaky your hand tends to be, so the design is generally going to look a little childish unless you have an extreme amount of patience. That just ties into the charm in my opinion, going for some super-detailed and ultra real look would kind of ruin the experience. If you're not particularly comfortable with your own set of skills, there are a number of presets available to you, and as the game progresses and you collect coins in each level, you can unlock even more preset designs too.
Once you've settled on a character design, it's time to get started. Well, after you sift through some more dialogue. And more dialogue. And. More. Dialogue. Seriously, this game is pretty wordy, with so much exposition about what you're going to do that I challenge anyone to not want to hit the skip button after the first couple hours. I tried to get into the story, but I couldn't find myself caring about the whole Raposa plight, and wanted to jump into the platforming so much that I easily skipped over a good chunk of the tale. I got the gist of it easily enough, but yeah, there's just way too much story here for what equates to a pretty simple platforming experience. Once you get past the dialogue, then you're able to jump into a stage. The stages themselves are basically landmarks on the overworld map that you move around and talk to villagers on. As the game progresses and you travel to new places, you need to paint in the missing color sections on the overworld, which will unlock new stages. To do this, you need to collect the paint drops that are scattered about in previous levels, think of this as the star system in more recent Super Mario titles.
The actual platforming is decent enough, but the level design and enemies are a little lacking, and the overall difficulty is pretty low. Your hero can jump and hit enemies from the top, do a jump smash move, slide down hills and kick, or swing a weapon (or shoot depending on what you picked). You also get a double jump move, and certain stages will require you to create platforms or other objects using the same creation menu that you made the game hero with. There are also hidden coins in each stage if you're looking to get one hundred percent completion, giving the game some semblance of a replay value. Overall though, it's a pretty easy game to get through, with little in the way of actual boss fights, and some pretty tepid and uninteresting character designs to go along with the levels. It's colorful though, I'll give it that, and the whole watercolor look of the overworld is certainly pretty to look at. Even the soundtrack is pretty decent, but nothing really stuck with me after finishing the game.
Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter isn't an awful game by any stretch, but it barely manages to get past that average mark. If it weren't for the whole hero creation aspect, there'd hardly be a game here worth mentioning, so I wish the core platforming stuff were a little more interesting than it is. Hopefully 5th Cell sticks with it though, it does see some slight improvements this time out, but the whole level design, enemy type, and boss fights really need to be better structured for another sequel. They've got the creation stuff down pat in my opinion; now it's just time to work on all the other stuff.
