Mario w/ user-defined sprites
What you draw simply fills in templates already in the world. You don't draw enough to really set the flavor of the setting, and all the drawing is simply filling in blanks in the background.
It's fun to draw your hero, and the drawing app is great (I sometimes put in the game just to doodle), but the gameplay itself is a disappointingly linear jump and smash, and your works of art do nothing to affect the game world.
Fun game with tonsa new innovations
This game, to put it bluntly, is a combination of Mario, Animal Crossing, and a coloring book. This is the coloring book part. It is really fun because you get to draw your own hero and a lot of times in your adventure draw like a cloud to get across a gap. you get to draw with pixel-by-pixel drawing if you want and if you do you can just use a template or make your own which is quite hard in the scope of things. This is wher the Mario part comes in. You have to go in to 4 separate gates which represent 4 different realms. You go through side scrolling adventures which are excruciatingly long. You run, jump and ground pound just like in mario. Fun sidecrolling with boss battles at the end of every realm. This is the animal crossing part. You also can monitor the population of your town. You have to draw certain things like a nice sign for a restaurant and the town crop. Every time you complete a level you will have rescued 3 people, which will get added to your population. Overall this is one AWESOME game. I recommend it to anyone that likes mario and stuff like that.
Equal Parts Animal Crossing and Magic Pengel With A Touch Of Mario
You play the game as "The Creator" and it is your job to save a small village of people/creatures/things by drawing the pizzazz back in to their little world which has become dark and gloomy and rescuing the townsfolk. Well this sounds kind of cool doesn't it? Too bad it's really not.
The game opens up with the pages of a book that apparently has been destroyed by one of the villagers who has gone evil. You are prompted to draw a few things, and I'm not sure what bearing they have on the gameplay yet, and then you are thrown in to a little Animal Crossing like world that is gloomy and fenced off with patches of dark fog. They talk about some nonsense for a while and eventually you get around to drawing a "hero" which you can pretty much do anything with. You're given a certain space built up of smaller regions that you can neither draw outside of or leave an individual region blank. This is to assure that your hero has 2 "legs", 2 "hands", a "head", and so forth. Naturally you can give them round stubs for hands and pineapples for legs if you wanted to but certain bits have to be there. There are also predrawn templates you can simply alter to your tastes or use them as they are. All in all I would say the drawing tools are simple but effective. You can zoom in/out, use a fill tool, there's a couple of different pencil widths, and there's a stamping tool. For the stamps and templates you only start with a given number and the rest must be unlocked. Once done, you may alter your hero whenever you see fit so don't worry about it too much.
So you've got your hero and you may now be saying to yourself, "Well he/she/it certainly is ugly" and you'd be right. Your drawn hero only has the 2D view and kind of flails around. This makes for a poor contrast to the rest of the game sprites since they all have a back, front, and side view. Whatever though, it works, it's just not pretty. With your hero you can now move on in to the saving of townsfolk and the recovery of the pages from the book of life. You enter in to side scrolling platform levels with your hero and there's really nothing new here. You jump on enemies to kill them, you can slide down hills to kill them, you collect coins for spending later in town, and you bounce around like this achieving various goals. There's really no additional flare to what it basically Mario 3 with the exception that every so often you are asked to use your drawing skills to move on. For example you may have to draw clouds that you can jump on. You also get various weapons which you are allowed to design yourself but I still found myself jumping on enemies more often than not even with weapons. The mechanics are a little wonky, your character seems to skate around and something about the feel of the movement is just slightly awkward.
Ultimately though this game boils down to being a mediocre game in all respects with drawing as a distraction. You could spend plenty of time making things look cool and pretty but every second you're drawing you're not really playing the game. If you wanted to draw like this you could simply hop on MS Paint and play Animal Crossing or Mario when you're done with that. I would call this game a "pass" unless you're hard up for a new DS game.
