Looks like it’s that time again. I’ve actually had this thread ready for a while, and I was waiting for an adequate moment to drop it. The issue is that I wanted a new layout, but that feature’s broken so I bided my time for a while. At this point though, I could have posted this at the beginning of the month, so if there’s ever a time to let it out of my chest, it’s the winter solstice, because everyone will be home and it’s not Christmas yet. Thanks Faded, you make good layouts. Edit: Ok but one thing to note, everything is impossible to read.

It’s no secret that I’m an avid fan of this game that most people have either never heard of, or I remind them of it and they’re like... oh. I’d say this is the reason I wanted to redo all those things I said in past reviews. Heck, I’d redo all of the reviews if I could, I was really bad at conveying my thoughts back then. Hey, I made enough words to fill out the thread, might as well post it. I mean, being completely honest, I’m still a blabber mouth...? Blabber text? I type to much ok. At least as opposed to then, I’m trying to maintain some purpose other than “let me tell you all about my day!” This was both the easiest and hardest review to remake, one because playing through both Drawn to Life and The Next Chapter on the DS was a very pleasant nostalgia trip, yet on the other hand I’m admitting that there exists a first version of this review. I kinda went on some childish rant, yadda yadda, honestly whatever really happened to 5th Cell isn’t important, hence why I initially wanted to ask if those reviews could just be deleted, but hey, not like anyone is going to look back riiiight? Anyways, by remaking these reviews I could clear up my conscious a tad and also make a quote on quote “definitive” version of my perspective. So, with all that out of the way, let’s begin. 

First up, why Drawn to Life? From the way the game has just become a permanent fixture in my memories, you might expect something groundbreaking. Honestly, taking away all my sentimentality and all my memories, detaching myself and just looking at the game objectively, I’d say it’s pretty good. Not necessarily one of the greats, but definitely a notch above mediocrity. The reason I cherish this game so much though is that it managed to strike every mark on my book, it was a platformer at a difficulty level that, at the time I played, was just hard enough, it had an engaging story with notable characters and there was a lot of charm to be found in the art style and personality alike, it put me in the perspective of someone who could shape the land to their own design, it persuaded me to apply creativity to something that, without the proper incentive, would be very generic. At the time I played Drawn to Life, it was “The Game”. You know how some people say Super Mario 64 or Zelda: Ocarina of Time was the game that defined their childhood recreation and love of gaming? That’s what Drawn to Life managed to be for me, it was something unlike any other game I played up until then, so by the time something like Super Mario Galaxy got to me, turns out the rapo-vikings were there first. I owe quite a bit to the inspiration I got from this game, and even now, coming back is a pleasure. 

Drawn to Life, as you would expect from the name, is a game centered around the premise of drawing the solutions to problems. You draw the hero you take control of, in a level you may need a submarine to progress, so you draw that, and once you get back to the village hub, someone wants a billboard for their shop and you get to design it. From that perspective, it sounds like you would get the most of the game if you were good at art, and maybe that would be a notable perk, but take it from 8-year-old me, the game accounts for the scenario where a player sucks at art. Templates are available for pre-made heroes, and with a lot of objects you need to create, you can either draw the way you want or just take the paint bucket and fill out all the necessary parts. Say you don’t have the time to build a sled, just make a generic red body, some golden skates because you’re pimpin’, then once you have the time later you can go to the creation hall and craft a proper design. Granted, in terms of official art, this was the DS, you can only expect so much resolution, but there’s just enough pixels to work with that the art is certainly good enough for what we do. 

Of course, there is a game backing this up, a platformer in particular. Each level typically has a one-off gimmick they lead the level up to, like the first official level for instance. I mentioned you created a sled to slide to the bottom, but the level before was actually getting to the mountain, then climbing up and avoiding the avalanche snowballs. These kinds of things are never too jarring, more like typical game mechanics expressed in a more creative way, and they often coincide with the world theme. Yeah, the first one is pretty generic, but let me give the example of the second and third worlds, world two takes place in the twilight forest, among other regions, that are really tall and often take place high above leveled ground, so for all those levels your character is equipped with wings to jump multiple times in the air and glide, and while water is usually a hazard, dealing damage and making your hero bounce back, the third world grants you a helmet, letting you participate in the pleasure of underwater exploration! In a side scrolling platformer... yey? It’s all worth it though, on the beaches above you get to create a boom box and make the bakis rave, stuff like this is why I still come back to this game. 

Story time! The world you play in was created by the creator. Yeah. They filled everything in the world by drawing in the book of life, designing every object, creature, and foodstuff you could imagine. The raposa, the cute bunny people who quite frankly look more like cats in the game sprites, foxes? No, they’re just raposa. They were privileged to watch over the book of life on the creator’s behalf, and flourished for it. It was like a My Sims deal, I mean they have the generic chef, generic policeman, I dare you to find a more generic name than Farmer Brown. Then the apocalypse began. Some eccentric guy named Wilfre (you can pronounce this however the hell you want) decided it was dumb that they had a book where you could design absolutely anything, yet only the creator could use it. Given the right person, a lot of things could be improved, maybe the raposa could even be a foot taller! So, one day he stole the book, brought it home, and attempted to draw in it, but the things he drew came out as black and twisted monstrosities, leading to quite a stir. The mayor and the officials tried apprehending Wilfre, and in a fit of frustration and general angst and daddy issues with god, he tore out a lot of the pages in the book, scattering them to the wind before escaping. Over the course of years to come, things in the world began fading away; the creator had abandoned the raposa and locked up the creation hall, and soon a darkness began to creep up to the village, as everyone living inside gradually abandoned their homes. At the brink of the village being completely abandoned, the mayor’s daughter, Mari (I’m pretty sure it’s Mary), pleads that the creator returns to help the raposa restore everything to the way it once was, and, as it would happen, you answer the call. 

That outlines the goal of the game, your hero goes out into the world, recovering the pieces of pages in the book of life so you, the creator, can restore the objects of the world, all the while fighting back the darkness created by Wilfre, slowly restoring the village, and rescuing the imprisoned villagers outside, bringing them back home. Along with a few other weirdos. How much locating and collecting is involved? Minus the pages, the raposa, and erasing shadow goop, scattered across the levels are also stamps, cause we’ll all be using those things, music tracks, color palettes, and ability tokens, all of which can be redeemed in Isaac’s shop to not only get your stamp collection flowing, but also unlock new moves for your hero, like charging and aerial attacks. I’ll admit though, those rapos are pretty spoiled, first you’re restoring the sun and moon, the rain, their crops, then it’s like “you know what we want? Beach toys. Go nuts out there.” The village is pretty lively though, as you progress through the game, a lot of things happen, like a festival, a sudden, unexpected, unexplainable crime spree, and throwing rock-filled snowballs at Jowee (I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced Joey?). One last word to 5th Cell, particularly David J. Franco, he’s the man who made the soundtrack. I... look, the soundtrack is just glorious. You can identify his work by the occasional record scratch in the background, it’s like Santa slipping candy into your stocking. Do you want to make a DS fan cry tears which fill a river with memories? Play the snowy world tracks. That song wasn’t in the Christmas Competition though, was it Mr. Davideo 7 Plant? 

That appears to be all I have to say. For this game. The first... now for the others! At least the ones that made sense to me, I still haven’t played that SpongeBob one. I mean, what even. The next installments were called The Next Chapter, yep, both of them. Don’t let that lead you to the assumption the Wii one was a port of the DS one, they were completely different games. I got the Wii one first, because, you know, CONSOLE POWER, so let’s talk about that one... it hurts. DTL:TNC on the Wii was produced not by 5th Cell, but by a third party, Planet Moon Studios. Much like 5th Cell though, they have a shaky history, starting off strong with Giants: Citizen Kabuto and some shooters I can hardly find any records of outside Wikipedia links, then making trivia games and Wii ports before going bankrupt. Now let me just clarify with the biggest point as to why this game did poorly... drawing on the Wii. Think about that for a moment, drawing with a Wii-mote. Now add on to that thought by imagining drawing with motion controls and infrared detectors and every now and then the sensor bar loses track of the remote cursor for a second and the line you were drawing rockets to the top of the screen at the speed of sound. There’s actually a very detailed template for just about everything in the game, so they knew that the drawing was bad enough to just make everything themselves anyways. 

So with the main selling point of Drawn to Life out the window, is the platforming good? No, it sucks, it’s like Bubsy Strikes Back levels of quality, no good sense of pace or momentum or anything you’d want from something like this. The levels are rather boring for the most part, enemies are easily dispatched or there’s some predictable generic hazards, and even the gimmicks that are here are bad! There’s a rocket car that you can hardly take control of, not that there’s much a reason to when it’s like Sonic boost level so long as you don’t try anything fancy. There’s also the feature of using ink to draw platforms and structures. Again, with how bad the drawing mechanics are, imagine being on that rocket car I mentioned before, only reliably going in one direction without any problems, then having to create a shaky ramp to drive over. And the platform features a large spike jutting towards the top left. The game felt slow, tedious, and I didn’t feel good about my progression at all, but dad gum it was the sequel to my favorite game so I carried on. Then Jowee said “hot dog” and I quit. There’s some discussion among Drawn to Life fans, all 74 of us, whether the Wii version is canonical and takes place before the DS version, I’d rather forget about the Wii version, but hey, whatever works. The only takeaway I really got is that the DJ guy is my head canon version of David Franco. He didn’t even do the music for that game. 

I did eventually hear from a friend that the DS version was completely different, so I obtained it and MY. GOD. Was it refreshing! The formula was a tad different from the first, you could double jump naturally, they went from an array of extensive levels to more numerous and shorter ones, some being optional, and added a few mechanics like choosing between separate weapons and a few transformations to traverse parts of the level. Also, you can swim if there’s water and the water world was right at the start to get that out of everyone’s system. It wasn’t all too bad, don’t worry. However, above everything else, the boxes now have physics. You may think that trivial, but trust me, without crate physics this game would not be where it is today, being good enough to be retold by some random guy on the internet. 

What is the plot? Well I’m sure I can get away with this, I mean, we all figure that good prevails in the end, right? Heather, this little girl that Jowee had to watch over from an early point in the first game and who seemed to be partially infected with shadow... substance(?) has had nightmares about Wilfre coming back, and one night takes a walk out and finds a strange scepter which, for some reason or another, contains Wilfre’s vital essence or something. He takes over Heather and reforms his body, then the next day uses the scepter to absorb the color from the world. Do I smell a new game mechanic? Your duty, and that of your hero avatar, is to travel the world locating other villages, restore their color reservoirs by finding dye, stop Wilf’s trouble making, and save whoever was affected. 

Y’know, this is the last review remaster I do, so why not make it more official? I did say this thread should be a definitive version of my viewpoint, so here’s some number rankings for both the games! That way I can be clear about how the two rank comparatively, and how I think they actually compare to other DS games. Oh wait, I forgot about that third one in the middle... let’s just assume all categories are 2 or 3 for the Wii one. 

Graphics: 8/9 

The games had a lovely style to them. First of all, the raposa are animated well, with each of their idle loops or whatever, some are rather expressive, and of course the enemies are too. Some feel too cute to kill, I feel like we all had this problem at some point in our gaming careers. The world’s design in the first game was alright, but the second game turns it way up a notch, making the world feel like it came straight out of a pop-up book. A really good one, not like cardboard cutouts, but like, the buildings all have perspective to them and are well shaded and designed and IT’S GOOD OK!? 

Sound: 7/9 

I will attest to the end of time how good this soundtrack was, all places in the game have their own unique tune, something to remember each and every one by, at least most. The sound design by the time Next Chapter rolled around was definitely a remaster, remaking many beloved songs while creating many new ones. I’ll admit, they play with motifs a lot, like the boss battle theme being basically the same for each boss except the final, but being adjusted a bit so it’s more fitting to whatever area they take place in. Do you want another hit? The space theme, going into space, can’t go wrong. 

Addictiveness: 7/6 

The first game not only had more variety, but was also longer than The Next Chapter, which gives it an advantage in this department. I did mention all the events and progression, granted most of them happen once in a save file. A lot of The Next Chapter’s content aside from the main story were little add-ons, and speaking of which... 

Story: 8/4 

I have to level with you, there’s precisely one reason why The Next Chapter’s story score is as crippled as it is. It does have some other issues, for instance the villagers of the original game don’t exactly have a place in the plot, most of them are just there for the sake of reference, but the new characters we meet and the new story arcs available help make up for that. While I can’t get into the main kicker, it kind of goes back to that thing about my old 5th Cell rant. They added something to the plot that felt so unnecessary and rushed, like they just wanted to wrap up the series as soon as they could. I thought that the company were sell outs, then as I got older, I thought they just went bankrupt and Warner Bros took control of Scribblenauts, and now I just don’t know, but the way the game ends is almost precisely why I can’t let go. I don’t have the closure I want, and plenty of others don’t either because the whole story just doesn’t add up. You’ll know exactly what I mean if you get that far. 

Depth: 6/4 

The first game not only had more variety, but was also longer tha- wait a minute... well one other thing I can say is that the original had a water well that gave rewards for dumping money into it, like they do. That’s a time sink if you want it to be. 

Difficulty: 6/3 

I found The Next Chapter significantly easier. This isn’t just because I played the original when I was unexperienced, after replaying through both I can confirm the sequel was pretty easy, especially with all the tools you have at your disposal. I’d recommend a no weapon upgrades run if you want more stakes. Jeez, what is this all of a sudden, new gen Pokémon? 

Overall: 8.9/7.7 

… and THAT is how I feel about this series. Now that I feel like that service to myself is done, maybe I can broaden out? Try something new? 

Or I could go looking through political news articles with ad blocker turned off again.