Pokemon Art Academy

Genre: Art Application

Players: 1

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Review:

Pokemon Art Academy is an Art Application released on the Nintendo 3DS in 2014. As the name implies, this Application combines the fundamentals of teaching players how to create art with Nintendo’s popular Pokemon characters.

Beyond the change in theme and focus on a specific subject matter, Pokemon Art Academy differs from prior games in the Art Academy franchise in a few key ways. First, while prior Art Academy games has players mostly aiming to create the sort of art seen in pencil sketches and paintings, Pokemon Art Academy looks to teach players how to create the sorts of art seen in cartoons and comic books, with a focus on shapes, how to go about inking borders, and how to best fill those borders. As such, rather than working with paints and pencils, you’ll largely be working with different kinds of marker pens here, with pencils primarily used to sketch out a design before you use markers to ink it in.

Another major change here is that the game is aiming for a younger target audience, so the progression in difficulty is much more gradual here. This has a downside too – older and more skilled artists may find this game’s early hours, where you’re doing little more than tracing Pokemon designs and coloring them in, to be far too easy, not especially instructional, and leaving little room for creativity – through much of the early parts of the game, you’re basically told to trace over lines the game gives you and fill them in, making these parts of the game come across like a children’s activity book rather than an instructional art class.

The presentation here naturally follows much the style of the Pokemon franchise as a whole, giving the game a colorful, cartoony look as opposed to the more painterly look of the main Art Academy games. This is backed by great appropriate sounds for the different tools you’re using, along with some whimsical music that gets annoying pretty quickly (sadly, none of the classic Pokemon tunes are here). Overall, the presentation here is not bad, but doesn’t really capture the excitement of Pokemon or the beauty of the Art Academy games.

As always, players do have the ability to draw art on their own outside of the lesson structure, and they can use as a reference any of the Pokemon designs they’ve unlocked through lessons, images saved to the MicroSD card, or simple work from scratch on a blank canvas. These works can then be saved on a MicroSD card so they can more easily transfer those works to PC for later use. There’s also a “quick sketch” mode here to challenge players to recreate Pokemon designs as quickly (and sloppily) as possible, but this latter feature seems like something more for younger kids than anyone with a serious interest in improving their art skills.

Overall, Pokemon Art Academy is a solid Art Application that caters to its young target audience and teaches a type of art that’s truly distinct from what you find in the mainline Art Academy games. That younger focus does mean that older players will likely feel that this Application seems to drag for quite a bit in its early hours, but despite this, I think most aspiring artists who stick with it will find it to be worthwhile.

tl;dr – Pokemon Art Academy is an Art Application that aims to teach players basic art skills with a focus on drawing cartoon characters (specifically, the various critters of the Pokemon franchise). This gives the game a different focus than the mainline Art Academy games, but it also means the game skews much younger in its target audience, so older and more skilled players may feel like the early lessons in the game are too easy and don’t offer enough opportunity for creativity. Still, while it’s not without its flaws, this is overall a solid tool to learn more about creating art in the style of the Pokemon franchise.

Grade: C+

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