Art Academy: Home Studio

Genre: Art Application

Players: 1

.

Review:

Art Academy: Home Studio (in other regions known by the title Art Academy: Atelier) is an Art Application released on the Wii U in 2015. As with prior games in the series, this game provides players with multiple interactive tutorials intended to teach players how to draw and paint. This game was originally announced alongside the Wii U Application Art Academy: Sketchpad, and was marketed as the full version of Sketchpad, but now Sketchpad is unavailable, leaving this as the only choice on the Wii U.

The larger screen and improved power of the Wii U compared to the Nintendo 3DS make for more detailed artwork with the Wii U gamepad giving players more space to work within, but at its heart this game is still very similar to what we had on Nintendo 3DS in Art Academy: Lessons for Everyone, and players should expect a similar experience.

You’re once again being taught by a detailed pre-rendered version of series mascot Vince, and have the ability to swap the top screen between photos of objects you’re attempting to draw the game’s demonstration of how to do so step by step, and your own work to use as comparison. This is backed by some lovely instrumental music that creates a calm, relaxing tone for the game.

Here’s where this review sadly must come up short. See, I seem to be having an issue with this game constantly crashing, which makes it a pain to try to review. From what I can tell, this issue is caused by the game trying to connect to the now-defunct Miiverse service, and apparently players can rectify this issue by turning off Miiverse Connectivity under Parental Controls. Unfortunately, when I try to access this feature, I get an error message and my Wii U crashes again. It seems that the memory location my Parental Controls is stored in has become corrupted.

What this means is that I can’t test to see this game’s features, including its purported ability to upload time lapse videos of your art creation to YouTube. Does it work well? Does it work at all? I have no idea. I also can’t give you a full overview of what to expect from this game’s tools and tutorials, as I can scarcely get through one or two steps within them before the Wii U crashes on me.

Will Art Academy: Home Studio be worth it for you to get? Well, not if it crashes on you the same way it’s crashing on me. If it doesn’t, I can’t really address that question conclusively, but what little I saw looked good, and in fact this seemed to be shaping up to be the sort of experience I feel like this series has been building to since it started… but without being able to freely play and review the game, I just can’t say for sure if that’s the case here. All I can say is that there does appear to be good reason to get this Application, but do so at your own risk.

tl;dr – Art Academy: Home Studio is an Art Application that aims to teach players basic art skills. In many ways, this seems to be a promising culmination of the series and everything it’s been trying to build up to. Unfortunately, constant, repeated crashes kept me from properly reviewing this Application, and as appealing as it is, the possibility that others may face the same issue makes it impossible for me to recommend.

Grade: N/A

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Talissa, Eli Goodman, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Ilya Zverev, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}