My Style Studio: Notebook

Genre: Art Application

Players: 1

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Review:

My Style Studio: Notebook is an Art Application released on Wii U in 2015. This software enables Wii U owners to treat their Wii U gamepad as a digital art tablet of sorts, using the touchscreen to draw.

The presentation here is fairly simple and somewhat amateurish, presenting everything via poorly-constructed menus layered onto a simple 3D desktop. This is backed by cheerful guitar music that will get annoying before too long (thankfully, there’s a mute option). Another unfortunate issue here is that the game’s options are all labeled poorly or not labeled at all, meaning you’ll have to experiment some to figure out what everything does.

Okay, so what’s in the tool set here? Well, you have a variety of “brush” types (pencil, pen, crayon, marker, and spray… though no actual brushes), the ability to change your color via palette or RGB sliders, big and small erasers, a smudge tool, a “ruler” that changes the page to lined paper, a selection of symbols you can stamp onto the page, the ability to use the Wii U gamepad to take photos that you can scale on the page (a nice touch!), an undo button, and a “clear all” feature. You can zoom in to a page by a predetermined amount, can flip individual pages by dragging the bottom corner, or press a button to flip the entire booklet like a flip-book. Players can save their works to one of three profiles, each with 30 pages.

What’s not in the package? You can’t custom zoom, you can’t zoom to full screen, you can’t change your brush size, you can’t edit pixel by pixel, you can’t use separate layers, there’s no copy-paste, and there’s no in-software ability to transfer your works outside of the game. Of these issues, it’s really only the first three that bother me – this is a $3 application after all, and for the most part the feature set here is pretty good considering how cheap it is. But the lack of the ability to zoom properly or even go full-screen, and the inability to change your brush size… those are basic features that it’s disappointing to see missing here.

Ultimately, I feel like My Style Studio: Notebook is surprisingly good in some ways and terribly disappointing in others. The presentation is pretty terrible, but in terms of functionality there’s a good amount of options here given the low price tag. Unfortunately, those options are missing some important basic features, and it’s harder to forgive these omissions. However, if you’re looking for a cheap art program on the Wii U, this will get the job done.

tl;dr – My Style Studio: Notebook is an Art Application that allows players to treat their Wii U like a digital art tablet, drawing pictures. The presentation is pretty poor, but there’s a good selection of options and features here. Unfortunately, those features are missing some basic stuff, like the ability to zoom in or go full-screen, or change your brush size. For $3, this is still a decent Art Application, but far from a great one.

Grade: C

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