Drawn to Life Games

Drawn to life is a small little series that has a soft spot in my heart. Known for being kind of a gimmick game where the main gimmick is that it's the DS, you can draw your character as the hero as well as various items and objects throughout the game to save the Raposa, rabbit / foxlike people who are suffering.

Setting aside the weird christian metaphors that's just abound in the games, it was something that I thought about a LOT as a middleschooler, perhaps even "baby's first hyperfixation".

Also as a franchise known for having kind of a wild tie-in spinnoff with the spongebob squarepants edition, and the fact that the original ending for the sequel, Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, was rough enough that they did a hard retcon of it with the collecter's edition of it. Or at least they did before retconning the retcon for the most recent third game.

I've been a big fan of the two DS games (the spinoff game and the wii game are also there I guess but I wasn't interested in them because they just seemed like cash grabs / poorely done by middleschooler me and the grown up me does still agree). The Pixel art has a specific kind of whimsy (for lack of better term) that I do kind of adore.

As for the most recent game, Drawn to Life: Two Realms, I'm kind of a mixed opinion on it. Partially because it sort of reminds me a bit of a fanfic of the game that had existed at some point in time (and is probably lost fan media at this point) that had a rather similar plot beat.

It has a bunch of the stuff there, but also I'm not so keen on the difference in gameplay loops (making it more like mario maker rather than being a platformer). As a result, I'm kind of in a weird standing with that one.