PN Review: Scary Girl Illustration Kit

Another art application for the Nintendo 3DS, this one has a rather interesting title. ‘Scary Girl Illustration Kit’ by Square One Games Inc. is a spin off of an adventure platform game called ‘Scary Girl’ that was released in 2012 for multiple systems. This vector drawing program uses tools which are a little different than what most of you are used to, or maybe its just me? Anyway its unlike most of the art apps that have been released on the 3DS eshop. So if your a fellow artist you might want to check it out.

I was excited to try this “vector” drawing style because its new to me. The first thing I did was watch the 4 very helpful tutorials that are available for viewing at any time from the main menu. You start out with basic drawing then move on to advanced in the next tutorial. There are also 2 animation tutorials as well I recommend watching them all. You can get really detailed with shapes and lines given all the tools available. Its easy to pick up but the controls and process are a little tedious.

From the Miiverse Scary Girl Illustration Kit community-Drawing by Douglas (DouglasBandicoot)

Vector drawing is a more precise way to produce smooth straight lines. Each drawing will be a series of lines and shapes, as you draw and create shapes the program kind of perfects what your doing by making your line a little straighter or fixing a side of your circle that’s a little wonky. It takes a while to get used to but its pretty neat. You can also fill in your drawings with neat color options like 2-tone shades and placement effects. All of your artwork is saved to your album and you can post your creations to Miiverse for others to enjoy.

The tool options you have when drawing are pretty cool. You can sculpt/shape objects you’ve created, move or resize parts of your artwork and change the colors around. But each time you do anything you must select the shape first then scroll back over to the tool you need making everything take a little longer than necessary. It needs some work in my opinion and it definitely needs an undo button, that alone would have made the experience better. The animation process is hard to get used to but if you master it you can create some pretty neat videos.

From the Miiverse Scary Girl Illustration Kit community-Drawing by Ryan (MajesticFlame)

My main problem with Scary Girl Illustration Kit is that I barely got to play it. Every time I would make any process on a drawing the game would freeze or go black, after a minute it would take me to my 3DS home menu and say “there was an error the system will have to restart”. It was REALLY frustrating because I feel like the game has a lot of potential being the only vector drawing program I know of. I read some other reviews to see if anyone else had this problem and I didn’t see anything about it so hopefully your as lucky as they apparently were.

This game could use some tweaks for sure. But overall it has good potential if your able to play it enough. Trevor Gould a fellow team member here at PNM, emailed Square One Games recently about the crashing issue and they are looking into it. So hopefully if there is a problem with the game its fixed soon. I hope so because im looking forward to delving a little deeper into this neat new drawing experience. Scary Girl Illustration Kit is available now on the 3DS eshop for 5.99.