Here is the short version of the review: it's like Flipnote Studio. Only better.
Flipnote Studio
Only better
Now, onto the long version!
Flipnote Studio 3D is a free animation tool for the Nintendo 3DS system. Released in Japan in July of 2013, the rest of the world has been waiting ever since its promised international launch of August 2013 came and went without its arrival. Now, the rest of the gaming world is on the brink of finally getting their hands on this awesome application. Here's my review of the Japanese version of the app, focusing mainly on the animation and drawing tools. (Also, there will be a lot of animated GIFs of various quality.)
Hadouken!
When you first create a new Flipnote, you will be greeted with a blank canvas. Tapping the frog in the bottom-left corner (or pressing up on the D-pad or circle pad) will bring up the various tools at your disposal, spread across 3 pages. The first page gives you your 3 most basic drawing tools: a pencil, a paintbrush, and an eraser. The pencil's main job is to draw lines, and there are six different sized tips to do this job (pressing the L button reveals the larger sizes). The pencil tool gives you access to various airbrushes too, as well as a line with variable thickness based on the speed of your stroke.
Hole in one!
A feature new to Flipnote Studio 3D is the text entry tool, represented by a letter "A" in the pencil settings. This feature is sure to be a relief to Flipnote Studio users. Dedicated creators using the DSi app painstakingly created their own pixel fonts, and copied the letters one by one to the desired page. Using the tool in FS3D is fairly self-explanatory, and useful as well.
Cats don't dance. But they keep falling over.
The paintbrush tool is designed for when you want to add shading, or mix colors. The repeating patterns of pixels provided by the brush perform this function well, and add a unique charm to Flipnote-based drawings. Pressing L while viewing the various painbrushes reveals not only larger brushes, but also a "paint bucket" tool to fill a large enclosed area. This feature was relegated to a strage easter egg involving the microphone in the original Flipnote Studio, so it's good to finally have this crucial feature firmly in place. You can even fill in an area with a solid color, something that you couldn't do so easily in the original. The last tool on the first page, the eraser tool, should be pretty self-explanatory. It works exactly as it did in Flipnote Studio.
This guy didn't sign up for Club Nintendo.
The third page of tools has a wide variety of editing and animation tools. You can change the background color of the current page, or turn the lightbox on and off. The Select tool allows you to lasso a selection of the page and move, cut, copy, and paste the selection. The new Edit tool lets you smoothly rotate and zoom the current layer or page, and the new Shapes tool draws perfect lines, squares, rectangles, circles, and ellipses.
And the improvements don't stop there. Flipnotes can now use 6 different colors (white, black, red, blue, green, and yellow), and 3 layers. And I can't forget the 3D effect! Using 3 layers at different depths can make Flipnotes much more visually interesting. In addition, Flipnotes can be saved/exported as AVI movies for sharing on YouTube, Facebook, and other sites.
I guess you could say Flipnote Studio 3D is a...slam dunk.
With all these tools in place, Flipnote users have many different ways to animate. You can painstakingly draw each individual frame, or use the Select and Edit tools to move around your drawing from the previous frame. A combination of these methods probably works best, but there's not one right way to create Flipnotes. You can create the funny looping GIFs like the ones that litter this review, you can make music videos featuring wolves or stickmen with hats, or you can make an epic, 91-part animated action series.
I haven't mentioned every single feature and improvement in Flipnote Studio 3D, but I hope you get the main idea: this is a huge improvement over Flipnote Studio. It's better in literally every way. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this music video I created myself. I hope it's a pretty decent showcase of what you can do with this awesome application, and a demonstration of a few different animation techniques. Full tutorials will come later. But for now...I can't wait to see what you all create!
