Scribblenauts Unlimited (Nintendo 3DS)

Unlimited? The Wii U and Steam versions maybe… The 3DS version, not so much.

I don’t think I’ve made it a secret that I greatly enjoy developer 5th Cell’s Scribblenauts games, as my reviews of the original game and its sequel can attest. After “Every item imaginable” and “Every adjective imaginable”, there’s only three ways the franchise could go: Encouraging the players’ creativity, make a Battle Mode, or do something weird and crazy and awesome that’s in a whole other direction from what the franchise has been so far.

Why yes, this is indeed Wonder Woman fightung
a giant minotaur.

The first option gave us Scribblenauts Unlimited, today’s game, in which one can create their own objects. The second option gave us Scribblenauts Showdown, the only game in the franchise that I don’t yet have. And the last option gave us Scribblenauts Unmasked, which add three bajillion characters from DC Comics to the mix.

As I’ve touched upon in the previous two reviews I’ve written about this franchise, there wasn’t really any plot to the original games. You have your magical notebook. You have Staries to collect. You have people to help and puzzles to solve. Try to solve every puzzle in different ways. Surely one can’t add a story to this type of game, right?

42 kids, only one daughter.
It's some insane probability.

Well, there is! And it’s actually quite interesting! Maxwell, the protagonist, is one of several siblings of a family living on a farm. And a big family it is, with 42 kids! And he has only one sister, Lily. Maxwell received his magical notepad from his parents, who were adventurers. I’d question how the parents would have time to go on adventures while caring for 41 sons and a daughter, buuuuuuuuuuut this is a world where a magical notepad can spawn God, Cthulhu, and a LOLCat, so I won’t complain too much.

Maxwell was a bit of a jerk while growing up; one day, he thought it would be funny to give a rotten apple to an old man. Well, that old man decided to punish Maxwell… by turning Lily to stone in a painfully slow way, limb after limb. The only way to save Lily is to gather the famous Starites, which is done by being a nice person and helping people. Oh, doesn’t matter if you’re doing bad things or helping bad people, as long as you’ve helped! That kinda muddles the moral a bit, doesn’t it?

To allow Maxwell to travel across the land, Lily gives him a magical globe for quick teleportation. Now go Maxwell, go save your sister, who’s being punished in an excruciatingly slow and horrendous manner for your own screw-up!

Well, I won't be wasting money on plane
tickets anymore.

I could probably go on and on about how you can create a heroic doctor riding a gigantic friendly hydra with a different hat on each head and a monocle, battling a purple lycanthropic succubus wielding a Medusa head and riding a similarly-gigantic rainbow Cthulhu wearing a three-piece suit. But I’ve talked about these games twice already. Summoning objects, people and creatures, and improving them with adjectives, is nothing new by this point.

The game improves on the previous two in a handful of ways. For starters, you no longer have a limit on what you can summon. Items that originally spawned over and over (which would crash the original games during beta testing) now will only do it a few times. This allows a creative player to bring out a ton of stuff without the worry of hitting the maximum. So, in a sense, the Unlimited subtitle is justified. Second, you can now save items to a backpack and bring them out whenever necessary. Got your pair of wings? Keep them around, you’ll need them.

Who will you help: The clown, the mermaid, or the pirate?

Third, the game is split into levels, all of which are represented by a small area Maxwell can walk around in. Unlike previous games, Starites come in two forms: Full, or split in 10 Shards. The game contains a total of 106 Starites, though only 60 are needed to beat the Story Mode.

Shards are earned through very short missions, which generally involve writing in one word, sometimes more. Full Starites are given at the end of longer quests, which are completed in several steps – most steps involve writing a word, but some steps can be action-based. As an example, one step may involve summoning a weapon and the next one might be to defeat some bandits with it. When you choose to start a mission for a full Starite, all the NPCs and items in that level that aren’t involved in that mission will disappear until the mission is over. Some NPCs and items are marked as essential to the mission and you’ll have to start over if you kill or destroy them.

Nice.

There is actually another way to collect Shards, by completing mini-quests in a section accessible after pressing Start. Some of these mini-quests, split in six categories, are things you might find completely by accident while you mess around summoning random stuff. As an example, milking a cow nets Maxwell a Shard. All of these can be gotten from the very first level, since you can summon all of the items necessary for the interactions that lead to the Shard.

Why yes, I am indeed riding a giant squid and hunting
down a yellow dotted Nessie.

Over 210 Shards can be obtained that way, which amounts to 21 Starites, thus roughly 1/5th of all the ones that can be gotten in the game. Some are hidden behind riddles, while others practically give you the answer. The biggest flaw is that you cannot access that menu quickly, and when you open a category if, say, you complete all the quests in numerical order, is that there’s also no shortcut to get to the next mini-quest you haven’t yet completed. You just finished the Living mission #20? Gotta flip through #1 to #20 to get to #21. It’s long, tedious and annoying, but also necessary if you want to beat the game and get everything.

Try to summon a black hole.
Go on. I dare you.

And if there’s a level in which you screw things up too badly (such as by killing an NPC before earning their Shard), there’s an option in the Start menu to reset the level while keeping the progress made so far. It will respawn everything that was there before you showed up, and will erase everything you created. This function is even necessary for a handful of Shards where two mission-givers have mutually-exclusive requests can’t both can’t be done without a reset (as an example, a hunter wants you to attract a rabbit into a trap, and the rabbit wants you two deactivate the trap). Also useful if you went overboard in summoning items and need a quick way to remove them all. Now, that is a pretty good feature, but it also means that you could potentially destroy everyone and everything in a level like a psychopath, then reset and act like none of it ever happened. Ah, the perks of being a hero.

Another detail I like about the levels in the game? Most of them are named after punctuation, written symbols and literary devices. The first area after Edwin’s Farm is named Capital City, and it goes from there. Hyphen Heights, Metaforest, Payper Plains, Exclamation Point, Tomb of Onomatopoeia, Storybook Keep, Alliteration Abyss and Palindromeda. It’s nice.

There's always someone or something to help.

What is a little annoying, however, is that the areas are fairly large and characters are often located on raised platforms, meaning that summoning an item to reach high places easily (such as wings or a flying object) become a necessity in order to find all of the characters with quests. Thankfully, it’s possible to move the camera with the + Pad, and you can tap a Starite on the screen that will change the view to highlight characters with yet-incomplete missions in yellow over a blue/purple background.

Another element that may be slightly annoying, is that several missions require a very precise word to be used. If you can’t think of the right word, these may be tougher to solve than average. Thankfully, most missions will do with an item from a certain category. I remember the first Scribblenauts game, in which you were encouraged to solve all puzzles three times, with different items at every step – alas, while you can replay the missions for full Starites, in several instances the mini-quests for Shards can’t be redone.

One thing I forgot to mention so far is that throughout the adventure, you’ll come across and help several of Maxwell’s brothers, and thus unlock them as playable characters. There is no real difference between the playable characters, they all have the same abilities, so they’re more like alternate skins. The most notable character is Lily, unlocked by beating the game. As of writing, I unlocked 34 playable “skins”. Also of note, you can use the notebook to summon Maxwell’s brothers by writing their names, and you can make a big family reunion!

After going around the world and gathering 60 Starites (which is done just in time as Lily was almost entirely turned to stone), Maxwell comes back and rescues his sister. With her cured, the old man Mawell tricked shows up, and sheds his disguise. He was Maxwell’s father all along, trying to teach a lesson to Maxwell about helping others and being a good person! …Yep, and in order to do that, he endangered the life of his only daughter. Grade A parenting right there. Still, they eventually forgive him, and that’s how Maxwell went on to become a hero with his magical notebook. And hey, after Lily is saved, there’s 46 more Starites to collect.

A whole group of heroes!

So, here’s the sad part. The game is called Scribblenauts Unlimited, and it does go many steps beyond past games. The Wii U and Steam versions of the game also make it possible to create your own items, and even do some basic programming to indicate how they respond to particular items and people. The Wii U version even has a number of Nintendo-inspired objects and characters! (It is, unfortunately, implemented somewhat poorly, as you can’t even add adjectives to them, and while you can bring them out to solve puzzles, they will be lacking a lot of features the actual objects have in their respective games.) The 3DS version? You can’t create your own items. You also can’t download items from the Wii U version, for instance. I understand, it might be difficult to set up on a 3DS cartridge, but it would have been a nice feature to have to further justify the Unlimited subtitle.

I wished I could create my own things.

You have a whole world of possibilities.
Write whatever you want. However, at the end
of the day, you will keep on using the same
few items repeatedly.

Oh, how I love 5th Cell’s games – I have a soft spot for Drawn to Life, but I still love Scribblenauts, and I like to see the franchise go to new places. I like many of the improvements made here – no item limit; large levels to explore with creative names, each containing many quick quests and a few longer ones; an option to reset a level if things have gone bad; and multiple skins. Those are very good improvements to the formula, and I’m also happy to see a bit of an upgrade to the game’s graphics as well. It’s not much compared to the high-resolution graphics for the Wii U and Steam games, but the 3DS version manages to do pretty well.

I do raise a few points of criticism, though. It’s often tricky to find all the Shard-bearers, since the levels can be pretty big. You can’t replay Shard quests after they’ve been done, and many missions require precise items, which contradicts previous games and the challenge of trying to finish a mission multiple times with different objects. I can’t help but think Maxwell’s dad is an ass for putting his only daughter in danger over a mean thing his son did. And lastly, while the game tries to justify the Unlimited title, there’s nothing to create your own items.

Although overall, I do like this game, in fact I think I like it more than previous entries due to the improvements made to the formula. I actually have Scribblenauts Unmasked on Steam, so I’ll probably get around to reviewing that one eventually – even though my knowledge of DC Comics pales in comparison to actual comic book fans. I hope to see this franchise go to more interesting places, because it’s still got a lot of potential.

See you soon for another review!