Drawcia, the evil witch, has been turning Dreamland into a set of paintings. When Kirby tries to fight back, she uses her powers to transform him into a ball. Surprisingly, the game includes you into its story, asking the player to use the magic paintbrush to guide Kirby along the way.

By using the stylus and drawing on the touch screen, you create brush strokes in the game that act as Kirby's path. Besides giving Kirby some ground to roll on, it also performs other functions. Draw a sharp vertical line to make Kirby run into it and turn around. Draw a loop to give Kirby a boost. You can even use it as a shield by creating a barrier with it.

You can stun enemies by tapping them, and unlock doors by touching the correct colored locks. The use of the stylus is both fun and challenging, as it can run out of ink quickly. When I first started, it seemed like a decent game - I spent most of my time instinctively drawing crappy lines that would accidentally trap him into a corner, or toss him in a wrong direction. It wasn't until much later down the road of playing it that I actually became good at controlling Kirby by drawing lines.

Of course, Kirby still does what he does best - duplicating enemies' abilities. There's eleven total in this game, including the stone, flame, beam, rocket, balloon, and spike. Each one alters the way you control Kirby slightly. I've always found it difficult to hold one of these abilities for long, since I generally lose it by instantly hitting an enemy on accident from lack of experience with the ability.

The 21 levels are each one of the five to seven different styles of paintings. The one to the right is more of a watercolor, while others are scribbles, cartoon, or just rather bizarre. The art style below is one of my favorites. It's kind of fun to be playing each level inside a painting that Drawcia created. Kind of an interesting concept. I just wish there more styles to go around, and the backgrounds didn't feel like a static image. They aren't, but they just don't seem to move by very fast.

The level styles are well-designed and create for interesting challenges for the use of your stylus. 3D games tend to lack the same kind of beautiful level design that 2D games can strategically create.

The balloon ability is simple fun. The lines you draw become trampolines for the balloon to bounce off of.

One of my favorite "art styles" that you play in.

While the main game is fun and challenging, I consider "Rainbow Run" mode to be even better. You have to play through certain areas of each level in the main game two different ways. The first is how quickly you can get to the end, and the second is a higher score for the less amount of ink you use. This helps kill off the overly free feeling of the main game by forcing you to complete each level a very specific and skillful way. By doing well, you earn medals that you can trade in for unlockable material.

You can unlock other characters to play as, who are better than Kirby in their own ways but always lacking the ability of duplicating enemies' abilities - keeping a solid reason to want to play as Kirby.

The boss battles are rather interesting, which are later earned as separate arcade style games of their own for free play and setting high scores. The first is a Brick Bash! style of game, the second a bizarre cart race, and the third a tracing game - which is my favorite. It's a fast "connect the dots" challenge, that has you tracing over the bosses' lines in a particular order and revealing cool pictures. Was that the Smash Bros symbol I just drew?

This game started out as a decent game to me, and then grew to be a very challenging and very enjoyable twist on the platforming genre. HAL Laboratory, Inc., who created Kirby from the start, and has gone on to create the amazing Super Smash Bros. games, were the brilliant minds behind this title. The amount of replay value, the amount of unlockables, and the amazing detail that's gone into the game makes this another amazing DS title.

There's a lot of very technical (and nerdy) details that HAL Laboratory, Inc., have put into this game to give it an incredibly polished feel. I would love to go into them, but it's probably rather boring to talk about how they spent time on making pause menus unique....

Verdict: A very unique game. Recommended.