Because I’m nothing if not thorough, I also played the DS version. Let’s see if it was able to dampen my enthusiasm for Rapunzel’s story.

I did briefly try this out on stream a while back, and dismissed it as a shallow minigame-a-thon. Playing it in full didn’t change my mind too much but taking it casually I did appreciate its gentle pace and how it added to the world, which again is one of my favourite things to look out for in licensed adaptations.

In this case the conversion is reasonably faithful to the film, covering ground that was skimmed over in the console game; certain scenes even take dialogue verbatim from the movie, albeit in text form (no voices here). But there’s extra events too, including a celebratory epilogue chapter and two more slotted in before the Snuggly Duckling. One has Rapunzel helping a family’s broken-down caravan in the woods and sorting out their various problems, and the other has her discovering Gothel’s secret vegetable garden and brewing a potion to restore the keeper’s memory.

These extra events may slightly undercut the story impact of her being thrust into a seedy pub among a bunch of thugs as one of her first interactions with the world, but eh. We’ve all seen the movie, and having new stuff to see and do is appealing to me. So I let it slide. Also the DS game has the new detail of Shorty (called Gene in both games for some reason) having a pet warthog who looks suspiciously like Pumbaa from the Lion King. So that’s fun.

But what is the game? Well, it’s a bit like a stripped-down point-and-click adventure. You move Rapunzel back and forth on small screens with the D-pad, tapping on things in the environment to talk to other characters, activate minigames to progress, and find sun drops (these can be cashed in to skip minigames, but only if you’ve done them once before; this seems useless, but it’s all too annoyingly easy to accidentally tap a trigger a second time after clearing it).

The minigames themselves are routinely boring, mainly done with the touchscreen. They fall into a lot of lame cliches like the memory game, or Simon says. Otherwise it’s “match the touch gesture”, dragging things around, etc.; there’s even a variation on classic Nokia mainstay Snake, where the tail is Rapunzel’s growing train of hair! They try to change them up for the theme or characters of the place you’re in but that doesn’t make them less tedious to play through. Plus, between each screen or event transition are load times that seem too long for the DS format and the simplicity of the graphics.

The DS game was actually handled by the same studio as the main one on Wii, Planet Moon Studios. There’s not much shared between the two though besides some of the cutscene art. I do prefer each platform to try its own thing rather than a scaled-down port, so I admire that about it. Otherwise it’s fairly ugly overall, with mismatched prerendered sprites on (often quite nice, actually) painted-style backdrops. It just doesn’t come together very well. If the art meshed better, the minigames were more engaging, performance was tightened up, and they went further with the story focus, then this could have been pretty special. As it is, I think even its young target audience would feel a bit let down.