Originally posted November 9th 2014 on the Seafoam Gaming Forums

Disclaimer: Due to the fact this game is an application and not a full fledged game, this review will be a bit different than my other reviews in structure. It’ll be shorter overall and the graphics section now talks about the organization of the game.

Title: KORG DSN-12

System: Nintendo 3DS (eShop)

Price: $37

Release date: 10/23/2014

The main game/story

This is a music synthesizer app, made to replicate the KORG DSN-12 machine. It’s pretty neat to see something so complicated and expansive crammed into a small handheld!

Menu Organization

When you first boot up the app, you can start a new project, sample some of the demo projects, or load a file. They are pretty self explanatory, and work just fine. Until you start a new project. Right away, you are given a LOT of options to work with, and I mean A LOT. With numerous amount of channels to work with, pitches you can set, along with speed and numerous amounts of other things to tinker around with, there is a lot of variety to choose from, maybe a tad too much.

Either way though, it’s easy to get to what you need, since all of the tools are on the bottom screen with a touch of a button. It’s quite difficult to explain, so you’d have to look up some footage of the app to see just exactly what I mean.

Music and sound effects:

With the app being primarily about making music, it does it’s job well. Even inexperienced users like myself can get the hang of things by messing around placing notes to make a simple melody. Then you can use the settings to change numerous other things like the pitch, speed, etc and you are good to go! Whether the music is good or not is up to your skill level, but this app is capable of great things, as seen on youtube, so I think it nails replicating the real thing pretty well.

Gameplay

Obviously since this isn’t a game, this section will be rather short. As mentioned earlier you have numerous tools at your disposal to work with, and they all do as advertised. You organize notes and channels in whatever way you like, and then save it when you are done. It’s pretty simple, but with many tools to work with, it’s fun to mess around with! If you get good enough, you can mimic actual video game music.

Sadly the only way you could share your music is via local wireless. This game would have been much more open to beginners if there was a way to share and download other players’ creations via the Nintendo Network, as they would be able to mess around with more complete songs in order to get used to the settings and tools without having to look at the manual constantly.

Conclusion

In conclusion, don’t go into KORG DSN-12 thinking it’s an easy to learn tool, or a fun music rhythm game. This is a simple app for those planning to make music with their 3DS, and it does a very good job with that. With plenty of options to choose from, anyone who has a desire to make some music will enjoy what this app has to offer. The only thing that might be a turn off is the price. $37 is quite expensive for a simple application, but since the source material is quite the complex machine, it isn’t too unfair of a price. I give KORG DSN-12 a 7 out of 10, and recommend this app to anyone out there who has interest in working with music.

Thanks to DETUNE for the review code.