Ever Oasis

Genre: Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Ever Oasis, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2017, is an Action-RPG set in a dangerous, desert-covered world where the only place of peace and safety is a magical “oasis” created by a bond between a human-like “seedling” and a mermaid-like water spirit. Players take the role of a seedling founding a new oasis after fleeing their brother’s oasis when it was presumably destroyed by the invasion of the malevolent magical force known as Chaos.

In terms of presentation, Ever Oasis is a perfect example of how artistic design and polish can more than make up for a lack of technical performance. The 3D world and characters in Ever Oasis aren’t especially detailed or well-animated, but their imaginative and cutesy design, the way everything is bursting with color, and the overall wonderful visual design of the game is absolutely wonderful. What’s more, this world becomes even more inviting due to this game’s wonderful soundtrack, with great tunes like Town (Night), Qarr Dunes, and Ostraka Ruins. Overall, this game is an audiovisual delight, even if it’s not technically impressive.

As for the gameplay, Ever Oasis has a fun gameplay loop where players head out into the field to fight monsters, explore dungeons, and collect resources, and then return to their village to use those resources in expanding their oasis village. Visitors to the village have requests (often looking for a specific item or the completion of a specific task), and completing these requests gets them to stay in your village as a resident, and players can expend further resources to get many of these villagers to open up shops which will provide the player with an income they can use for further progression. Add in item synthesis and a few other features, and you have some good potential for growth options in your village. Your growing village, in turn, will improve the stats of your adventuring party – the bigger your population and the happier they are, the more health you have and more times you can fall in battle.

The Action-RPG combat in the game starts out somewhat slow and clunky, but as the player levels up, they unlock access to new combos that can improve this experience somewhat. There’s also a partner system that allows players to gain additional party members they can swap between, and players will run into obstacles that these additional party members can assist with. Overall this element of the game isn’t spectacular, but it’s overall quite good.

In the end, Ever Oasis is a delightfully satisfying Action-RPG with light town-building elements that has a great gameplay loop that makes it fun to improve your town to expand your own capabilities and then venture into more dangerous areas to gather things to improve your town. Nintendo 3DS owners looking to expand their Action-RPG library should definitely give this one a try.

tl;dr – Ever Oasis is an Action-RPG where players venture into the world to gather materials to expand their oasis town. The wonderful presentation and fun gameplay loop make this game a winner, and fans of the Action-RPG genre should definitely give it a try.

Grade: B+

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