Ever Oasis (3DS)

Oases are a small respite from the harshness of a desert, a spot of comfort in an arid and hostile land. Ever Oasis takes this a step further though with its premise, the player assuming the role of a chief in charge of the last safe oasis in the entire world. A force known as Chaos has turned the animals into monsters and swallowed up the other oases, so not only does the player need to make sure they can maintain a trading stop for the other tribes in the area, but they are the only hope for fighting back against an evil power that aims to wipe this last bastion of safety off the map as well.

 

Play begins with the creation of a custom character, this chief not only to be your avatar when heading out fight monsters and explore dungeons for the means to push back against the darkness but also a valuable guide in developing the last oasis into an appealing and profitable town. After watching your brother’s oasis fall to Chaos, the chief encounters Esna, the final water spirit who can bring to life an oasis to stand against the corruptive dark powers. While the player’s character is silent, Esna helps a lot with understanding the world you live in and how to manage the oasis, helpful when she needs to be but still having a charming personality to go with an adorable mermaid-like design. Her eagerness is balanced with a reasonable fear about not being powerful enough to sustain the oasis when all the others have failed, and while she can’t leave the water spring that keeps the oasis alive, her comments while you’re on your journey do give the player a simple and endearing personality to latch onto to add some more weight to the adventure than the already high personal stakes of avenging your brother and keeping the oasis thriving.

 

While an action role-playing game with real-time battles and puzzle-filled dungeons, one of the big appeals of Ever Oasis is introduced early. Utilizing an in-game day and night system where the hours pass by incredibly quickly, the player needs to keep a hand involved in the affairs of their people at the oasis, returning from adventures to routinely set up new shops, upgrade areas, collect resources, and perform other important tasks. As travelers come to town you essentially court them into turning into residents, needing to have certain things in the oasis or performing quests out in the world to convince them to stay. Some of these travelers are seedlings, similar in appearance to small chibi humans but each one has a seed inside them they can use to make Bloom Booths. Building up your roads with these market stalls will help your oasis grow and provide additional benefits for it. The seedlings provide you with some of the profit from their sales to other travelers like the adorably chunky Noot birds who can’t speak but love to buy things. However you do need to help with restocking the booths and if they want a bigger business you’ll need to perform character specific side quests. Some of these can be simply about providing the right items, but others can be little stories on their own like an amusing tale about a soup maker who thought she had a huge fan but what she thought were lovely words for her cooking were actually the musings of a secret admirer.

It’s rather addicting yet simple to work on the upkeep of your oasis, and while it does require walking about and doing much of the work yourself earlier on, you later get assistants or tools to speed up the process of doing some of the more time-consuming tasks. Other species can join your oasis as well and help in their own ways like heading out for exploration quests to find materials, the other tribes of the desert a small but interesting bunch. The Serkah are perhaps the standouts when it comes to their design, these rotund tribesmen having cycloptic scorpions for heads where their mouths are actually one of the claws of a scorpion opening and closing to imitate a mouth, but the lizardlike Drauk and the rabbitlike Lagora, despite being more traditional humanoid animals, add to the texture of the world by introducing small new cultures who have encountered their own problems caused by the encroaching Chaos. These characters have their own wants and needs as well and interacting with the tribes is vital to expanding your oases capabilities and your own as the work you put into creating a bustling and diverse community pays off when you do need to head out into the desert and fight.

 

Ever Oasis begins with a simple combat system where you can swing your blade in some simple combos and can send out a small wind burst to fight the altered animals. However, as the oasis grows and you explore more regions of the desert, not only do your own capabilities expand, but you can take residents out into the field with you. Two partners can accompany the chief on their adventures at any time, the game having plenty of different weapon types that provide different benefits in combat. A staff can charge up magic spells from afar, but the crossbow can be fired more quickly and reliably for ranged damage. Spears can flip foes but hammers hit hard despite their slow swing speed, and since the different tribes have unique weapons and certain foes have certain weapon weaknesses, you’ll want to switch between party members not only to exploit those weaknesses but to have different attack options in a fight.

 

Leveling up is slow but meaningful as your strengths increase each time you eventually earn enough experience for it, so while fighting cobras early on is challenging enough, you will still find the giant crocodiles, beam-firing starfish, and jewel crabs sturdy yet dangerous foes since it’s hard to outpace the expected power level. Knocking enemies over so they can’t attack for a bit is often vital to scoring hits without putting yourself at personal risk, and while you are given healing and revival options there are still many simple foes who can tear through you if you don’t respect their attacking methods. Armadillos can bowl you over and defend against your attacks well while flying foes are sometimes hard to get out of the air before they inflict negative statuses on you. The battle system avoids becoming too easy while rarely feeling like you’ve stepped too far into the deep end unless you are overextending, and the work you do in town can start to pay off as you can synthesize new items to up your team’s equipment or item options to better survive when things do get tough.

Dungeons and the desert are more than just areas to fight creatures in though. The action segments have plenty of puzzles that grow into deeper and more involved challenges as you get further in the adventure. Every person who moves into your oasis will have a skill, some of these are more useful for secondary tasks like collecting more of a certain ingredient or the ability to mine ore while others directly impact the puzzle-solving gameplay. Some Seedlings can curl up into a ball to slip through small openings while others can make a propeller out of leaves to cross gaps, and depending on the weapon they have equipped, they might be able to activate switches or break through materials others can’t. The tribes all have their unique abilities tied to the weapons only they carry, and since Seedlings need to close their booths to join the adventure, it can be good to have a tribesman along for the combat and only swap in the other characters when you need them. At the same time having the extra attack options and flexibility of certain seedlings might make them more valuable than the work they could do at the oasis, so even when you encounter a switch only certain characters can activate you are still making layered decisions to get the most beneficial outcome. Usually a dungeon also keeps its required abilities somewhat limited so that it isn’t just a bunch of locks with abilities serving as keys but different trials for how the abilities can be applied or mixed.

 

Admittedly, the means of swapping around your party members is a tad slow. You need to return to your oasis to change the party layout, and while you can use the Aqua Gate ability to teleport to town and then teleport right back, taking on new side quests in town can clear away the Aqua Gate and the game only lets you mark one side quest at a time for active work. Considering how the game gradually introduces the conveniences to oasis management before they grow tiresome it is strange the action segments have a few limitations linger the whole adventure long, but it does seem like these might be to encourage frequent stops back home so you don’t forget to do important tasks just because you’re caught up in exploring a new area. Ever Oasis also gives plenty of incentives to drop by older areas, many areas blocked off by abilities you won’t get until much later so you can return if you remember them for rewards and new areas. The desert thankfully doesn’t get too old aesthetically, major areas focusing on different ideas like the open desert, a large canyon area, or a bone-filled wasteland while interior areas can be ruins, digging sites, or caves. Everything remains close to the theme without creativity on how to alter it drying up. The desert theme in general is wonderfully present across all of its elements, familiar Egyptian elements retooled into fantasy concepts and aesthetics that make Ever Oasis familiar on one hand but appealing with its charming little spins on what it borrows.

 

The main story is still the major appeal of the adventure, the post-game content mostly about continuing oasis growth and exploring ever-changing labyrinths. On the main quest you’ll keep moving to new areas and experiencing new mechanics regarding your oasis’s growth, but it does feel a little sad to see the story end and all that work into building your little paradise amidst the sands doesn’t have anything too extravagant waiting if you keep putting more work into it. The game itself is over 20 hours already though and the settlement management and action never feel like they dominate the experience to the point where you can’t enjoy the one because the other is too demanding, and the interchange in one affecting the other so often means the effort is frequently paying off in small ways. Even just keeping your residents happy is important as they’ll provide you with additional life and revival chances when out adventuring, the player always able to find something meaningful to do as they bounce between an extensive yet manageable list of possibilities for improvement.

THE VERDICT: A charming desert adventure that finds a powerful loop between action, puzzle-solving, and settlement management, Ever Oasis is able to make an experience filled with enjoyable ideas greater by how its pieces intersect. The travelers you get to join your settlement can join you out in battle and utilize unique abilities and weapons and investing in the health of your oasis affords you better access to beneficial tools for the adventuring. The adventuring in turn provides the materials for enhancing parts of your oasis and plays into side quests to help out your citizens. Conveniences are introduced to keep things manageable although not in every place that could use it, but Ever Oasis always keeps you busy with something without it being too overwhelming or dry, the action and puzzles challenging and the oasis building simple where it needs to be but rewarding as it truly feels like the fruit of your labors.

 

And so, I give Ever Oasis for Nintendo 3DS…

A GREAT rating. It’s easy to get caught up in the cycle of Ever Oasis and it’s certainly a well-tuned one to get hooked on. Certain small elements could have been made more user friendly when it comes to things like side quests, but for the most part going from managing your little oasis to fighting monsters out in the sands and solving ability puzzles in dungeons is a surprisingly zippy process where appreciable progress can be made frequently. The constant flow of new travelers and the tasks you need to perform to add them to your populace motivate you to adjust your plans but the story can still move forward at a good pace with new areas and enemies that feel different despite being part of the same consistent aesthetic. Inviting and pleasant in appearance and finding a good balance for how hard things should be and how you can increase your odds with hard work elsewhere, it’s easy to get sucked into Ever Oasis and unless you get stumped chasing the citizenry’s rumors or spent too much time away from the system it’s easy to keep moving forward to new content at a steady clip. Combat and puzzle solving continuing to grow into something requiring more thought and unique actions helps the game avoid being swallowed up by the deeper oasis building as well, there not being one part of the game that feels underfed.

 

With Esna and the little personalities given to all your oasis’s inhabitants, Ever Oasis is a well rounded experience that provides the little artistic and emotional touches to make things personally rewarding while its interconnected mechanics provide plenty of moments where actions build up to future successes. You get to adventure out in the desert and discover old temples with trials to overcome while your role as chief of the oasis serves as more than just a title as you are key to helping it thrive. The job is never too easy or ever too tough, so while you are the last oasis in a world threatened by the influence of Chaos, the game can have its satisfying and breezy moments while also making it truly seem like you need to work and stay active to keep this refuge against evil alive.