REVIEW: Ever Oasis

While all the town building and overall simulation aspects sound nice on paper and its a bit addictive at first, like the combat, equipment, and crafting is quite shallow with many of these mechanics not having much depth at all. Town building is literally building shops in straight lines and making enough room in-between them to place ornaments to bolster their efficiency to sell their products. Farming is extremely simplistic and made even easier when you are allowed to task a shop keeper to do the planting for you to acquire certain harvests, with no net negative besides their shop being closed for that period of time and being too busy to join you. A nice feature later on is the option to hand out all the demanded items to shops to a delivery seedling so you don’t have to keep traveling to each of them every time your Oasis expands. However, like everything I listed, it makes everything feel hollow as if the game is run on auto pilot and what was fun hours earlier, with it all feeling being organically tied together seamlessly, just seems like more a remedial check off lists as the game went past the 20 hour mark.

For a 3DS game the game runs well with very few snags and is beautifully colored and full of life aesthetically, which was ironic given the end of the world scenario set in a vast desert. All was helped with the cutesy designs by the famed KanColle artist, Shizuma Yoshinori which give the game a comforting tone. The game’s soundtrack is nothing too spectacular but serviceable enough and featured many differentiated compositions to further embolden the atmosphere, which gives credence to that epic adventurous feeling while still feeling comfy. While I say a desert is the set piece the game surprisingly sports diverse locations with your Oasis looking lovelier and livelier as you keep upgrading it with cutscenes to depict this. While the game has a copious amount of different races that are distinguishable by themselves, because the game introduces so many NPCs, they start to be indistinguishable in appearance within a single race.

Ultimately, Ever Oasis‘ main problem is that the game had a ton of potential yet it failed to really develop most of the game mechanics and left them at the most basic levels. For what it is, its a decent effort by a developer that looked to have tried really hard to bring forth a lot of cool ideas to mesh together but without any direction to flesh them out. The game took me around 30 hours to complete the story with an extra 10 for the side content and the extra rouge-like dungeons called the Hieroglyph Labyrinths. While it may not seem like much I’d rather have a copious amount of playtime than one filled to the brim with padding, especially a game with its combat and building mechanics being on the shallow side. If you’re a fan of old school action lite RPG titles that focus more towards gameplay and not heavy on plot, this is decent successor to the Mana series and one to keep you busy enough to satisfy.