I’m not entirely sure where to start discussing Ever Oasis – hence this unusual opener. It’s a game that both feels like an action RPG that could only find a home on 3DS, from the way it plays to the underlying theme and the graphics, and yet it’s charming in its own right and could easily transcend its home platform.
It’s overly cutesy and homely in places, but there’s a certain buzz when you consider who’s developing it. Grezzo are a team that have grown through making and porting a string of The Legend of Zelda games for 3DS, while Koichi Ishii is best known for creating the Mana series of action RPGs for during his time at Square.
Ever Oasis follows a young seedling named Tethu – who actually has a more humanoid ‘chibi’ form – who has to build up a village in the middle of the desert, an oasis that can fight back the forces of Chaos that have corrupted all around.
There’s an interesting juxtaposition between building up this small town and adventuring out into the sandy desert to complete quests, but they are closely intertwined. As you set forth, you can encounter people out in the wilderness that you can tell tale of your flourishing village to and encourage them to visit you. Should you then find a way to help them out, they might decide to stick around longer and join your village.
Depending on the character, they might then set up shop in your little jewel in the desert, but again, there’s a degree of give and take. Grabbing resources and materials within the the caves and dungeons, you can then use these to keep the shops in your village stocked up, which in turn has those shopkeepers showing their gratitude in the form of discounts or new gear and items.
Take, for example, Jasper, a character who despaired for his lost crafting tools that he uses to make fancy scarves. Head out and defeat the Spikeydillos near where he lost them and he’ll set up a new scarf selling shop… and reward you with a turban, for some reason.
At the same time as I trekked to defeat the Spikeydillos, I bumped into another character who was obsessed with solving a certain mystery in the dungeon, joining my party for a short time. Each character has a particular class and set of abilities, all of which can come in handy for solving puzzles. Tethu and send a gust of wind to blow away piles of sand, another can propel themselves up in the air from a certain plant and float back to ground, you might find a hole in the wall needing someone that can roll into a ball, or you might want to flip some large pieces of pottery.
In combat, you can hop between your party of three, with the fights mixing melee and ranged or magical combat. Picking your party, you’ll likely want to have a good mix of characters and classes that compliment one another, and having a successful and thriving village can even help you in combat, with the delightfully saccharine sounding Rainbow Protection buffing your characters.
There’s a pleasing freeform feeling to the way you can wander the desert, perhaps stumbling upon the entrance to a cave or dungeon that you didn’t know was there. Naturally the more guided quests will point you in the right direction, and there’s a delightful little rumour system where you might hear of a location and then be able to head out and try to discover it for yourself, but you could easily get ahead of yourself by mistake and find areas with a higher level than what you can tackle at that point in the game.
That in mind, it’s fair to be a little worried that the game tumbles into a kind of Pokémon-itis, where you settle on a particular party make up initially and then find yourself pigeonholed with only a handful of the many characters being sufficiently levelled to be useful in combat. With only a brief time to try the game out, it’s difficult to know how that will play out in the long run, but levelling in the game is apparently fairly slow, we were told, which should help lessen this.
While easily overlooked, I feel, there’s certainly a quirky appeal to Ever Oasis that becomes more apparent the more you learn about it. It’s a fascinating blend of town management and action RPG that just feels so perfectly suited to the 3DS.
