All the oases were destroyed, and still, the hope is not dead – the future of the whole world is in the hands of gamers who start playing Ever Oasis on the Nintendo 3DS systems. One last Child of the Great Tree becomes the main hero. He meets the last Water Spirit and they create the last oasis. It’s your oasis, and during the game, you manage it, explore the desert, and fight Chaos monsters.
Ever Oasis is a very good adventure, with nice music, cartoonish visuals, and amazing internal atmosphere. After completing the story campaign and enjoying the end-game quite a lot, I would like to share my impressions in this review.
The game develops:#Memory #Planning #Reaction #Constancy #Spatial orientation
Enjoyable gameplay
The game combines the city-builder and action-adventure genres in a very interesting way. In the oasis, you communicate with the residents, build and restock Bloom Booths, take care of the Garden, and synthesise various items to be prepared for battles in the desert. Those battles are not very tough – you just need to get used to the control system and various weapons. With two support characters, your hero enters many dungeons, fights monsters, and collects items.
The oasis offers lots of repetitive actions, and still, this is such a nice place that just being inside is a joy enough to blow off sand again and again, collect crops, provide the residents with goods for their shops, and plant various magic plants (to increase sales during Festivals, for example). Quite soon, the game introduces automatization for many tasks – for me, it’s never was too boring to walk around my personal oasis and make it a better place. Sometimes, I found myself enjoying even the process of putting the hero in his bed - imagine how wonderful it is to lay in this leaf-hammock inside the tree and look at stars through that round window.
The dungeons are interesting to explore: enemies are rarely too powerful and puzzles are never frustrating. In the story campaign, the difficulty level is not high, and this is a good thing for such a game. The world beyond the oasis is surprisingly big and various. The battling system is a bit awkward – you can’t look around and sometimes the camera movements are not helpful. You can use different strategies by taking different characters to your team and picking new weapons for your hero. For me, the best thing in these battles is their harmless final. The defeated animals run away, saved from Chaos. The defeated “people” find peace and save their souls from Chaos. This is one of the most non-aggressive games that have battles in the gameplay. Even the final fight with Chaos has a surprising outcome – I will not spoil it, just play and experience on your own.
Aftertaste
Ever Oasis is one of the best games on the Nintendo 3DS systems – it utilises the features of this console very well. Ever Oasis is one of the best games I ever played – I put it in my top-list during the campaign and it remains there after the long end-game and even when I decided to move forward in my gaming adventures. For me, the best part of Ever Oasis is its amazing atmosphere. It has been created by multiple components, which are not perfect individually and do not create a perfect mix, but the game has a kind of vibes that resonate with my gaming personality – maybe this will be true for you too.
I would recommend to not hurry to finish the story. Pay enough attention to side quests, they are quite interesting and without them the game might be unnecessary short. Also, don’t remain in the end-game too long. The final missions for levelling up all the Bloom Booths and all the residents are quite demanding to your time and become even annoyingly repetitive. I feel like the end-game has been made to give us an excuse to return to Ever Oasis time after time and still find something to do in this world.
To play Ever Oasis, purchase the game in the official eShop:
See also…
Another great game for the Nintendo 3DS systems is Pokémon Sun. Here is my review:
For a much shorter and still a very fun playing experience, take a look at Donut County:
