The Legend of Oasis - Review

Ah! April showers bring May flowers...

Or in my case April snowfall reminds me that I live in an area that has crappy weather.

On to the review!

This is a repost of my review of Legend of Oasis, or LoO as I like to call it.

If you liked games like Zelda and Secret of Mana you will like this game.

In fact the weapon and spell systems of this game are very similar to the system used in Sword of Mana, a game for the Gameboy Advance. A quick button press brings up a ring of icons and you pick whatever weapon you want to use.

The spin on this game is the combat system. Super cool moves are not dependent on pickups or learning skills but rather Street Fighter style button mashing. For example you can do cool little slicing tricks with the beginning sword or fire 3 arrows at once with the bow. Little signs throughout the game world show you how to do more combos with your various weapons but if you are replaying the game you can do them as soon as you get your hands on the weapons. You can also do some cool jumping attacks which let you change up the battle for weaker enemies.

The spirits you collect also let you do cool little moves with different button toggling and also let you do spells and help solve puzzles (Just like in Secret of Mana).

Speaking of puzzles, some of them are annoying as hell and involve your character jumping around like an idiot. However, most of the jumping from platform to platform puzzles are satisfying when you finish them.

Other puzzles involve shooting arrows at targets and can also be a pain. In one instance I was trying to shoot arrows though a fire to trigger a switch and I could not do it. After stumbling around the level I came back to the same area and tried again. By shooting the arrows into the flames in what seemed to be the incorrect way I triggered the switch and continued on...This brings me to the weird angle this game is viewed from...

LoO has a 3/4 view rather than the traditional "top down view" and the characters are pretty large. This messes up with the way I like to fight in game (Run and Retreat) and sometimes messes with your perception when you are trying to make jumps to platforms and ledges.

This game is just barely an Action RPG. No real inventory so you can't collect the cheeses and meats in the game that restore your health. Accidentally run over a meat item when you only have a small bit of damage? Tough you just wasted it. You can only collect one potion at a time as well.

The save system is platformed based, meaning you have to stand on certain platforms to save the game. It's very easy to miss the first one and the helpful NPC who tells you what the unassuming platform is. So look for it in the first town so you know what the damn things look like.

There are some classic video game moments like meeting one of the first NPCs who teaches you how to run in the game. "I used to run alot when I was younger" press so and so buttons to run...classic.

Enemy design, especially the bosses, is pretty good. Graphics overall are OK but nothing special. Other Saturn games look much better. Framerate is ok. Nice colors in this game.

Yuzo Koshiro did some of the music for this so it's pretty good. The sound effects are pretty nice for the weapons too.

Load time is ok.

This game is fun for a change up and fighting the bosses is pretty cool. The combo button pressing is somewhat unique for the genre and adds the the replay value. (or having to restart the game if the Saturn gets unplugged and you do not have a memory card)

If you love this sort of Action RPG or played the original you may want to try this out.

6.5/10

Final: I would pay $8 USD for a MINT used copy of this game. I would pay $4 for a beater copy.





Here is a short video of some of the gameplay I found on Youtube.











A general note:

I hate blogger. I really mean that. It's not that blogger ALWAYS destroys my posts, it's that it destroys my posts SOMETIMES. So it's stable enough that I start to feel that it's not necessary to write up the posts in Word before I put them in blogger. So when I worked on my review of Legend of Oasis I did not think that blogger would destroy that post...but it did. I am reposting this review but the original was much better. Trust me. It was. And I will never get that review back.

If blogger was a person I would kill him/her in such a way that I would be guaranteed an insanity plea. Because a sane person would never do the things I am prepared to do to blogger...