This is a hidden gem for the 3ds. The game is about building and upgrading an Oasis (village), seeking dudgeon's, crafting upgrades and meeting people. The combat in the open world is very satisfying and the people although generic over time have a great story to follow and makes you feel compelled to help them. You can change characters in combat and tests the abilities which is fun.
The dungeons are fine, just wish there were more of them and they were shorter with slightly more puzzle solving. The puzzle solving is aspect might be more of a personal choice, but they had their own charm.
I feel the other races you meet and villages of those races were under used having a lack luster story and should show the protagonist connecting all the races again. When the game falls short is crafting upgrades and trading. The materials and placing items to characters can be very tedious and slows the game down. This is a small component is seeking the merchants to do a trade or buy materials, this was too complicated for such a minor section. There is too many materials and I shouldn't need to note the trade/materials to get items for upgrades or for a shop. Also the maps on where to go for a quest is at times vague and frustrating not knowing where to go, especially in the end game.
I had fun but wasn't perfect but definitively a good, verging on very good ARPG.

I'm genuinely saddened by the fact that this is a Nintendo IP because I just know that's going to end up like StarTropics and just languish forever in Nintendo's company portfolio as "that weird thing that failed" rather than receive a sequel/spiritual successor that irons out all of the rough spots. There's some great ideas here! The execution is a little rough and the combat is boring, but hey, I appreciate the spirit.

It's pretty clear that the people developing this were hoping that this was going to be a smash hit, right down to a species designed with the specific purpose of becoming marketable plushies. Someone really wanted those Noot birds to be on phone cases and keychains.

I also love that Nintendo has an IP where the main story is "the apocalypse happened, most of the cities are dead, humanity is also dead, and the wilderness is a bleak wasteland of sand". They tried to soften the blow by having a localization where the words "Squee" and "Rawr" are honest-to-god used in a 2017 release, but man, we could've had a Nintendo franchise where the premise was "global warming fucked us all over, go time manage your desert survivor town and hope that this named character doesn't die like the other named characters".

I think when talking to a friend about this game, we eventually settled on it being to Animal Crossing what Rune Factory is to Harvest Moon in terms of basically being an adventure RPG version of a comparatively chill franchise. The comparison is by no means perfect, but Ever Oasis had the cute animal people city management aspect I enjoyed about Animal Crossing alongside a more guided adventure-y structure that held my interest for far longer.

I had a whole lot of fun with this game for the main story, and had every intention of going the whole mile and getting all the residents... but honestly, the fact that the postgame consists almost entirely of delving into the horribly repetitive and not particularly fun labyrinths made me really not want to 100% the oasis.

Which is a shame, really, as I liked the main game quite a bit. The characters weren’t particularly deep, but they were charming, and I really did like the setting quite a bit. The story itself was also pretty simple but well told, and it did a pretty good job of being emotionally effective. Or maybe I am a sap. Nah, it’s got some genuine gut punches throughout.

The story dungeons are pretty alright, though they don’t quite do the best job of signposting what skills and weapons you’ll need going in. It’s not too big of a deal since you can warp back to the oasis and shuffle your party around without losing your place, but it can get a little annoying. The music is definitely a strong point, though the battle theme itself can get a little repetitive. The oasis’s theme doesn’t have the same issue in my opinion, since it’s kind of fun to listen to it evolve over the course of the game.

The town management aspect of the game is definitely pretty fun, and I enjoyed the little side stories that accompanied upgrading each seedling’s shop. I think the major criticisms I have of the system is that I wish the side stories had some kind of level recommendation since I found myself slamming into monsters that were way too high a level for me on some of the sidequests. Another criticism I have is that I kind of wish the non-seedling residents got to have their own sidequest storylines, since I definitely liked the designs of all the different peoples and it was kind of a bummer that only one storyline-relevant Lagora, Drauk, and Serkah each got to have their own little story arc.

Anyway, it’s a shame this game felt like it got slept on a bit, because I really do wish it could develop into more of a franchise and iron out the rough bits, not unlike the aforementioned Rune Factory series. Who knows, maybe it’ll happen on the Switch someday despite all expectations. I sure hope it will. There’s definitely potential in the ideas and setting, and it’d be nice to see Nintendo messing around with a new IP.

Fairly enjoyable. Decent gameplay loop, but the more the oasis expands the more the repetition piles on itself, day and night cycles ends up going too fast for the formula and both the material farming and dungeon crawling is held back by backtracking and lack of a solid menu for micromanaging.

Other than that it is very charmy, has nice music, and dungeon spelunking in similar fashion to a mana game which was very enjoyable, aside from the fact you need to warp back to the oasis to trade out party members constantly for different abilities to traverse puzzles and obstacles.

Clever game, just not as intuitive as it should've been.

Good example of a game that is badly in need of both design craft and narrative theme. On paper, the game sounds interesting enough: revive a town through shops and farming, adventure the nearby landscape with shopkeepers, dive into dungeons..

Customizing the town (at least a few hours in) only involved placing a few shops and some other items to optimize their income. Restocking shops involves a process of farming for particular materials, walking into the shop and restocking. As the game gets bigger you have more shops to restock. I guess the idea is that the player was supposed to be sort of a supplier for the town, but the NPCs' dialogue didn't feel particularly interesting.

Made worse is that grinding for these items is a little boring. The combat isn't that interesting, the environment you find enemies in ranges from empty large maps to dungeons filled with boring mechanics reminiscent of the 3D Zeldas' boring puzzles. So if you need to restock, it means going to a dungeon and finding an enemy that you easily kill. Because there's SO MANY materials, I would assume this kind of gameplay loop would occur a lot through the game.

The dungeons are bad - for some reason the Zelda Items needed to do the (boring) puzzles are tied to party members, so you need to bring a mining person to mine ore, etc... puzzles seem simplistic or perfunctory, the combat doesn't really use 3D in an interesting way...

So overall, you have a combat/exploration loop whose combat isn't fun, nor exploration interesting. And that feeds into a town management loop, which is tedious, simplistic and slow (to farm you have to walk to the farm screen...load.. etc). The Town is 3D and explorable, but there isn't much to explore or see (like in a harvest moon town), it would have felt more efficient to merely make everything into menus? Or to shrink the size a lot more or improve fast travel.

Simple town management could be cool, but it would only work if it was feeding into an adventure experience with more well-designed and interesting things, or narrative hooks. But Ever Oasis feels like spending time in one flat system in order to make the numbers in another flat system go up.

I think the number of shopkeepers could be way lower. Lean into making them actually interesting characters, tie them to the environment in some way so that there's a desire to go out into the world. Create some kind of motion that makes it actually interesting to run around. Make the shops interface in more interesting ways with the combat/exploration systems, etc...

Ever Oasis reminds me of why 'lots of game systems!' games can fail, in that if none of them are given ample design thought, there's a risk of nothing interesting happening - sure, the systems feed into each other and make numbers go up, but there's not much meaningful outside of that. (And there's already a genre for 'number go up' that streamlines and gives lots of thought into making number go up - clicker and idle games!)

Anyways yeah. I guess I like the spirit of this game, but it doesn't do anything particularly well, which is sad. I think the setting of exploring outwards from a town, going to the countryside, etc, is really interesting!