devonrv

I got this game the year it came out, but I decided to put it off until after I beat Legend of Legacy (which I got at the same time), and now, new physical copies are almost half-price online. Oh well.

There's a face in the leaves right next to the ESRB rating. I just wanted to point that out.

This is a Zelda-clone with hack ‘n’ slash combat and town-management elements. Exiting the main town (the titular oasis) leads you into an empty open area with scattered enemies and a few paths on its edges, but trying to explore beyond your current story objective just uncovers progression-based roadblocks (just like in real Zelda games!☺). The main difference is that, in this game, examining the roadblock in question will display an icon that shows exactly which ability it requires, thus dropping the pretense that these switch-hunts were ever puzzles in the first place. Unfortunately, there isn’t really any level design here besides said switch-hunts, so the game-play has to stand entirely on the merits of its combat, AND (drum-roll)…it’s okay. You attack with the A button, do a jumping-attack with the X button (for hitting flying enemies), dodge-roll with the B button, and summon a tornado with the Y button (which is really more of a switch-hunt ability since its only combat use is to lower the defense of sand monsters). One thing I want to draw attention to is that enemies are really good at making sure their attacks are telegraphed (which is something other hack ‘n’ slash games don’t do as well), so it’s entirely feasible to beat a never-before-seen enemy without taking damage. Alas, you still can’t interrupt your attack animation with a dodge-roll, so you can end up getting hit anyway if you start a combo at the wrong time. Using the tornado is also annoying since if you simply press the button, nothing happens; you have to hold it down for around half a second, which is especially annoying during time-sensitive segments that require tornadoes.

The other side of this game is the town management, though don’t expect anything too in-depth about it. NPCs will visit the oasis, and talking to them adds their side-quest to your to-do list. Sometimes, this can be as simple as “get me X amount of Y resource” or “let’s go kill X amount of Y monster,” but more often than not, they ask you to find a key item, and said item WILL NOT EXIST until after you activate the side-quest in question (and you can only have one side-quest active at a time). Once the objective is complete, talk to them again and they’ll join the oasis. Some residents can run shops if you have enough money to build them (and there’s little else to spend money on, so the only thing that would prevent you is lack of space), but you’re not going to be buying anything from these shops because the game won’t let you. Instead, you can restock their inventory by giving them the required resources, and after enough time has passed, collect taxes by throwing a tornado at their shops (tax is non-negotiable). Something that took me a while to notice was that if you restock inventory over the maximum, the game will not get rid of the extra stock outright; it will be sold over time like normal. Also, restocking shops increases a meter, and once it’s full, you can talk to the shop owner to go on another side-quest, and completing it will upgrade the shop in question (one new product to be sold and more inventory space for existing products). Beyond that, there isn’t much else; residents can’t leave, and if any visitors leave, they’ll be back after an in-game day or two.

One thing that really bothered me about the game is that it starts off really rough around the edges. You know how some people say that games need to introduce new mechanics regularly in order to be enjoyable? Well, this game takes that to its logical conclusion by hamstringing the game-play at first and making you earn good game mechanics by leveling up. For example, you don’t start off with a three-hit combo, or even a two-hit combo; you start with a ONE-hit combo, so there’s a full-second delay between each attack (plus, trying to fight an enemy a level or two above you ends up being even more tedious due to their HP and defense increase). At least you start with the dodge-roll. Another example is your HP: you start with a maximum of 9, and if you get hit by a level 2 enemy, you take 9 damage. It isn’t until after you level up a bit that you unlock “rainbow protection,” a separate meter that essentially triples your max HP (and that percentage only gets larger as you progress). It also takes some time for you to unlock the ability to fast-travel back to the oasis, so the beginning will have you running to dead ends to get something, then having to go all the way back with nothing but the occasional enemy along your path. Honestly, the entire first four hours of the game feels like little more than an extended tutorial, and you only fight the same two enemies during that time (and the only real difference is that one’s charge attack goes further than the other’s).

But hey, at least you can cite it as a game that *does* get better over time, eh?

It isn’t until here where the game finally decides to let you go into the first actual dungeon, along with introducing its core game-play feature: the ability to take two of your residents with you when exploring outside the oasis and have them fight alongside you. They have their own health bars, and you can switch between them using up and down on the D-pad (and certain enemy attacks won’t deal damage if they hit an AI-controlled ally). There’s even a weakness system with different characters’ weapons being strong against different types of enemies (though their level plays a far more important factor regarding damage output). Plus, it’s their abilities that let you get past the aforementioned progression-based roadblocks, and as you can imagine, this just ends up being a clunkier alternative to the Zelda games’ item menu since, if you don’t have the ally necessary to progress, you have to quick-travel back to the oasis (which itself takes around 10 seconds on an Old 3DS), go down the list of allies until you see one with the ability you need, then go back to the roadblock in question (at least the game lets you teleport to the last location you used the quick-travel ability, though this takes another 10 seconds). Sometimes, the game will require three different abilities in a row, and since you can only have two NPCs with you at a time, you’ll have to do that back-and-forth shenanigan.

However, if you thought the game was done introducing game-play features, you’d be wrong. Once you finally get enough space to build every available shop, the game introduces gardening: you can assign a resident to a plot in the oasis’s garden, but only if they can run a shop but don’t have one out. Later on, you gain the ability to send out residents who can’t own shops to gather resources from a previously-explored area.

But the most egregious example is how it handles festivals. First of all, the leader of another town won’t let you access the second dungeon until after you hold one, so it’s required (which wouldn’t be so bad except for how festivals work). In order to hold the festival, you need enough stamps from your shops, but in order to earn these stamps, you have to restock their inventory enough times. However, due to the shops having a maximum for inventory space, you can only restock four-resources-worth of inventory at best (and that’s only if the shop is really low on stock), and then you have to WAIT for the inventory to drop before you can restock by even one more resource (and I hope you didn’t upgrade your shops, because then the requirement for how much you need to restock to get that stamp increases by over 2,000%!). I get that the devs wanted to stop your action-side progress to make sure you haven’t abandoned the management-side progress, but this just results in making you grind, regardless of how much focus you put on the management-side. Sure, you can go to your hut to sleep and advance time by an in-game day, but don’t be surprised to wake up and see that you can only restock by another one or two resources.

Lastly, I’d like to give some more details about the combat. If you’ve read other reviews, you’ll know that a common complaint is with the camera, but this doesn’t tell the whole story. It is true that the only camera control is the L button, which either puts the camera behind you or locks onto/off an enemy, and it’s true that there’s no way to know if an off-screen enemy is about to attack you outside of a single, non-rotating image that doesn’t even point to which direction the enemy is attacking you from (it could be from the left or right, and it could even be too far away to hit you, but it will always point straight down). However, it’s entirely possible to lock onto one enemy, then move next to the other enemy and attack it instead so you can keep an eye on both of them (sometimes there are three enemies at once, but the same principle applies). The REAL problem here is that, sometimes, when you kill one enemy, the game likes to spawn another enemy after a couple seconds, usually off-screen, with barely any warning that it happened until after you get attacked (you might hear a faint audio cue, but that’s it). It also happens sporadically enough that you’ll forget the game does it until after it happens again. For example, in the second dungeon, there are glowing orb pedestals that do nothing except revive the fish bone enemies when you kill them, so you have to destroy the orbs first, but then when you go to kill the fish bones, the fish bones will revive and you’ll be like “I know I destroyed all the pedestals” only to turn the camera and see one standing where you KNOW one wasn’t standing before. Another example is in the third dungeon, where you’ll be fighting a sand version of an enemy, and by this point, you’ll know that it can restore its health by absorbing sand piles, so you’ll use your tornado powers to blow away all the sand piles, then start attacking the enemy, only for it to run away and restore all its health from a sand pile that showed up off-screen while you were fighting. You’ll also see sand fall from the ceiling (something you can’t do anything about) and form another sand pile, so you know that you weren’t crazy and you definitely got all the sand piles the first time around; the game just added more of them behind your back. I guess that explains why some of the unlocks are “you can instantly revive ANOTHER time after dying”; it’s to make up for some of the more cheap hits you’ll take.

Overall, this game is okay. It does some important things better than other hack ‘n’ slash games I’ve played, but it has enough issues that I wouldn’t recommend getting it at full price. Also, if you do get it, I recommend playing it in short bursts, as it can get repetitive at times.

Lengray

I got this game a few of months ago but it’s still in my backlog. However, I’m still very much looking forward to playing it despite your mixed feelings.
Thanks for sharing such an extensive review.

Minamimoto

I own this game for about a year and played around one or two hours, then set it aside because I wasn’t in the mood of the DS anymore. I always thought I will come back to this someday b/c I thought it could be a real gem. Your review doesn’t sound like it’d be one so I probably don’t have to worry about it anymore. Thanks for your opinion!

devonrv

Yeah, the thing about most “hidden gems” is that they’re just okay. They’re not bad enough to be made fun of (e.g. Sonic the Hedgehog 2006), but they’re not some underrated masterpiece that will blow you away, either; they just do what they set out to do, even if it doesn’t make them as well-known as the other two outcomes.