GAME CLEAR No. 15 -- Beyond Oasis

Beyond Oasis (1995, Genesis)

Developer: Ancient
Publisher: SEGA
Clear Date: 1/23/2021
Clear Platform: SEGA Genesis Mini

Another one toppled on the Genesis Mini. Beyond Oasis clearly draws a lot of inspiration from Zelda, but it’s got enough of its own ideas that it never feels like a work of plagiarism. The story revolves around a young prince and his discovery of a Gold Armlet that gives him mysterious powers. He quickly crosses paths with a mysterious villain bearing the complementary Silver Armlet, which sets the course for the action to follow. Parallels can be drawn to the triforce here, I suppose, but it’s certainly different enough for me.

As Prince Ali travels around the world of Oasis and conquers its various dungeons, he earns the aid of various interesting familiars with different powers that open paths to new areas. This is similar to Link’s Bow or Hookshot and things of that nature, but for my money, the Beyond Oasis implementation is way more interesting.

Perhaps most importantly, I’m also a big fan of the combat in Beyond Oasis. Ali moves pretty smoothly, and there are even some fighting-game-style combos you can do to unleash particularly devastating sword slashes on your foes. What’s more, Ali can jump! These movement options really spice up combat, and you can get your familiar buddies involved in the combat as well to mighty effect. Usually the game is pretty fair about its enemy distribution, but occasionally you’ll have to really pull out all the stops to get through an encounter. One additional bone thrown to the player is that enemies can hurt and collide with each other. Kicking a bad guy into a mob of other bad guys can really help to give you some breathing room. Fun stuff.

As always, graphics are secondary to me, but this game looks damn good for a Genesis game. Great sprite work and smooth animations abound. Certainly a jarring transition from having just played the borderline prototypic Altered Beast.

The soundtrack was done by Yuzo Koshiro, whom I revere for his work on the Streets of Rage games. Unfortunately, I was a bit let down by this one! It’s by no means bad, but I was never really blown away by it. I doubt it’ll make it into my work playlist anytime soon.

One last thing I really appreciate about this game is its very reasonable length. The in-game clock put me at about five and a half hours to clear the game. Long enough for character/ability growth to be appreciable, but otherwise respectful of the player’s time. I’m by no means averse to a great long game, but it’s really nice to be able to put one away in ~6 hours like this from time to time.