As of tonight, I am about 3/4ths through Ever Oasis, the new 3DS game by Secret of Mana creator Koichi Ishii. Imagine Animal Crossing if you had to explore Zelda dungeons to recruit/entice residents. And some part of me is wondering why I'm still playing it. It's as light as the Animal Crossing games without the customization, the combat feels like simplified Secret of Mana fights in a Zelda dungeon, and you can achieve the goal of the game (keeping all your residents happy) relatively easy. So why have I put 20 hours into it?

Because growing your Oasis is just involved enough to be entertaining. Every potential resident requires you to complete a favor for them before they join, whether it's gathering a certain material or building a certain kind of shop. Once they join your Oasis, you can set up their shop along your roads, as well as various decor to increase how much visitors spend there. To keep the shops stocked, you have to keep gathering materials, which is easy at first but gets progressively harder as you have more materials to check off your list. (Fortunately, halfway through the game you get the option to send townsfolk on gathering expeditions so you don't have to keep farming earlier areas.) Once a shop sells enough goods, you can complete another favor to upgrade it, which increases the number of items it sells (and how many materials it requires) and gives the shopowner an extra ability when he's adventuring with you. While a short miniplot follows each shop's upgrades, it's so light & fluffy as to be forgettable. And many of the abilities are too focused (like +30% gathering on a single specific material) to see much use. No, your goal is make an avenue of giant shops.

Your avenues of shops is your customization for this game, and it's more enticing than I expected. There's simply something neat about setting up a line of restaurants and watching it grow & develop, or swapping it out with a line of clothing shops for a Fashion Festival. It's no Planet Coaster, but just because it's aesthetic doesn't mean it's boring. And that's... pretty much the high point of the game.

There's a crafting system and weapons with different abilities, but it's hard to gather up all the necessary materials for crafting and the weapons' abilities are never explained, with many of them having no apparent effect. Not that I think it really matters; the combat in the game is pretty rote, mainly consisting of bringing along the right weapons & mashing buttons with the occasional dodge. Healing items are so plentiful I really haven't felt threatened by anything yet.

The puzzles are slightly better, with several approaching the (old) Zelda style of figuring out what tools to use where. Your "tools", in this case, are special abilities of various townsfolk you can bring along with you on your adventure. The bad news is, if you don't have the right townsfolk for a puzzle, switching them involves warping back to town, putting them in the party, and warping back to the dungeon. You can always warp right back to where you left off, fortunately. (Or perhaps it's unfortunate, as it lets you refill your health almost any time you want.) The entire mechanic feels... awkward in a modern game.

The quest system feels similarly awkward. You can only have one sidequest Active at a time, which means there's no chance of finishing 2-3 quests in a single run. Getting a quest into your Quest Log requires activating it, but activating most quests also removes any warps you currently have up, which could lose you a bit of progress. This quest juggling is the most irritating part of the game and makes it feel like it was developed in the 90s.

The plot itself is nothing special either: Chaos threatens the land, blah blah blah, etc. It has the open-world problem of occasionally interrupting your oasis building & exploration to pull out Chaos weeds (which is a bunch of busywork that probably could've been removed from the game entirely) and highly encourage you to focus on finishing the next dungeon rather than leaving you to your exploring and town-building. I'm frustrated by it and would probably ignore it completely if several residents & upgrades weren't gated off by your progress in the story. It definitely could've taken a cue from Breath of the Wild and just shoved the plot off to the side as much as possible.

All in all, it's entertaining but nothing special. It would be a good game for pre-teen children, and has enough meat to keep adults occupied, but none of the systems quite mesh together in a way to make it a challenge or stimulating. And while the desert world has some charm to it, it's not striking the same chords the "of Mana" games did for me when I was younger. Still, I hope he makes a sequel to it... and makes that sequel much meatier.