Past meets present: Beyond Oasis
A late-life Genesis classic is available to play yet again this console generation.
This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Just what constitutes the Oasis series of games is up in the air. If you’re from Japan or Europe, then, without question, The Story of Thor and its sequel-prequel, The Story of Thor 2, are it, even if the word “Oasis” never comes into play — even the translations of the Japanese subtitles for the games avoid the term. If you’re from North America, thanks to a decision made by whoever was responsible for localizing the game, you might think that the Game Gear JRPG, Defenders of Oasis, is also part of this series. And that’s because, in North America, Story of Thor was Beyond Oasis, and Story of Thor 2 was named The Legend of Oasis. There is no connection between Defenders of Oasis and these other two, however: both have some Arabian imagery in them, but that’s about it. In gameplay, in game world, there’s nothing there connecting them outside of the decision by someone at Sega of America going, “Hey, this should have the word Oasis in it, too.”
An unnecessarily confusing decision, but hey, we’re talking about Sega in the mid-90s, aren’t we? We’re lucky that this is the only thing that went awry here. Hell, The Legend of Oasis could have ended up stuck on the 32X as was originally planned, instead of having development shift to the more widely adopted Saturn instead. At least this naming snafu was the kind of thing I can get annoyed at decades later and move on from instead of being able to point to it as part of the company’s demise in the console space.
Anyway. Beyond Oasis! It’s an action-adventure RPG developed for the Sega Genesis, and released pretty late in its lifespan, too. Ancient, the studio founded by famed composer Yuzo Koshiro — responsible for some of the most influential and successful soundtracks going such as Ys I and II, ActRaiser, and Streets of Rage 2 — developed Beyond Oasis, which would release in December of 1994 in Japan and in March 1995 elsewhere. To contextualize the lateness, that’s a month after the Saturn hit shelves in Japan, and two months before it would end up in North America.
Streets of Rage 2 is the only one of those titles I mentioned that Ancient itself developed, and despite the fact that Ys is a series of action RPGs, Beyond Oasis has more in common with the beat ‘em up. It’s not that they’re similar games, no, but Beyond Oasis has combos and special moves baked into it in a very beat ‘em up way — keep hitting the attack button, and your character, Prince Ali, will switch from stabbing with his dagger or sword to repeated kicks meant to interrupt an enemy’s movement and counters. The RPG elements of Beyond Oasis are somewhat optional, too, as we’ll get to: you can keep on defeating enemies in this game and never actually get any stronger nor gain any levels, but since that is something you can do, it’s also more action RPG than it is Zelda-like adventure game. Genre can be a messy space to play in, but it’s also neat when something doesn’t quite fit into the established conventions.
Speaking of messy, Beyond Oasis controls a little imprecisely and awkwardly, especially when you’re trying to get your spirit summons to do what you want them to do, where you want them to — yeah, it’s good that all you have to do to get your fire spirit to shoot flames at enemies is to press the A button twice in succession, but if the flying-wherever-he-feels-like-it spirit isn’t pointed at a foe, it’s a pointless maneuver. It’s worth pointing out, though, that even with all the combat you’ll be doing, the game isn’t quite challenging enough for unresponsive controls to be a problem. It’s something you get used to in a hurry and work around — setting this guy on fire is annoying, so I’ll just kick him in the face repeatedly instead — because the game is worth getting through despite its deficiencies.
The thrust of Beyond Oasis comes from the opening cutscene, which shows Prince Ali on one of his usual adventures looking for treasures, finding a golden armlet. It turns out that this golden armlet, which is capable of summoning four spirits — water, fire, shadow, and plant (yes, plant, it’s in the manual, even) — is the key to defeating the holder of the silver armlet, who just so happens to be on the loose and raising hell in the countryside while Ali is elsewhere. You don’t have to wait very long to find out the answer to “where did all of these monsters come from,” or to discover that Ali does have the solution to them in his hands. Or, rather, on his arm. From there, it’s a whole lot of monster fighting with the occasional puzzle to solve, until you can put an end to the evil threatening Ali’s family and homeland.
The puzzles aren’t the kind that are going to keep you up at night or anything, but they suffice for a change of pace in a game that’s as combat-focused as Beyond Oasis. If you’re more into puzzles than combat, The Legend of Oasis is probably more your speed, since Ancient reversed the emphasis for the sequel-prequel. Here, though, if you want to swing a dagger a whole bunch of times and kick demons in the face and summon a plant spirit to eat your foes in between the occasional environmental puzzle, well, Beyond Oasis has what you’re looking for. The best of the environmental puzzles utilize the secondary effects of the summonable spirits: water to put out fires, shadow to reach out beyond your grasp to grab onto items and platforms, fire to light torches or destroy obstacles, a hungry plant to eat what’s in your way. Since you can’t just summon spirits whenever you’d like, but instead, only by shooting a blast of light from your armlet at a related object — pools of water or slow dripping leaks for the water spirit, flames for fire, reflections for shadow, plants for plant — you also have to sometimes know when it makes sense to destroy objects and when to let them persist. If there are more flames than you need to get rid of with water, for instance, keep one around — you might need to summon fire in another room or two, and having the flames left behind so close by will save you time.
The rate at which you find puzzles to solve does increase as the game goes on — the dungeons for the final spirits have a whole lot more going on in them than the earlier ones, for instance — but things never get quite as complex as they do in, say, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which isn’t even a particularly complex game by Zelda standards. The bosses, though, are at least as well-designed as the ones in that game, and like with the best titles in the genre, have a weakness you need to survive long enough to discover and solve how to exploit before you can take them down.
It will take you about 5-6 hours to complete Beyond Oasis, a little more if you decide to do the optional sidequests, which are certainly worth completing since they upgrade your arsenal with some infinite use weapons. You see, Beyond Oasis’ combat system is a mix of pros and cons. Your dagger has unlimited uses, but is fairly weak. You can perform a number of special moves with it equipped, though, that you can’t necessarily do with stronger weapons: with the dagger (and limited-use swords) equipped, Ali can perform jump kicks, crouch and slice, a wide, half-circle slash, and a running, sweeping slash. None of these attacks are hidden from you if you have the manual, but you’ll have to experiment if you don’t. Luckily, the manual is available online in PDF form, if you have any questions about a game released in an era that expected you to have access to it, and walkthroughs are also good about explaining all you can do with button combinations, too.
Otherwise, you have limited use swords, crossbows, and bombs. They’re more powerful than your dagger, and there are multiple levels to them as well — a standard wooden crossbow, a metal one, one where the bolts are on fire, plus swords made of stronger stuff — but you can only use them five, 10, 15, and so on times, depending on both the kind of weapon and how many uses it happens to have when you pick it up. It’s best to save these for bosses and situations where you’re both vastly outnumbered and running low on health, but if you do the optional dungeons and pick up the sword that should replace your dagger as the default weapon, you don’t need to worry about that so much. If you don’t want to bother with that, it’s also fine to skip it: as said, there’s some challenge to Beyond Oasis, but not enough that to make these optional dungeons required ones, instead.
What’s definitely worth it, though, is making sure you poke your head into every room in the dungeons you go into, so you can find the various upgrade gems and items that will make life easier for you. In-game, there is once again no description of what any of these items do, but the manual has all of that information at the ready for you. Spirit gems increase the strength of a spirit’s magic — the color of a given gem corresponds with a given spirit. The sunburst pendant lets Ali regain health while standing still in sunlight. The psychoring lets him regain Spirit Points, even indoors, so long as he’s not using a spirit at the time. And the sun’s charm does both of those things at once. While the items are often story-related — like the key of time and space that lets Ali warp — the gems are not, and you might have to work to discover where they’re hidden. Making sure to clear each room of enemies can help — sometimes a treasure chest won’t even appear in a room until you’ve defeated all of the enemies within, and in rooms where you can move on without fighting, it’s often worth it to fight anyway, just in case. And many of the game’s tougher puzzles are hiding optional upgrades, to punish you for ignoring them.
The manual doesn’t actually answer everything about how Beyond Oasis works. Remember earlier, when I mentioned that the game has some optional action RPG elements for leveling up? You might occasionally see an enemy drop a heart, which, if picked up, will increase your Rank on your status menu. The game doesn’t tell you what this means, though, you can see that your health has gone up. Basically, your Rank goes up as you defeat enemies — the status menu has a kill counter on it — but you don’t automatically receive the benefits. Instead, you have to get one of those hearts. But the hearts don’t automatically drop, either: you only get them when you’re low on health, then defeat the enemy that got you to that point. If you don’t pick up the heart, you won’t get the upgrade in health and strength that comes with a new Rank. If you’re wondering why you wouldn’t, well, you haven’t completed Beyond Oasis before: the game judges you for your Rank at the end, in such a way that making things harder for yourself is how you get a higher score at the end.
If you don’t care about how impressive your completion of Beyond Oasis is, by all means, grab every heart you can — per folks who have looked into this far more than myself, just 10 hearts will cut the game’s difficulty in half, and you can Rank up 200 times before Ali’s stats stop improving. If you want combat to have an edge and a danger to it, though, and want to see if you can basically complete the game in such a way that you’d come out at the top of the post-game rankings, then ignore the hearts, and keep Ali’s health and strength where it was when the game began.
Beyond Oasis is a lovely game, but you might not have noticed that as much as you should have if you’ve never played it on a CRT screen or with a proper CRT filter going. It’s intense in its bright colors on an HD set without the appropriate filters, to the point it’s a little hard to look at since it comes off looking overly smooth. Played in its intended environment, though, or an appropriate facsimile, it’s gorgeous. CRTs tend to be darker than HD sets, and since Beyond Oasis was meant to be a brighter game that popped even with that fact in play, it’s bright without the inherent darkness of the platform. It’s kind of a funny thing to say, that a game is too intense with its brightness and colors, but it’s true! You’re not going to want to go back to a version of the game that lacks the appropriate filters if you’ve experienced it with them.
The video below gives you an example of how the game looks and plays, but it’s also missing an appropriate filter: you should notice while watching how smooth and overly bright certain parts of the game look, and if it feels off-putting to you, well, again, it’s not supposed to look like that! And if you think it looks fine as is, just imagine how much you’d like it when it’s as intended:
One reason the brightness and colors are overly vivid and smooth in the wrong viewing environment is the size of the sprites. Beyond Oasis, as a 16-bit Genesis game, obviously doesn’t compare exactly to the 32-bit spritework found in a Sega Saturn title, but you can see the industry shift toward those larger sprites here. Beyond Oasis did release when the Saturn already existed, so that’s not a surprise that’d it go in this direction, but it’s still something to see Ancient attempt to go with this shift despite releasing on what was becoming last-gen hardware in real-time. You have to love those late-life console releases that push what the system is capable of: there are some instances where Koshiro’s soundtrack is dampened by sound effects, like in the castle near the fountains where the sound of rushing water cuts into and over the game’s music, but visually? The game’s pushing the hardware without any drawbacks whatsoever. Huge sprites, loads of enemies, impressive spirit magics, and quick movements from Ali all happening at once.
Beyond Oasis might have been a late-life Genesis release, but Sega, which published it worldwide, has made sure it’s been available decades later. Beyond Oasis was part of the Xbox 360/Playstation 3/PC Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection. It’s also in the PS4/One/Switch/PC release, Sega Genesis Classics, as part of the digital-only Volume 5. It’s part of the Sega Genesis Mini’s library, and, as of September 2022, is also available on Nintendo Switch Online+, the membership tier that includes Genesis and Nintendo 64 games along with the NES and SNES titles available with just the base membership.
Beyond Oasis finding yet another way to be available is reason enough to write about it, but it’s also worth your time to pick it up in one of the purchasable collections instead of just in a subscription service whose terms and library can change for the worse at any time. You could grab it in its original Genesis cartridge form, if you really want to have a physical copy, but just know that it’ll run you more than any of the collections it’s in — and, in most of the instances you find a cartridge in, for more than the Sega Genesis Mini’s MSRP.
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