Pop Culture Analysis of Sega's "Beyond Oasis"

Gimmick and Puzzles

Since A Link To The Past, every Zelda game seems to have had a central gimmick:

Link To The Past - time travel changes the world

Link's Awakening – sidescrolling sequences add variety to the gameplay

Ocarina of Time - time travel changes the world, as well as your age.

Majora's Mask - masks change how you can interact with the world, and how the game plays in general.

Oracle of Seasons – Change the seasons, altering the environment.

Oracle of Ages – Change the time period, altering the environment.

Four Swords - Now you have to command 4 Links instead of just one. Puzzle calamity ensues.

Wind Waker – You have a boat now! It talks! Travel the ocean, as well as the land!

Minish Cap – Meet the Kinstones! Collecting and fusing them alters your gameplay experience.

Twilight Princess – You can now transform into a wolf!

Phantom Hourglass – Slightly more industrial boats; and a magic time altering hourglass.

Spirit Tracks – Trains

A Link Between Worlds – You can now go inside of walls, and travel to other dimensions.

Tri-Force Heroes – Team up with two other friends in an online Zelda jamboree!

Breath Of The Wild – The world is now excessively large and filled with Western RPG tropes!

Now. It's not a bad thing that Zelda has introduced these kinds of gimmicks! In fact I would say that the greatest improvements of Zelda have been results of temporary gimmicks. I feel like some of these gimmicks could have been expanded upon more, but others worked out just perfectly. For instance, I absolutely loved the wall-merging mechanic from A Link Between Worlds! It led to some interesting puzzles that were very satisfying to complete.

Beyond Oasis has a gimmick as well! It comes in the form of the golden armlet, with the player can use to summon the four spirits. Before the player can use these spirits, he/she has to free the spirits from their temples first. Each spirit corresponds to a specific element. In order to summon a spirit you need to fire a ball of energy out of your armlet at something that relates to it's element. For example: if you want to summon the fire spirit, you're going to need to find some fire first.

The gimmick in Beyond Oasis is very clever, and requires the player to keep an eye out for his surroundings. But it's not just background objects that allow you to summon these spirits! If you're fighting an enemy who is wielding a flaming weapon, or an enemy who is made of fire, you can summon the fire spirit by simply firing an armlet blast at the enemy!

Beyond Oasis's gimmick replaces one of the more disliked tropes in Zelda: the "Zelda Formula" of theming dungeons off items that are found in said dungeon. This formula is very repetitive and it often seems to insult the players intelligence by questioning whether or not they know to use the correct item when it's blatantly obvious. It really wasn't until "A Link Between Worlds" that Zelda finally stepped away from this formula. Beyond Oasis had the foresight to realize that this formula would get repetitive over time, so Beyond Oasis used it's gimmick to replace it! Now instead of having players ask themselves "What item do I use?" Beyond Oasis makes players asks themselves "Okay, I know what I need to use, but how do I get it?"

In addition to each giving Ali three abilities upon being equipped: the spirits also serve as partners. The fire spirit for example, will beat the daylights out of any enemy he sees, in addition to being a useful tool that helps you solve puzzles. The spirits feel like more than just simple items, or simple tools: often times as I was playing, they felt like friends.

It's needless to say that I absolutely love the gimmick in Beyond Oasis.

The puzzles in Beyond Oasis aren't the hardest things in the world, but I recall getting stumped on a few of them for a little while. They're no more or no less difficult than the average Zelda game's puzzles, and that's perfectly reasonable.