Pop Culture Analysis of Sega's "Beyond Oasis"

Presentation: Graphics, Theming, and Music

The way I see it, graphics in games aren't bad unless they distract from the game. So that being said, I found the graphics in Beyond Oasis to be absolutely gorgeous. Everything in the game is very colorful, even the enemies. The cutscenes look great, especially for a game made in 1994. Honestly, the game's introduction alone was just a pleasure to look at. Animations for Ali look great, his walking cycle does look a bit... "Disney", but his combat animations look great. My favorite animation for Ali is the slide he does while running, it's so satisfying to run as Ali, and watch him slide at the end of a run cycle, it makes him so much more real and fluid.

The game themes it's environments interestingly. Yes the four spirit dungeons have very common, typical themes that you would expect, but only because they're themed off of the spirit that they each contain, which in the context of the story makes sense: there's a reason for there to be a fire temple when it's a fire spirit, and it makes sense for there to be a water temple when there's a water spirit. I'm just saying, there are interesting, unique environments in the game, I'm not going to spoil them, but they exist.

From what I've noticed, everyone seems to disagree about the music in Beyond Oasis. I've heard people say that they think that the sound design is the weakest thing about the game, but I've also heard people say that the music and sound design is revolutionary. I know why this is though: the music is very atmospheric and tries to mimic the soundtracks of 1980's adventure flicks like Conan The Barbarian. The music perfectly resembles classic music in a lot of ways: often times the soundtrack will get very quiet then suddenly get very loud: just like a classical piece. I personally liked the soundtrack, I felt like it did something that Zelda games often fail at: it served to add to the atmosphere without becoming a distraction, and honestly it's the oldest game I've seen try to tackle music in that way. The music score was composed by Yuzo Koshiro, who is notorious for some of the best video game soundtracks of the 16 bit era of games: and I can tell he really tried to do something with Beyond Oasis.

Beyond Oasis has beautiful graphics, good theming that may at times surprise players, and a soundtrack that wraps the whole thing together in a beautiful tortilla of "unique".