Pop Culture Analysis of Sega's "Beyond Oasis"

Conclusions

It only took me seven hours to beat Beyond Oasis in my first playthrough. From what I've seen just casually strolling through YouTube comments, I've found that "7 hours" is about the average time it takes for people to beat Beyond Oasis on their first tries. Compared to the 2D titles like Link To The Past and the earlier Zelda games, Beyond Oasis is just a bit shorter. Compared to the 20/30+ hour 3D Zelda titles of modern day, however, it seems relatively short.

Let me put this in perspective though: in the time it takes for someone to beat Beyond Oasis, you could watch the entire Star Wars original trilogy and Toy Story.

In the time it takes someone to beat Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, you can watch the entire Star Wars original trilogy, the entire Lord Of The Rings original trilogy, and maybe still have time for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. OR you can beat Beyond Oasis three to four times.

What I'm getting at is that there's a certain level of replay-ability that is taken away when a game is very long. It's fairly likely that one day, I'd be willing to return to a game like A Link Between Worlds or Beyond Oasis, but it's very unlikely that I'll want to sit down and start a new game of Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask.

I liked the focus in Beyond Oasis. There were very few side-missions to do. I hear somewhere in the game there's a Cave of Ordeals/Pit of 100 Trials equivalent hidden, but I'll be honest, I never found it, and I'm curious to go back and explore sometime. Otherwise, the game kept me going in a very specific direction which makes sense: if I was in Prince Ali's situation I would be focused on dealing with the Silver Armlet as soon as possible, because I would know that the person wielding the Silver Armlet is just as panicked about me. That's something Zelda games often get wrong: they try to present a very serious situation that puts the world in danger, but then there are all these trivial, distracting sidequests where you're given the option to do stuff like play minigames or fish in a lake, it completely eliminates the feeling of desperation in me. I love that Beyond Oasis didn't have anything silly like that.

Beyond Oasis is very replayable, and after beating it once there are all sorts of things that I want to try out: after getting a handle on the controls I had an amazing time with the game. It kept surprising me, which is something that Zelda-Like's almost never do.

Beyond Oasis is currently available on:

-Steam

-Sonic Ultimate Genesis Collection for the Xbox 360

- The Wii E-Shop

(and of course)

- The Sega Genesis

Now as far as recommending the game, I can imagine who would and wouldn't like the game. I may as well segment this next part of the analysis off into their own sections.