Board 8 > Ever Oasis getting good reviews. 80/81 on Open/Metacritic so far.

(+) Yeah! (+)

http://www.metacritic.com/game/3ds/ever-oasis
http://opencritic.com/game/4488/ever-oasis

On mobile, so can't go in depth with links, but I am pleased with this so far!
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Aww, a 50/100 review dropped it down.
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I read your username as mrduckbear907 for a second and was surprised he was branching out into relevant topics.
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scarletspeed7 posted...

I read your username as mrduckbear907 for a second and was surprised he was branching out into relevant topics.

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I am offended?
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No, it was just a hilarious misunderstanding.
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what's a duckbear
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seems like a lot of the reviews are like "what if there was a new Mana game?"

and I'm like

all those new mana games suck give me the Seiken Densetsu Collection on Switch
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mnkbear907 posted...

I am offended?

are you? why you asking us
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80/81 seems like a weird scale

Sticking around 78 it seems. Oh well that's still good.

i'm not picking it up just yet because I'm pushing myself to finish Dragon Quest VIII still. Hopefully I don't have too much left there. For the three people who followed my purged playthrough, I just got out of Purgatory Island.
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ninkendo posted...

seems like a lot of the reviews are like "what if there was a new Mana game?"

and I'm like

all those new mana games suck give me the Seiken Densetsu Collection on Switch

I'm only like two or three hours in, but so far it's not really that Mana-like

I'm having fun, though
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~12 hours in it feels like mini-rune factory crossed with zelda

Based on the reviews, it sounds like a sequel will fix the issues with merging genres.
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...

So what you're saying is "Rune Factory 5 has arrived at last"?
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SupremeZero posted...

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So what you're saying is "Rune Factory 5 has arrived at last"?

There's no romance and the farming is really simplistic compared to RF/HM, but it might tide fans over for now.
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Haha, it's so easy to die in the beginning.
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goddamn these superbosses have a load of hp

Difficulty kinda spiked again in Bahar Hill. Had a very close call at night in a fight with two of those boulder snatchers and one sandy sharkobra thing, then went into a cave and died against two sandy spikydillos, even despite reviving once. For some reason I thought progress wouldn't be lost when it gives you the option to return to your last warp spot but no, that is certainly not the case. Return and save often when traveling through a new area! Lots of exploring to redo now...
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The second big dungeon has a pretty noticeable difficulty spike. I'm having to abuse the aqua gate for healing pretty regularly.
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yeah fights with 3+ enemies are kind of silly because you can't fully control the camera in combat and something is bound to go offscreen eventually and then you have to guess when and where it's going to dash into you

You can on a New 3DS with the C-stick, actually. Oddly no CPP support, though.

But I mean yeah, it's still hard to always keep track of that many monsters at the same time. Especially when they're the ones that like to run away and launch projectiles at you.
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Wow, getting to level 8 really adds a lot. I got there pretty much instantly after hitting level 7, too. Jamileh is an auto-recruit after getting to 7, I think. Then I had just recruited Sabayt before leveling up and built the scarf shop, so with Edina already visiting at the time, that got her recruited. And then Levi had also just wandered in and was another auto-recruit to follow Mariah, and bam, level 8.
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jamileh and the upgraded fast travel are lifesavers. until that happened i was really confused they chose home of all places as the one spot you could fast travel to!

not digging this 'do a long dungeon for a chance that the right boss will spawn and beat it for a chance at getting one copy of the right material' thing that i need to do to synth some of these last few items
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I plan to pick it up down the road, rn tho FF12, Crash, and Miitopia have my priority with Kiwame and DRv3 taking the later months.
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I hope there's a more reliable method of getting sturdy vines soon. Going through the ruins every two days hoping for them in pots is not particularly fun, and they're needed in synthesis and now a Bloom Booth too. Was hoping one of the merchants would allow trading for it already. I was pretty happy to see that you can get small flower petals in your garden by appointing certain seedlings to tend it, because those were getting annoying too.

I know an option to send explorers unlocks eventually. Hopefully that'll be good enough, and hopefully it's soon.
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you can grow them once you get the third garden plot. don't remember when that is though

The second actually. Just discovered that each plot grows different things. But then I unlocked explorations and the first team out brought 22 sturdy vines back so it's like wow why bother gardening now, lol.
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Finished the Necropolis. Dungeon design is pretty nice. I liked a couple of the things this one did. Aside from the glowy fossils just looking cool in general, I also liked the part where the party got split up for a battle, with the paraflower user left by themselves. That and there was the puzzle for a chest where you had to make sure a party member was standing on a colored block in order to reach the bell when your Serkah hit the other block. That took me a minute to figure out because so far the game hadn't conditioned me to think of party placement as a thing that mattered. The boss was tougher, too.

The third hub desert area looks pretty cool too. Confused about crossing over gaps with the balloon things, but I think maybe I need to wait until I get a crossbow to hit them and make them bigger before jumping on them? That seems like what they were trying to convey by putting one of them down on the ground to hit freely with other weapons.
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i managed to cross the first set with a wand iirc but it was tricky. i wouldn't recommend bothering with it.

Finally decided to actually use the gardening feature because I was basically out of small flower petals. It's pretty annoying that you can only use it by taking down bloom booths to free up seedlings.
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in case you didn't know you can get some items, often flower-type ones, from using green gale on the sprites in your fountain (once per day). it doesn't make a huge difference but it helps.

the labyrinth farming is insanely grindy and i'm probably done with it. 30 minutes per canyon labyrinth x 6-7 possible bosses even using 3 slabs of same type x 10% drop chance (total guess but my observed rate on rare enemy unique drops is lower than this) x 5 items needed = expected 150 hours??? of farming just for ONE item. maybe the boss spawns can be manipulated somehow and maybe the drop rate can be improved - luck gear at least didn't seem to help - but it's still way too much. i was looking online to see if anyone had a better way but i seem to be ahead of everyone so bleh.

Were you using the seedlings with the item drop+ skills?

But good tip for the fountain. Probably never would've tried it myself.
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yeah i tried using collectors too, and it didn't help too much. i'm not even sure how the skills work...like, i DO get items, just not the correct (rare) ones. do those skills make rare drops more likely? i dunno. there is one wand with rare item drop+ but it's a huge pain to make and wands do crappy damage compared to swords.

Haha, I just went through every dungeon again to see if there were things for a lagora, and seconds after I finish it up, I get a crossbow user. Time to do it over! Well I think I more or less remember which dungeons had those targets.
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Just did the quest to get the book store to rank three, and that was the toughest fight yet. Three level 20 dillos charging and shooting spikes WHILE dodging chaos orbs WHILE in the dark, yikes. Originally I just had a bow and wand user with me, and that went terrible. Nearly got a game over, but went back with a bolas and a Serkah and it went much smoother, but still time consuming with always being on the move. I've got Tethu with bolas since it's the strongest thing I could synth.
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