Beyond Oasis

Beyond Oasis arrived in 1994 for the Sega Mega Drive, developed by the Japanese studio Ancient and published by Sega. It is an action game with role-playing elements viewed from above, with real-time combat, equipment to collect, and a world that opens up according to what the player has acquired.

Ancient was founded by the family that also produced a composer well known for his work with Sega, and the soundtrack is accordingly one of this game's strongest features. The same goes for the art: characters animate smoothly and the environments use the console's palette to the full, which was not a given on this hardware.

Mechanically it combines ordinary swordplay with summoning elemental spirits. Each behaves differently, one attacking, another clearing an obstacle, so the player has to think about which one a situation calls for. Weapons wear out along the way, which forces a rotation of equipment rather than reliance on a single tactic.

By 1994 the Mega Drive had reached the peak of what it could do, and this is one of the titles where that shows. The game shipped under a different name in Japan and Europe, which still complicates any search for it today.

Action games with role-playing elements were scarcer on the Mega Drive than one might expect, since the genre was dominated by the rival console while Sega built its identity on fast arcade titles. That scarcity is why this one is still remembered as one of the platform's few representatives of its kind, and why it is still discussed three decades later.

Beyond Oasis runs directly in the browser on OldGame.cz, with the year, the studio, and images on the page beside it.