Ever Oasis: new video, third blog post from Koichi Ishii (world)

Update: the official translation of this second blog post, about the world of Ever Oasis, can be found there!

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Today, Koichi Ishii posted a third blog post about Ever Oasis over at the Topics website in Japan, and shared some more details about the world. In fact, he also shared a new video for the game, showcasing some of the areas you can explore in the game.

Actually, let’s start with that new video, which also gives us a nice preview of the game’s soundtrack!

Koichi Ishii begins this new blog post by sharing pictures of… his two dogs: Coco (a female toy poddle), and Natsu (a male yorkshire).

It looks like he didn’t go anywhere during the Golden Week, as he wanted to avoid the usual crowds and traffic jams. Instead, he chose to stay at home to play with his dogs.

The previous blog post was about the characters, but this time around, he is sharing details about the world (called Vistrahda).

When creating a new world, Koichi Ishii always start by defining its rules. For example, when creating a fantasy world, he asks himself the following questions:

• Is the world a planet?
• What elements is the planet made of, and what is the general concept behind them?
• What about the climate of the various regions?
• What kind of creatures are living there?
• Are human living there?
• If yes, how do they live?
• What about the races?
• What kind of tools are they using?
• What kind of impact does the passing of time have on them?

Then, using the answers to those questions, he starts creating a map of the world. He points out that some people may wonder if going into such fine details right from the start is really necessary, since many of the elements haven’t even been implemented in the game at this point.

He explains that working that way, having all those details about the world set in store early on is pretty important. By working that way, all the details and ideas reverberate in even the most minor lines of dialogues and the various items you find in the game, which makes the whole thing much more convincing.

Basically, working that way allows all those separate strands of information about the world to converge, and allow the players to properly envision the world the way it was imagined by its creator.

In the case of Ever Oasis, the game’s setting is an “Egyptian Fantasy”, and the starting point of it all was “a desert world”. He asked himself the following questions:

• What was the world like originally?
• Did the desertification happen because of a weakening of the spiritual power?
• What caused that weakening in the first place?
• Is it in any way related to the rationale of the world?

It’s only when the setting the world had been firmly set into stone that the art team joined the fray, in order to breathe some life into that world. They came and created quite a lot of concept-art. Vistrahda may be a desert world, there is still quite a lot a variety when it comes to environments: there’s areas with brown sand, others with white sand, caves, and more.

The thing is, Vistrahda wasn’t always a desert: in the past, there were many oasis around, and lush greenery all around the place. But it’s now completely covered in sand, and only a few traces of that past are left. The giant urn (in the picture above) may very well be a remnant of that past.

The concept art above shows a settlement inside a cave. The blue part on the ground may look like a river, but it’s actually sand. It looks like a river was flowing right into the ocean in the past…

Koichi Ishii explains that when creating a world, it’s essential that everyone involved with art have the same image of the world in their mind… it certainly would be an issue if all the artists had their own idea of what the world should look like!

Next, he shares some comments from two of the artists involved with creating concept-art for Ever Oasis:

• Yasuda (Concept Art Lead) asked himself how he could accurately transcribe into a pictures the world inside Koichi Ishii’s head. It looks like the background modelers had a hard time with shapes, due to all the really fine details. As a matter of fact, it’s the whole art team that was frequently in a pinch, something that definitely amused him;

 Throughout the game, you get to expand your Oasis, and naturally, the art team had to create art for all the stages of that expansion. Mr. Yasuda hopes that players will pay attention to the changes, the various interesting designs they came up with, and that they will try and collect all the elements to see the differences for themselves.

Another area the art team struggled with is the dungeons and the field. After all, the game takes place in a desert, and it was pretty hard for them to express the individuality of each area and avoid everything looking the same.

Also, as you can see in the concept art above, the night / day cycle also has an impact on how the world looks. The atmosphere of a given area changes dramatically during the night!

• Kikuoka (concept-art) explains that when creating art for Ever Oasis, they had to design not just the fields and dungeons, but also various items, plants, gimmicks, and more. For a given “item”, they could have from 5 to 10 ideas, which is why they did struggle a fair bit to understand it or how interesting it was.

They hope that players will take the time to stop and look at the various elements that make up the world. There’s quite a lot of characters and shops in the game, each with their own design, but which one will be your favorite?

Finally, Koichi Ishii talks about those features that can be found in moden games, that helps with progression. You have maps, where the places you need to reach for your quests are clearly indicated, for example. Those are there to make playing the game as stressless an experience as possible. Naturally, Ever Oasis also has such features.

However, he hopes that players will sometime take the time to simply look at the sky, go to places they never though to go to in order to gather materials, or listen to what the people visiting the oasis have to say, in order to fully enjoy Vistrahda.

If you take some detours, instead of simply taking the shortest path to the end of the game, you may find some never-before-seen items, and discover an unexpected side to your partners. The game’s world may be a desert, that doesn’t mean there is nothing to do or find in there… quite the opposite!

Ever Oasis (3DS) comes out on June 23rd in Europe and North America, and July 13th in Japan.

Source: Nintendo
A big thanks to Ash for the help with translation!