My Aquarium

"Fish on your Wii"

This is a review of the Japanese version of Blue Oasis; a fish tank on your Wii.

Blue Oasis lets you design up to 6 fish tanks and keep them on your Wii. Think of it as a glorified interactive screen saver.

The customization in Blue Oasis is great. You can choose the tank size, background, substrate, decorations (there are nine pages of decorations to choose from) lighting, and of course, the fish. There are around 50 fish although you only start off with about 10. The rest are unlocked although the game is very vague as to how you unlock them.

You can feed your fish. There are three types of food and not all fish like all types of food. Keep in mind that the fish in this game grow. They start small and over a period of weeks get bigger. Apparently, they can also breed.

If you have a big fish with small fish, sometimes the small fish will get eaten. Make sure your fish are compatible with each other before putting them in the same tank, or they might die.

The decorations and fish are for both fresh and salt water; you could make a river stream tank or a coral reef. It's all up to you. One gripe I have though is that you can put saltwater and freshwater fish in the same tank, which is weird and unrealistic. You can arrange the decorations any way you want using the wii remote, but remember that you can only fit so much in one tank.

There is also a limit to how many fish you can have to a tank, based on the size of the fish you are putting in.

Blue Oasis lets you tap on the glass to send your fish into a convulsion; I don't really think its good for them though.

You can send tanks to friends through wiiconnect 24. You can also set special dates on which fish will do a dance for you. So you could send your friend a tank which is preprogrammed to do something on their birthday. Neat!

The graphics of the game are great. The fish animations are realistic and the lighting effects are like a real aquarium. Everything is very professionally done here.

Sadly, the sound effects are obnoxious. You can choose from a bunch of random piano songs to play in the background, but I just turn them off. The bubble effects are cool though if you turn those on.

Overall, this "game" is worth the 5 dollars simply for a great screensaver for your HDTV.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/28/08

Game Release: Blue Oasis: Uo no Iyashi Kuukan (JP, 06/24/08)