There are a whole bunch of, well, let’s say ‘Wii-centric’ video games from the history vaults that, in theory, seem like they might be a bit of fun to revisit on Nintendo Switch. You know the sort of thing, usually pairing some new-fangled/novelty control scheme with an activity you’d never tried in a game before; making cakes, driving a quad bike…eh…bobsleighing with the Jamaican Olympic team? The Endless Ocean series fits right into this mould and, as it turns out, revisiting its chillaxed dives — even with up to 30 other players in tow — wasn’t a very good idea.
Now, before we get into the negative stuff, let’s start by pointing out that if you’re looking for an incredibly low-energy, low-effort sort of gaming experience where all of the focus is on simply scanning marine life and then reading a tiny informational excerpt about each of them in order to expand your underwater knowledge, this is 100% the game for you. In fact, you’ll likely never find another game more suited to your very specific needs. Please enjoy. For the rest of us, as much as learning about all the amazing creatures that live under the sea is a captivating pursuit, we’re not sure we can justify the price tag given that there is precious little else to do here.
Endless Ocean: Luminous takes the basic premise of its predecessors, 2007-08’s Endless Ocean and 2009-10’s Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep, plonking you in tight-fitting scuba gear beneath some very pretty waves. Here you’ll use a scanner (hold down the ‘L’ button) to catalogue an admittedly impressive array of aquatic biology as you embark on solo or shared dives.
There are various tiers of animal, from your average Joe Starfish to some great big epic monstrosities with scary names that we can’t remember. STINKFIN. There. Something like that. Scanning this stuff is fun for a little while, no doubt about it. The fish all look great, there’s an addictive quality to scanning a whole bunch of them at once, it’s certainly nice to watch your catalog fill up, and you’ll unlock customisation options as you go, but boy-oh-boy, there really isn’t much more to it, certainly in terms of mechanics.
Solo dives allow you to start fresh each time you switch on, or resume your last dive from the same location you were at last time around, allowing you to work on 100% clearing every animal type and secret in that area. The general ebb and flow of gameplay consists of simply diving down, whether alone or in a group, and continuing to tag creatures and/or items of interest until it’s all been done. Very simple.
With a smattering of old shipwrecks, alluring caves, underwater temples, and other oddities to find, the best part of this game comes in the quiet moments where some colossal beast emerges from the abyss below you, or when you suddenly spot part of a building or wreck in the endless gloom and proceed to investigate. There are also some attempts to inject more depth by having you travel with specific animals to unlock paths forward at points – we had to make friends with a giant turtle at one point – but that’s about as far as interesting touches go here.
The game’s story mode does little to help with this monotony, tasking you with simply finding and scanning artefacts and specific targets whilst following along with a very slight narrative that doubles as a tutorial. It’s fine for a while, and it looks great for a Switch game, with some lovely models, lighting, water effects, and so on, but it feels like it could — and should — have been so much more had Arika seen fit to really make the most of the act of actually diving. Instead, the developer has opted for simplicity whilst also making the absolutely killer decision to lock new chapters behind goals such as “scan 2000 creatures to continue”. Eh…no thanks.
Why not give us more interesting objectives to get stuck into? And where is all the detail and life? It’s a very good-looking game, as we’ve said, and there are tons of animal types (something like 500 apparently), but in comparison to almost any other underwater adventure we can think of, it all feels very stage-managed and artificial. There’s no magic to it. Creatures appear, get scanned, and then move on. And then there’s the actual moment-to-moment gameplay itself. Why not give us more movement options? Why not allow us to roleplay and be a little more individual in how we dive and swim?
Couldn’t we have had the option to control more aspects of our dives such as prepping air supplies, utilising pressure, or selecting suitable dive points based on a range of conditions? Any of this would have improved things. Why just give us a simple dolphin kick and send us on our way like this? Moving around underwater can be a majestic and magical thing, an otherworldly experience that games like Subnautica and Abzu capture so very well. The ocean’s alien aura, the unknowable abyss, is hypnotic, and there’s lots of space to roam and swim and spin. Unless you’re experiencing it in Endless Ocean: Luminous, that is, where it’s just sort of big and empty and you can’t do anything more than move in straight lines at a speed best described as “a bit safe but at least it won’t wake granddad.”
Given that this is first and foremost an online experience, it’s a nice surprise to see a story mode at all, and it does do a reasonable job of showing you how to complete tasks, but it also lays bare just how shallow (genuinely didn’t mean that one) and repetitive the core gameplay loop is. Give yourself over completely to it, to its environmental message — the story has you scan fish to save the World Tree — or to learning everything it’s got to teach you and you may get a few hours of limited fun, but not much more.
The main meat here, the group diving mode that allows for up to 30 players simultaneously exploring, is where we expected all of these disappointments to shake loose, where the game would drop its guard and get going properly, but unfortunately it’s just more of the bland same. You can tag items for other divers to pick up, communicate via emoji, and work together to complete simple scanning tasks, but that’s really about the height of it. It’s very much a ‘vibes’ affair, and we’re just not really digging this particular groove at all.
The more time you spend with Endless Ocean: Luminous, the more it begins to annoy, too. Why award us a gold medal for teamwork after a dive that we did solo? There’s already very little to grasp at for comfort, so seeing that this stuff is meaningless really knocks the remaining wind out of it all. It’s these irks and issues that add up to the overall suspicion that, aside from the chill atmosphere, there is nothing much of anything going on behind the scenes, and that what you’ve actually got here is just a big old empty video game ocean with some randomly spawning stuff floating about to scan, and not a whole lot more.
Conclusion
Endless Ocean: Luminous attempts to revive a niche Wii franchise as an online exploration experience, and fails miserably in the process. In comparison to the likes of Subnautica, this is an empty, cold, and boring ocean space to explore, devoid of any real reason to play beyond its generally relaxing ambiance and the opportunity to learn some facts about underwater animals. Even taken on those terms, it’s weak, its online play is basic and bland, and its story does little to engage beyond teaching you the ropes. It didn’t need to be this boring, but it is.
