Welcome to EXPlay, (Explain & Play) the review series where we care not for scores but tell it how it is when it comes to every game we get our hands on, whilst also taking the time to include some lengthy gameplay, to give you the reader, the chance to shape your own impressions and views whilst watching and reading. In this installment, we’re covering Endless Ocean Luminous by developer Arika.
Endless Ocean Luminous: (The Explanation)
You have probably read endless reviews on Endless Ocean Luminous with mixed opinions on the game but get ready for a review penned by not only a long-time gamer but a certified and experienced PADI Divemaster with more than 20 years of experience of the deep blue and over a thousand hours spent exploring its beauty in person.
This Explain & Play review will be a deep dive into Endless Ocean Luminous I will provide my own professional opinion on some of the aspects of the game that I am partial to and what I feel should have been added. Not only that but this EXPlay will be a culmination of both my own and our Editor Jack who is also a fully certified PADI Divemaster as well with plenty of experience under his weight belt.
“What’s this? Two Scuba diving professionals/video game writers reviewing a video game about Scuba Diving?” Oh yes. So get strapped into your BCD and check your gauges, its time to dive straight in!
It has been 15 long and gruelling years since Endless Ocean: Blue World (Adventures of the Deep in Europe and other parts of the world) released on the Nintendo Wii. For a diver like me, that is far too long a surface interval to be stuck on dry land for but alas, the wait is finally over as Arika’s latest entry in the series, Endless Ocean Luminous, is now here on Nintendo Switch!
For anyone unfamilar with the Endless Ocean titles and are looking to take the plunge, they are a series of scuba diving simulation games designed during Nintendo’s Touch! Generations era. They were meant to open up video games on the DS and the Wii to a larger audience with the focus on edutainment. The games gave players the opportunity to dive into tropical seas and oceans and get up close and personal with an abundance of sea life.
By interacting with them, you could learn more about their species and their habitats in the real world. The newest installment allows you to do that all over again with over 500 different species of marine life from tiny blennies to the majestic blue whale and everything in between like fearsome sharks, colossal squids, and even long extinct creatures from a time long past. This is an aspiring marine biologists and scuba diver’s wet dream come true.
Endless Ocean Luminous takes the core mechanics of scuba diving and exploration from its predecessors and adds online multiplayer to the mix so you can go on scuba diving adventures with your friends. In fact, up to 30 players can buddy up and join in on the experience together. When playing online, friends and random players can dive on in to your session and will appear at a random point on the map. By reuniting with another diver, you can can go on “Shared Dives” and any experience that players have collected will be shared among those in the group including any fish that have been scanned and treasures found.
Every time you dive into the Veiled Sea of Endless Ocean Luminous, you will be dropped into a randomly generated dive site. Each site has its own seed or Ocean ID that you can use to revisit the location again another time should you not have enough time to explore the map on a single dive. To be fair, each map is pretty vast so it will certainly take time to try and fill it out but you can always return to the same dive site again on your next dive or opt for a whole new dive site. You can also share the Ocean ID with other players as well should you find anything of particular interest that you think your friends and fellow divers may like to explore for themselves.
Now, for those who would rather dive alone (although it is definitely not recommended in the real world), you can do so freely at your own leisure without anyone popping up to interfere in your private session. You can also dive for as long as you want (as well as in shared dives) as there is no air gauge to limit how long you can stay down for, nor do you ever have to worry about decompression or safety stops when ascending.
I suppose the biggest question on everyone’s minds is “What is there to do and what is the reward for doing so?” Well if you want the short answer, like I said before, you go around looking and scanning marine animals and finding treasure. By doing so, you can earn in-game currency to purchase new colour templates for your diver’s equipment and emotes that you can use to interact with your fellow divers when playing online. That is pretty much it in a nutshell. That may sound pretty boring to the adrenaline junkies and the action heroes but to be fair, about 90% of recreational scuba is looking at marine life and finding treasure.
Well, treasure in the sense that one person’s trash is another’s treasure, but more often than not, it is still trash, like drink cans, plastic bags, fishing weights, crisp packets, a pair of glasses, a rusty car, or even a wheelie bin (that’s right, you read that correctly, a wheelie bin). Still, I like to feel like I’m doing my part for the environment by removing all the trash I can possibly carry during my dives and the same goes for when diving in Endless Ocean Luminous as well. Fortunately in the game, the treasure you find are will earn you in-game currency regardless of whether it is trash or not (although more valuable pieces will net you more cash), and you won’t have to worry about floating it up to the surface either.
For those wondering if there is a main story mode, yes there is but it does lack depth in regards to previous Endless Ocean games. Gone are the days of conversing with Jean-Eric Louvier or diving with his granddaughter Océane (also known as Oceana in some regions), nor can you get your treasures appraised by Nancy Young. Instead, in Endless Ocean Luminous you will be accompanied an AI by the name of Sera and occasionally dive with an NPC by the name of Daniel who will come and go during the game’s story.
The main premise of the game’s story is to dive the mysterious Veiled Sea and find a way to cure the World Coral that is being ravaged by a terrible form of necrosis. The Veiled Sea is a strange place where the topography and ecosystems change with each dive. This makes each dive feel different as you may encounter marine creatures you haven’t seen on previous dives. You are tasked with finding UMLs (Unidentified Marine Lifeforms) and other anomalies to learn how to deal with the predicament of the world coral.
On the surface, the story really only serves as a tutorial of sorts to get you familiar with the gameplay and the controls. However, it actually mirrors a worldwide crisis with coral bleaching throughout our oceans that is caused by the ever increasing rise in sea temperature and other issues that are devastating our coral reefs like overfishing, pollution, and lack of action to turn more coral reefs into protected areas.
Getting back on track, the story mode in Endless Ocean Luminous does not follow in the same stream as its predecessors and is dished out to the player gradually after scanning enough fish to unlock the next part of the story. This and the lack of a hub area where I can relax during my downtime from exploring the depths is a bit of a letdown, I will be honest. The first game had the yacht where you could chill out, train dolphins and accept the occasional diving or photograph request. The second game allowed you to do that your very own island and this time around, there’s nothing. The hub is literally a menu and I can see that being quite a turn off for long time series fans and understandable too.
With that said, I do respect Arika’s decision to take Endless Ocean Luminous in a different route. After all, if we really wanted to same experience as we got from the original Endless Ocean games, we may as well just boot up the Wii (or Wii U, as it has backwards compatibility with Wii games) and play them instead. I am first in line to wanting a remaster of the original games but I am more than happy to have a new entry into the series instead. The visuals and the realism in this game is absolutely breathtaking which is how it should be for a video game about scuba diving.
Now, there are a number of other scuba diving games on Nintendo Switch and on other platforms like ABZÜ, Subnautica, Beyond Blue, Scuba Diving Adventures and even the Scuba Diving activity in GO VACATION are all very enjoyable and I have played all of them with the exception of Subnautica. Each of these games can just as easily scratch that itch of a diving experience but the Endless Ocean series will always have a special place in my heart, and that includes Endless Ocean Luminous.
I will admit though that there are some quality of life improvements I would like to see added to the game or perhaps in a future installment, should it ever happen. For example, the air gauge making a return. You can get the diver to look at the dive computer on their wrist by pressing a button that will have details like depth, air pressure, time of dive, etc. In third person mode, this information could show up in the HUD but his could be more impressive in a first-person camera mode for the game in a similar fashion to how the pause screen in GoldenEye 007 functioned. Still, that wouldn’t be for everyone but it would certainly make the experience that little more realistic for a scuba diver.
Another thing I would have liked is for dangerous settings to be made optional. In Endless Ocean: Blue World, sharks and other dangerous animals would strike at you if you got too close. Now, they didn’t bite you or anything but they do swipe their tails at you. I would have like to see this make a return with the added effect that the screen goes blurry and you would have to press a button to clear your diver’s mask and effectively the screen would go clear again. Also the ability to adjust your bouyancy would have been a nice touch too as you could sink if you were too negatively bouyant or you would start to float if too possitively bouyant. This would I say would make a nice optional feature that players could toggle on or off if they wanted some extra realism to their diving adventures.
Back to the game at hand though as it is, the whole purpose of Endless Ocean Luminous is to provide a relaxing and immersive experience and learn about the marvels of aquatic life without getting your feet wet or leaving the comfort of your own home. Those looking for an action-packed adventure game with fights against killer whales and the opportunity to punch a shark on the snout, you will not find that here in this game.
It is a slow, easygoing adventure that if you allow yourself to fully embrace its beauty, you can easily spend countless hours without even realizing it. Yes, you can scan fish. Yes you can find treasure. Yes, you can dive with friends and penetrate shipwrecks lying on the seabed. If you are looking for anything more, you won’t find it, but if just take the game for what it is, you will find that Endless Ocean Luminous truly encapsulates the essence and beauty of scuba diving.
Endless Ocean Luminous: (The Gameplay)
Game Specifications:
Developer: Arika
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Category: Simulation, Multiplayer Adventure
No. of Players: 1Â player (local) up to 30 players (online)
Release Date: May 2, 2024 (EU & NA)
Price: $49.99
File Size: 5 GB
Nintendo.com Listing
