Endless Ocean Luminous - Review

The Wii was a curious time for Nintendo, they released some of the best games featuring their most recognisable characters, but they also kicked off all new series, like the Sports series and of course, Endless Ocean. It has been 17 years since the series first started swimming, has time been kind to this oceanic adventure, or has the air in its tanks gone stale?

When the original games first released, it was during that time when Nintendo was advocating for their ‘Blue Ocean’ strategy, where not every game had to be for the hardcore gamer. This is what led to titles like Dr Kawashima, Nintendogs and Wii Fit, so Endless Ocean fit into that mould fairly well. While the series never grabbed me on the Wii, I was more than willing to dive into this release, given its online offering and the chance to play a game that didn’t need me to go for a score or battle 100 enemies at once. What I got was not what I expected though, some of the parts made sense and others were just different.

The game does offer a story, in it you are a new diver who has joined Project Aegis, a new group who have come together to try and learn why the coral of the sea is dying. While you are a new diver, you are joined by Daniel, who is the experienced diver and then Sera, who is an AI assistant. You are given a series of missions to complete, each with their own task to focus on and while none of the missions are complicated or long, they get the job done. The biggest problem with the story mode is that the game artificially blocks you from enjoying it, unless you have scanned the prerequisites number of sea creatures in the other modes, and it isn’t just 100 or so. Eventually one mission will require thousands of scans to be completed, which may sound like a lot, but can be done fairly quickly, the problem is the scanning is kind of boring.

There are two ways for you to scan the requisite fish, the first is in the online mode, the other is in the solo dives, and it was here that I spent a lot of my time. The solo dive is just that, you and only you in the water, surrounded by all sorts of aquatic life, with the occasional shipwreck to discover. Scanning is a straightforward task, once the fish or sea life of your choice is within range, you just hold down the L button and the scan begins. Once your scan is done, the game presents you with a list of all that you managed to tag, if its one or two fish then it’s short list, but when there are schools of fish, that list can be quite long. If you have never encountered that fish before, then you have to wait for the games to load the name in, again not an issue for one or two, but if you have a lot, it takes time. Annoyingly the game won’t count you as having encountered that particular life form, if you don’t select the mystery name from the list and let it pop in, I had to rescan a few until I learnt that. The solo dives are a great time, if only because you can just do things at your own pace, there is no one to get around you and no story to worry about, the downside is that there is also nothing of major interest to do. There can be some fun things to discover, like the previously mentioned shipwrecks, but you can’t do anything with them. Even finding items lost at sea, like books, bottles, coins and such don’t do much except rewards you with P, which you use to unlock more items.

When you venture into the waters of multiplayer, it almost the same experience as solo dives, except there is now other folks with you. There isn’t more to discover, but instead you work together into order to fill in the maps and locate all the items you can. If you find something you can drop a pin to let other players know that something is there, you will be able to see other pins dropped by others. In an interesting twist to multiplayer, there are no lobbies, instead if you want to dive with mates you just need to share the dive-id. Once you have all joined, the dive is then open to other folks who swim on by, but it caps at 10, so if you are only 5 swimmers, the game won’t add more than 10. While the cap at 30 might seem smaller than other games, the slow nature of the game means that each dive is more about the exploration than the levelling.

Don’t misunderstand there are levels, your scanning is what boosts them up, so the more dives you do and more you scan, the more P you can earn. The P is converted to currency, which is then used to unlock new colours for your suit, emotes and stickers. Some of the items are locked until you get to a set level, but for the most part you can find a few colour combinations to suit your style.

This is where we talk about the games presentation and the issues it contains, first up the game looks fine, not great but fine. When you are in story missions, you will often be locked into a very small area, but when you are diving solo or with others, you will get a much larger area to explore. These areas are randomly generated, which is a nice addition, but I often found that most locations created were bereft of things to see. This meant that most of the time there isn’t much to look at and while some of the sea life looks good, you will encounter a few types more than others. The game makes a big deal about coral, but in all the dives I had, there was very little of it, unless you were lucky enough to get a lot of shallow areas to explore. None of this is to say there is anything bad going on, the game looks good and runs fairly well, but there is nothing about the game that is going to blow you away.

One area that is quite interesting is the audio, the game sports a soundtrack that is equal parts exploratory and zen meditation garden. The most common sound is the air leaving your tanks and if you spam the swim faster button, you will hear the water displaced behind you. The worst sound in the game is Sera, who is either a basic text-to-speech voice or a very bored VA, either way its not that great. You will have to hear more from that character in the story mode, in the other modes its only if you scan a special animal or you elect to hear more about the species you have scanned.

Endless Ocean Luminous is an ok game, there is nothing wrong with it, but it doesn’t really do much to keep you engaged. My first session with it, I honestly started falling to sleep while playing the game and it was 2pm in afternoon. Playing with other people does make the game more entertaining, but even with that, what you are going to get from it depends on how much you like to simulate swimming. The games odd reason to restrict you from the story until you scan a set number of creatures and for the final chapter, finish off the mystery board, just comes across as artificial roadblocks. If you are looking at taking a dip once in a while, then you might enjoy the game, but anyone looking to break some world swimming records had best put the breaks on those expectations, this is a game that is more about the journey than the destination, even one that sounds as exciting as The Veiled Sea.

The Score

7.0

Review code provided by Nintendo

The Pros

Swimming is easily done and you won’t need hours of instruction to get around

The randomness of each new dive means that you should always find something to discover…

The Cons

… the downside is that there is a lot of empty space more often than not

The games artificial roadblocks do nothing other than making you less likely to keep on swimming