Official Review Nintendo Switch Updated

Endless Ocean Luminous (Nintendo Switch)
Official GBAtemp Review

Name: Endless Ocean Luminous
Item: Endless Ocean Luminous
Rating: 6.7
Author: KiiWii

Product Information:

Release Date (NA): May 2, 2024
Release Date (EU): May 2, 2024
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: ARIKA
Genres: Exploration

Game Features:

Single player

Local Multiplayer

Online Multiplayer

Co-operative

Review Approach:

Code provided by Nintendo for the purpose of review.

How endless can an endless ocean be?

Endless Ocean (Forever Blue in Japan) debuted on Nintendo Wii some 17 years ago in 2007 with its stellar +70% average review scores. The 2009 follow-up Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep also received similar scores. Now in 2024 the second sequel, Endless Ocean Luminous, is set to take Nintendo's now ageing hardware by the gills but does it live up to the fanfare, and does it succeed in delivering an all-encompassing underwater experience?

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Incredibly Addictive, Intriguing Premise

First things first: you have to realise that this game is an experience, not a traditional "game". Sure it has a handful of game-like elements similar to Pokemon Snap and the aesthetic of the 3D Ecco the Dolphin games, but what differs here is that the entire premise is to chill, explore the Veiled sea, take your time, and unwind in the briny depths of the titular endless ocean.

Anyone coming into this thinking there may be spearfishing, boss battles and any sense of danger will be (ironically) rudely awakened by the pure serenity within this title.

Controlling your diver is extremely simple, using the left stick to move, the right stick to control the camera, A to interact, B to swim fast, L to scan LZ to take a photo, R to rise to the surface, RZ to sink down, X to open your map and Y to emote. The plus button also allows you to have fish follow you, depending on capacity!

The emotes are upgradeable using in-game currency (salvage) and you can use them to communicate points of interest, celebrate your shared discoveries or as markers to indicate cool things you find!

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Incredibly Visceral & Varietous

Endless Ocean Luminous (EOL) sits firmly towards the Nintendo Switch's apparent EOL (Endo of Life) but attempts to bring us some astonishing features at a reasonable price point of £39.99.

To begin with, the ability to play this game "1-30" players should not be sniffed at, because there is a social element to scuba diving, and the ability to team up and explore together is somewhat idyllic for a lot of people who aren't into strenuous or taxing games, and with up to 30 of you there is a lot of room for some unique experiences and memorable moments to share.

EOL also allows you to generate new dives each time you play, meaning no new dive is the same, though there is a code system to track and save your favourite dive sites for completion or sharing later on. I did notice a little repetition within components of dive sites, but by and large, the map layout is vastly different, it's just the props that you may recognise in different places.

Within each dive site, there is the option to go solo offline, or take it online and allow others to join, or you can join in with others along their journeys, so there are quite a few ways to play from the get-go.

The tutorial/story mode is a little disappointing from the start as each level lasts 1-2 minutes, and contains the bare minimum needed to get you started but it also "pay-walls" each additional chapter behind your progress in free dives, which is frustrating, but I'll get back to that later on.

Story mode sees you introduced to your AI diving buddy SERA and another diver Dave. SERA drives the story along with facts and figures, and Dave is somewhat the experience bringer and comedic relief throughout but neither grip you with the undulating themes.

The storyline goes that the world's coral is dying and as such research needs to be done to attempt to save it. You are tasked with scanning and identifying every fish that passes you in the hopes of finding clues as to why the coral is being blighted by encroaching toxicity and hopefully forging a fix to this issue.

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Collect-a-thon Vibes, Puzzling in Places

There are 500 vibrant species to scan and learn about, each with a short blurb explaining their unique characteristics and place in the Veiled Sea. This serves as a nice learning tool if you are so inclined, but also adds a lot of depth to the otherwise conceptually monotonous task of holding L to scan hundreds and hundreds of fish.

I'm a collector at heart, with a massive collection of N64 games, Amiibo, stickers, collector cards and such, so this sort of tranquil-based collect-a-thon definitely appeals to me, but I could understand how many may find this a hard slog with little actual action keeping them engrossed.

As stated before, this is not an action game, it does not feature overly gripping edge-of-the-seat storylines or cliffhangers, nor does it contain incredible or death-defying stunts. EOL is quite the opposite, it is about you exploring the aquatic space, collecting salvage, discovering the underlying story through artefacts, temples & wrecks, and collating data on the marine life throughout.

Each free dive offers you the opportunity to add to your fishy pokedex, and the more you scan, the more you seem to unlock. For example, when I had trawled the grid location I was in and scanned every small fish there: all of a sudden a larger predatory fish would appear that was 100% not there the first time I entered that area!

The pleasure of this game comes from the discoveries and the game lays gratification on you by categorising these discoveries into competitive achievements (yes this game has a build-in achievement system), such as the smallest/largest fish scanned within a classification of the species, or when you find a nice item of salvage, imbuing you with "light" XP to level up with.

There is a weird bolted-on lucky-spin slot machine mechanic each time you fill your light bar and get the message "Light Gathered. Drawing tags". This essentially enters any tags you've dropped into a lottery, and gives you bonuses dependent on luck, however, none of this is explained in the game, and you only realise your bonuses in the game's log screens.

Levelling up your player does several things, first and foremost it adds capacity to your character that allows you to swim with bigger and more complicated creatures. You begin with enough capacity to swim with a couple of smaller cichlids who inquisitively swim alongside you for a short period, but as you progress up the levels you eventually can have Dolphins, Whales and more at your side which is useful for unlocking more of the mysterious story at various temple locations.

One example of these puzzles is that of an ancient stone disc with a riddle asking for you to bring "a notorious singer of the sea" so increasing your capacity allows you to get the correct mammal to swim alongside you to that location to meet the conditions and let the underlying story unfold further.

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Pay Walling Problems

Every time you scan a creature, if it's new the game unlocks its description and adds it to your collection, but it also tallys the number of fish scanned as well as your time played and your movements across each dive site. The number of scans from dive mode is what prevents you from progressing in story mode, and that is incredibly frustrating and not necessary at all.

Scanning unscanned fish count, but groups of the same do not. Scanning already scanned shoals also doesn't count towards your scan total, and nor does scanning bigger or smaller variants within a shoal, but partying up and scanning everything at a new dive site does count, so my top tip would be to party up and hammer new dive sites frequently to bypass this "pay walling" as quickly as possible.

I went to check out Chapter 3 episode 1 only to discover I needed to scan 200 more fish, so I did over 15 mins or so, but then Chapter 3 episode 2 required an astonishing 900 more scans just to see another 1-2 mins of story mode. Each chapter demands more and the sheer numbers just get worse. I genuinely hate this mechanic because it puts a massive dampener on the story mode and forces you to put in the hours just to unlock something undoubtedly meagre.

Story mode does unlock a few new species here and there, so it is integral that you go back to it to flesh out your collection, just feels backwards that you have to use another mode to unlock parts in story mode.

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Endless Gameplay, Restricted by Hardware

Endless Ocean Luminous is a great experience for what it is, though I cannot help thinking that it could have been done far better on more recent hardware with raytracing, NVME load times, and far higher-resolution models and textures.

This game would probably have served better with more time to improve the storyline somehow and pack in far more wonderous granular detailing throughout as a day-one title for the next generation of hardware. Given the restrictions of the Switch, the developer ARIKA has done a cracking job in maintaining a consistent framerate, with 30 people emoting all over the multiplayer, lighting effects, layers of bubbles, shoals of fish and more all on screen at once.

In a vague attempt to speedrun the game I found that in under 80 minutes, I could finish the 7 anomalous species hunt, photograph the final UML animal and I had unlocked around 50% of the map and scanned over 60% of the creatures within it. Doing so quickly levels you up massively (I jumped from 22 to 28 in one 74-minute session) and had well over 2000 scans to add to opening up story mode which allowed me to find a slew of new creatures.

A second speedrun from me saw just 23% of the map unlocked, 30% of creatures scanned, all 7 special species found and the UML was the same one as before. This time though in under 40 minutes, belting it around the map at the fastest speed possible.

I would thoroughly recommend Endless Ocean Luminous for players wanting to take a break from the souls-likes, put the guns down for a bit, unwind away from the racing games, and take a dip into something more slow-paced and different beneath the surface.

Verdict

What We Liked ...

Randomly generated replayability
Serene, tranquil and an incredibly peaceful experience
30-player online
Heaps of treasure to find
Thrilling monstrous encounters
Basic but interesting puzzles
Ridiculous number of customisation unlockables
Possible to speedrun to get XP to higher levels

What We Didn't Like ...

Story mode grind "pay wall" is frustrating
Story mode is rather bland overall

Gameplay

I enjoy the whole collection element paired with no time limits, no pressure and no danger elements. I feel that this game is an incredibly endearing title that some will find great pleasure in, especially with its 30-player online mode.

Presentation

As Switch games go this one doesn't look bad at all but you can see the ageing system focussing on ambience and draw-distance over finer granular textures, because up close a lot if it is rudimentary and basic. The aquatic atmosphere does a nice job with colour and light shards, surface undulation and

Lasting Appeal

There is an "Endless Ocean" in terms of randomly generated dive sites, but once you have the majority of the 500-strong fishy-dex completed it's a waiting game for online events to get the mythical extinct beasts.

6.7

out of 10

Overall

Endless Ocean Luminous could be far better in a lot of ways, but as it stands it's good enough to have eked out a decent chunk of my time collecting hundreds of fish and hunting down the elusive mythical beasts!

Reactions: BuddhaHunterMac and Blythe93

Not that endless - IRL, the Pacific Ocean is huge, yet it's still bordered by land in several directions. In-game...every game has an ending, a point where everything worthwhile stops. And even if it's a live-service game that relies on grinding to get more play hours (a rather artificial means of doing that), there's always a point where the grind just stops feeling worth continuing, and that's another ending.
So yeah; nothing is truly endless.

The storyline goes that the world's coral is dying and as such research needs to be done to attempt to save it.

So just like in real life, huh. Except in our case it's global warming that's killing off the temp-sensitive coral polyps - that, and human trash poisoning the seas. I've never been to the Great Barrier Reef, but I'd absolutely hate for it to become the Once-Great Barrier Reef.

Chary
May 14, 2024

My grandma bought me Endless Ocean on the Wii as a Christmas present. As a kid who wanted Guitar Hero, I was disappointed, but I played it cuz I was bored one day. It was this really nice, calming kind of almost edutainment that was actually pretty great. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was a cult classic level of good, but it has this special spot in my heart.

...Which is why it's wild to me that this got a sequel. It's cute...but I really hate the weird grindy level conditions D:

Reactions: KiiWii

Does the pay walling refer to having to spend real money?

Pay you say ?

KiiWii
Friday at 11:56 PM

SonicRings said:
Does the pay walling refer to having to spend real money?

Thankfully not real money, I was referring to “pay walling” as in you have to achieve points in one mode to unlock more story, which seemed vastly counterintuitive at the time.

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Product Information:

Game Features:

Review Approach:

Incredibly Addictive, Intriguing Premise

Incredibly Visceral & Varietous

Collect-a-thon Vibes, Puzzling in Places

Pay Walling Problems

Endless Gameplay, Restricted by Hardware

Verdict

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