Endless Ocean Luminous is a diving simulation that invites you to relax, but degenerates into monotonous hard work the longer you play.
I was delighted when Nintendo announced a new Endless Ocean game in their Direct presentation as a complete surprise. The Wii game series stood out from the crowd for its time. The first Endless Ocean from 2007 is actually one of my most-played Wii games.
The Switch successor Endless Ocean Luminous builds on the diving gameplay of the original games and lets me explore vast ocean areas in a relaxed atmosphere. It’s a lot of fun at first, but turns into a grinding salvage marathon. I was just as excited about the game as I was disappointed with the finished product.
In collaboration with Nintendo, we are giving away a total of three copies of "Endless Ocean Luminous". All you have to do is answer this question: Which is your absolute favourite fish?
The competition has ended.
The first impression is depressing. At the start of the game, I’m thrown straight into the deep end of an unconvincing story mode. Kiki, the AI, guides me through tutorials and missions. I can’t explore extensive areas, but am instead channelled through small levels with trivial tasks. Now and again, Kiki interrupts me with her annoying robot voice. It sounds like a text-to-speech engine used in other games as an accessibility option for visually impaired players. After a few missions I mute Kiki, otherwise I’d go crazy.
The lacklustre story is told in cutscenes with strange cuts and bad animations. A short summary: I have to save a dying coral reef by scanning glowing fish and collecting their «light». Umm… okay?
After a few chapters in story mode, I begin to lose motivation. Before I can continue, I first have to scan 500 creatures in other game modes. Endless Ocean Luminous continues to present me with such huge barriers in later chapters of the story. By the time I get to the last story chapters, I’m so bored I give up completely. Not because it’s difficult, but because the game tasks are repetitive and there’s lots of them.
Apart from the story mode, Endless Ocean Luminous delivers – at least in the first few hours of play. First, I give the solo diving mode a go. Here I explore the Veiled Sea – a fictitious piece of ocean that’s home to over 500 different animal species – all by myself and without any time pressure.
For each new dive, a different region is generated. Depending on the current topography of the seabed, I find myself in various climatic zones and encounter different fish. On the one hand, that’s cool, because I never know what to expect. On the other hand, I’d have liked more manually designed levels when playing. It’s pure luck if there’s an exciting reward actually waiting for me in a mysterious shipwreck.
The goal is to scan as many glowing fish as possible in each dive. After a scan, the fish stop glowing and I’m rewarded with exciting info text boxes. I feel like a little kid on a visit to the aquarium and literally soak up the exciting facts. What’s really cool is, the game also features some extinct animal species from the time of the dinosaurs.
Sometimes I also discover fish with my scanner that send mysterious interference signals. If I scan seven of these special animals in one dive, I attract a mythical creature. These giant creatures are mystical beings that can only be found in the Veiled Sea. The route to them is often blocked by hidden caves or labyrinthine coral reefs, which makes the search exciting.
Away from the animal world, there are all kinds of treasures to discover on the seabed. Some of them suggest that an ancient civilisation once lived in the area. Piecing together the cryptic clues is fun and works much better than the bumpy cutscenes and dialogue in the story missions.
Once I’ve found a mythical creature in a game area, I can continue exploring the rest of the sea. Or I start a new dive with a new end boss. In this case, the game area is again randomly generated and I start my exploration from scratch. Every animal in the new game area lights up again, regardless of whether I’ve already scanned them in the previous dive.
The procedure is identical for every dive: scan as many luminous fish as possible, find interference signals, search for mythical creatures. To begin with, I didn’t mind the simple and repetitive gameplay because I kept finding new and exciting animal species while searching for the seven targets. With each additional trip into the Veiled Sea, however, the number of new discoveries shrinks drastically. The luminous creatures repeat themselves. Exploring the underwater world becomes tedious hard work.
To keep me interested later in the game, I receive points for scanning animals, exploring the game world and collecting treasures. I use these to level up my diver and unlock cosmetic items such as stickers, emotes or new diving suit colours.
Apart from these cosmetic modifications, there are no unlockable items or statistics for my diver that I could improve. There’s no meaningful progress. All I do in Endless Ocean Luminous is scan and watch my points rise.
After a while, I get bored of the monotonous solo diving. So I thought I’ll try out Shared Dives mode. Here, too, I scan my way through the underwater animals – only I don’t plunge into the depths of the ocean alone, but with up to 30 divers. In contrast to the solo dives, my online underwater excursions are limited to 60 minutes.
Due to the limited playing time, the multiplayer sessions aren’t as relaxed as the solo dives. Nevertheless, I share the tedious scanning work with other players so I unlock new mystical creatures much faster online.
I’m also rewarded with points in online mode, for example by tagging rare treasures or animals for other players. Apart from accessing cosmetic items, in this mode too, the points aren’t much use. At least I can see in a global leaderboard how many points I’ve collected in a certain period compared to other players. But even this competitive aspect can’t keep me hooked in the long term. My points and my level are constantly increasing, but the bottom line is that the numbers are completely worthless. Empty calories.
Nintendo promises limited-time online diving events with new species and new mythical creatures in the future. If these events don’t bring any fundamental innovations to the monotonous gameplay or significant rewards for progressing in the game, they won’t be able to encourage me to dive again.
For a Switch game, Endless Ocean Luminous looks quite respectable at times. The game definitely has its magical moments. When a huge whale approaches me from the dark depths of the sea, singing melancholically, I get goose bumps.
On closer inspection, however, I realise that the beautifully staged underwater world is nothing more than a lifeless backdrop. The animals hardly react to my presence. Sharks and other predators don’t attack me. And dolphins ignore me. I don’t feel part of this world, just a virtual visitor. It’s a shame, because in the previous games I could even pet the animals, feed them or stun dangerous creatures for a short time.
The animals don’t interact with each other either. They tirelessly work through their animation cycles and live in isolation. The detail of the fish types varies greatly. No wonder, when there’s over 500 animal species. Some creatures are incredibly detailed and have a high polygon density. They look photorealistic in the right light.
Other animals, on the other hand, are jarring with angular models and hazy textures.
In situations where many fish are on the screen at the same time, there are also often unsightly stutters, especially when scanning.
Endless Ocean Luminous will be released on 2 May for the Nintendo Switch. The game was provided to me by Nintendo for testing purposes.
Aside from the poor story mode, Endless Ocean Luminous is a lot of fun for the first few hours of play. I’m rewarded with some beautiful underwater worlds and exciting facts about various animal species. Essentially, it’s a virtual aquarium you can play in.
The more I discover of the underwater world, the more tedious the gaming experience becomes. The gameplay loop of Endless Ocean Luminous turns out to be simple and superficial, the rewards trivial and unsatisfying. The initial intrinsic motivation to learn more about the animal species of the Veiled Sea gives way to a purely extrinsically driven appeal that revolves solely around increasing levels and scores. Even the largely successful online mode doesn’t help much. It’s a shame, because at the core it has the potential to be an excellent game.
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My love of video games was unleashed at the tender age of five by the original Gameboy. Over the years, it's grown in leaps and bounds.
