Nintendo is certainly keeping gamers on their toes with all the possible surprise releases in 2024, which many believe will be the last year of the Switch. With titles such as Another Code: Recollection and Mario vs. Donkey Kong, the focus on remakes and remasters of lesser-known series means that almost anything could be right around the corner. Endless Ocean Luminous, the third part of the Endless Ocean franchise, is another title that many probably did not expect. More than 14 years have passed since the Wii release of the previous installment, Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep (Endless Ocean 2: Blue World in North America). After so many years away, is this a series worth diving into?
Endless Ocean Luminous has three different modes: Story, Shared Dive and Solo Dive. Story Mode primarily serves to familiarize you with the gameplay mechanics and setting. As a new diver, your mission is to scan the various aquatic organisms that inhabit the Veiled Sea, collecting the light emanating from them in order to save the declining World Coral. You are assisted by Sera, your faithful AI companion, and occasionally joined by another human diver, Daniel, as you explore and uncover the various mysteries surrounding the Veiled Sea.
Despite the vague promise of a deeper mystery, Story Mode is unfortunately quite disappointing. Some chapters are just two-minute cutscenes with no accompanying gameplay and contribute little to the progression of the narrative. After completing a chapter, in order to unlock the next one, you will need to scan the creatures a certain number of times, and the number will be higher and more challenging as you progress. The end result is a disjointed, vague experience that often feels anticlimactic due to the amount of time you’ll have to invest to witness it all, but to its credit, it’s very clear from the get-go that this isn’t the main focus of the game. .
Fortunately, most of your time in Endless Ocean Luminous will be spent on Shared Dives and Solo Dives. In these modes, you’ll be placed in a procedurally generated map and left to your own devices, free to play the game at your own pace. These maps are huge, and while you can go from end to end relatively quickly, it will take you several hours to explore them in their entirety. You get very little guidance or help from the game on how to make the most of your time here; as you explore, the map will slowly reveal itself, and you’re given a percentage of completion for both the map and the sea life you’ve managed to scan as your only indicator of your progress. To aid in your exploration, you have a radar that will flash when you are near a rescue location. This can make it difficult to navigate at times, and especially when it comes to rescues, you can search the area for tiny flashes of light that are hard to make out in the surroundings. However, overall I feel that this hands-off approach facilitates a more relaxed pace of play and allows you to discover things in a way that feels more natural than if they were clearly marked on your map.
As is often the case with open-world titles, the game’s focus is more on exploration and discovery than collection. With that said, Endless Ocean Luminous is a bit too free-flowing at times, and this is especially evident with the Istery Board, a 99-square board you’ll gain access to at the start of the story. This is an integral part of completing the story mode and you get absolutely no instructions on how to unlock the squares. After fifteen hours of play, I’ve only managed to complete a third of the Istery Board, and that’s been purely by chance by collecting certain items, discovering little bits of lore in very noticeable (but easily missed given the size of the map) boxes, or stumbling across hidden places. Since these are all random items, collecting them depends more on luck than skill, which can be extremely frustrating. Hints on a mystery board about what you need to do to unlock that square, or an additional function on the map or radar to mark the target, would make the process less arbitrary, without compromising that element of discovery.
The different types of terrain and environments within the Shared and Solo Dive maps are also selected from a limited range of options, meaning you’ll experience most of what the game has to offer within the first few hours. The location of these miniature biomes may vary each time you start a new map, but the species that populate them will be almost exactly the same, and after you’ve explored them a few times, they start to lose their appeal. The thrill of discovering a dark cave filled with prehistoric life is much less impressive the third time around, and it can be disappointing to explore a brand new map only to find you’ve seen most, if not all, of its signature features in an earlier dive. But there is still plenty of content that gives the game a high degree of replayability and makes it suitable for both short and long play sessions. You’ll never know exactly what you’ll find when you dive into the game, and the lack of information makes each new discovery all the more enjoyable. However, this isn’t a game I’d recommend for completionists, as the random nature makes new discoveries come much more slowly after the first few dives.
The main attraction, of course, is the variety of marine life you’ll find as you explore. An incredible 578 different species are present in the game; freshwater and marine fish, mammals, crustaceans and even a few prehistoric and mythical creatures are waiting to be discovered. Registering them in your journal is as easy as holding down the L key while they’re in your line of sight, scanning them in a way that reminded me of the Metroid Prime series. You can also photograph them using a range of different filters and take them with you as you explore for a limited time. Unfortunately, the different species don’t interact with each other on the map, or they behave very differently, listlessly swimming around in a small area waiting for you to discover them. However, this in no way detracts from the impressive variety within the game, and each creature has a detailed journal entry, giving you some insight into its behavior and history.
Despite occasional lulls in engagement, I found Solo Dives to be an extremely satisfying experience, full of unexpected surprises. There may be too much blank space on the maps at times, but certain areas are miniature maps un to themselves, filled with various species to catalog and salvage to collect, and are never more than a few minutes away from your current location. It’s easy to get lost in the network of caves or stumble upon a hidden area. Because the creatures are shown almost entirely to scale, I found myself more than once discovering multiple species while scanning a group of fish or an area that seemed to have nothing in it. On top of that there’s a chance you’ll come across a rare species or anomalies that, once you’ve found the chosen number on the map, will result in a UML (Unidentified Marine Lifeform) appearing somewhere on the map.
Shared Dive follows almost the same format as Solo Dive, with a group of players being placed on the same map at different starting locations. In order to communicate with another player, you will first need to find them, after which they will be registered as a Dive Buddy. Then you’ll be able to share map progress, see each other’s bookmarks, and teleport to each other’s location at any time. The lack of voice or text communication makes it difficult to truly coordinate your efforts, but it makes exploring a much easier and generally more satisfying process, especially if you’re more interested in finding points of interest as quickly as possible. Up to 30 players can explore the map at the same time, and while I wasn’t able to test the feature at full capacity before launch, I found the Shared Dive I participated in to be an almost completely different experience than exploring the map alone. Despite the limited communication, there is a great sense of collaboration, and this makes the process of discovering points of interest and tracking unusual marine life to make the UML appear a much faster process. Most importantly, I had no performance issues during the event, which makes this game very appealing if you have friends to play with.
Endless Ocean Luminous favors a muted color palette and I felt that because of this its scenery often fails to impress, often appearing flat and lacking in detail, even on an OLED screen. In manual mode, it can be especially difficult to make out what details there are in more cluttered environments. However, this is perhaps more by design than a lack of quality, and the Veiled Sea’s natural opacity makes drawing distance and the lack of significant textures in the environment a non-issue. Also, thankfully, I didn’t encounter any noticeable pop-ups while exploring. The various creatures you’ll encounter are mostly easy to spot thanks to the blue (or in the case of rare creatures, yellow) glow they give off until you scan them. Most are rendered in a realistic scale compared to the player and have excellent (albeit somewhat limited) animations, giving the game a satisfying degree of realism. When viewed up close, both in-game via the camera and in the creature record, the models also have an impressive amount of detail. The game has some excellent particle and light effects at night that help give the environment a different atmosphere without compromising visibility. While loading times can noticeably increase when entering a map, the game runs smoothly as you explore, making this a pretty enjoyable experience overall.
The game has a light, ambient soundtrack that, while it doesn’t detract from the experience, adds a little to it, and it seemed to stop and start at random times while I was playing. The only sound that could be heard was often the rhythmic swimming of my player character, which was more unnerving than relaxing as I traversed the empty spaces of the Veiled Sea. An option to adjust the frequency of the music, not just the volume, would be welcome. Endless Ocean Luminous also has extensive AI voice work, which is both to its credit and its detriment. Within Story Mode, this feels unnatural and awkward, as the AI tries (rather unsuccessfully) to capture human emotions and mannerisms, while your human companion, Daniel, is limited to unintelligible gurgling sounds. However, every entry in the Creature Log is fully expressed by the AI, making it a completely understandable design choice in light of the vast amount of information presented in the game.
As long as you don’t approach it with a completed mindset, Endless Ocean Luminous is a relaxing and generally fulfilling experience that’s perfect for short solo games or group dives with friends. The limited variety in the procedurally generated maps means the novelty of exploration is likely to wear off long before they catalog everything, and the story mode is disappointingly sparse and disjointed, but what it lacks in depth it more than makes up for in sheer volume of content. If you want to try something with a slightly different flow, this might be worth diving into.
6.5/10
A copy of Endless Ocean Luminous was provided by Nintendo UK for the purposes of this review