Endless Ocean Luminous Review – Soothing Yet Shallow Waters

With the Switch slowly winding down, Nintendo has been looking to tide hardcore fans over by diving deep into its back catalog to resurface long-neglected franchises like Mario vs. Donkey Kong, Advance Wars, and Another Code, but Endless Ocean may be the most unexpected revival yet. Beginning on the Wii as a perhaps over-literal expression of Nintendo’s 2010s-era “blue ocean” strategy, the series got two entries in quick succession then disappeared, for good many assumed. Well, surprise! Nearly 15 years after we were last graced with an entry in the series, Endless Ocean Luminous is sailing our way.

Is Endless Ocean Luminous a refreshing dip? Or is it time to leave Nintendo’s blue ocean behind permanently? Strap on your snorkel and let’s dive in!

If you’re new to the franchise and expect Endless Ocean Luminous to be packed with undersea perils and derring-do, well, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong place. Endless Ocean is about swimming around at your own pace and looking at fish. Lots and lots of fish! And dolphins! And whales! And this time around, a large variety of ancient extinct sea creatures. You maneuver your scuba diver avatar around until you happen across some underwater critters, then press the L-button to scan them. You don’t need to be particularly precise about this -- simply hold down the button to potentially scan dozens of creatures in your vicinity at a time.

And that’s about all there is to it. Aside from your scanning ability and a camera to take pictures, you have no tools to speak of. No food to lure fish, gizmos to alter their behavior, or weapons to defend yourself. The latter isn’t required as none of the creatures in Endless Ocean Luminous pose any threat, not even the sharks or dinosaur-like aquatic reptiles. Oxygen, temperature, underwater currents -- you don’t have to worry about any of them. It really is just swimming around and looking at fish.

If Endless Ocean Luminous were the first entry in a series, I might be more willing to let its extreme simplicity go. To write it off as a creative choice. But this isn’t the first Endless Ocean game, and it’s hard not to feel like something has been taken away when the previous entry in the series had things like aggressive creatures, defensive weapons, and a variety of other tools to use. A number of other features from past Endless Ocean titles, including an upgradable and customizable island hub and aquarium, have also been given the boot. Luminous is strictly about the diving.

Endless Ocean Luminous essentially has two new ideas around which the game is built – procedural generation and large-scale 30-person online play. While past entries in the series offered bespoke maps focused on specific environments, every time you dive into the “Veiled Sea” in Luminous you can choose to generate a new randomized map. In multiplayer, you’ll have an hour to explore this map, while in solo play, your progress is saved when you finish a dive session, so you can return to that map later if you so choose. If you want to spin up a new map on your next solo session, your previous map will be erased, although in a wonky “only Nintendo” solution, you can retrieve favorite past maps by entering a lengthy 16-digit “Dive-Site ID” code (your progress on that map will be reset). Maps you play on during online sessions will not initially come with a Dive-Site ID, although you can earn one by uncovering a certain amount of the map during your session.

While the themed maps of past Endless Ocean games have gone away, each procedurally generated map in Luminous incorporates a randomized assortment of biomes and landmarks. In addition to areas featuring salt, brackish, and fresh water, deep sea trenches, underwater caverns, ancient ruins, and more intermingle. How do all these things logically exist in a single, connected map, you ask? Well… the game basically just says “It’s magic!” and leaves it at that.

Maps are fairly sizable and exploring them can be engaging in a simple sort of way. Finding a tunnel that leads to a cistern full of new species or a series of ancient ruins overrun with strange extinct creatures can be satisfying. That said, it feels like so much more along these lines could have been done. Endless Ocean Luminous’ randomized maps very rarely feel like living ecosystems. The creatures never seem to interact with each other, they just float there or swim along set patterns waiting for you to scan them. It doesn’t often feel like you’re asked to do any environmental puzzle solving or sleuthing in order to find a particular sea creature, as there’s not much logic to how they’re distributed. Those “Ah-ha!” moments where you discover something that feels hidden are rare – most of the time, you’re just systematically swimming around scanning whatever you happen to see.

Luminous is no great shakes visually, either. The deep sea environments are quite dated and you can tell the developers were happy to use underwater murkiness to keep the draw distance close. Despite this, the game’s frame rate still chugs at times. The quality of the sea creatures themselves varies, with some looking quite realistic while others are notably chunky and low-poly. Overall, the sense of wonder and beauty you'd hope for from a game like this is only occasionally evidenced.

There is a simple mission structure in place in Endless Ocean Luminous, which repeats on each randomized map. You'll be tasked with finding a series of creatures with "unusual biometric signs,” which can take a while, as they just look like regular fish until you scan them and can only be found by following your radar when you pass near them by chance. Find all these unusual creatures and a UML (Unique Marine Lifeform) appears on the map for a limited time. Find this quirky, one-of-a-kind creature, and your official objectives for that map are done, although, of course, you can keep searching for new fish and treasure.

As mentioned, all of this can be done with up to 29 other people online. During an online play session with PR reps and other journalists, I found the connectivity to be solid. Still, as is usually the case with Nintendo, the online experience comes with many limitations. There's no matchmaking, and you can only join or invite other players to a dive with a six-digit code you have to share outside the game itself. Once in the water, there's no voice chat (something that was a feature on the Wii), with players only getting a limited number of emotes and tags to communicate. Granted, there are some benefits to playing online, most notably the fact that everyone shares progress, meaning players can uncover the map and get through missions much more quickly. Really, it feels like the game’s mission structure was designed for multiple players.

In addition to diving on randomized maps solo or with friends, Endless Ocean Luminous has a story mode. Typically, I talk about the story at the beginning of my reviews, but it hardly bears mentioning here. Past Endless Ocean stories weren't exactly Shakespeare, but this one, about preserving a "World Coral" to keep the planet from dying, barely even exists. Most missions are extremely simple, with some literally just being non-interactive cutscenes. Story missions are also gated behind milestones that require hours of regular dives to achieve, giving away what the game’s devs really want you to focus on.

Given its reliance on procedural generation, Endless Ocean Luminous is technically endless, but after around 12 to 15 hours, I completed the majority of the story missions and my fish-o-pedia and started to feel like I was bumping up against the limits of the meaningful experiences the game has to offer. The final bits of the game are locked behind completing a "mystery board" with challenges so random and poorly explained they'll test the patience of even the most chill of virtual divers. Sure, I could keep playing to find the handful of remaining creatures and grab a few outstanding trinkets and achievements, but without the more interesting sidequests and extra content of past Endless Ocean games, I’m not sure how invested I am in diving for those final pearls.

This review was based on a copy of Endless Ocean Luminous provided by publisher Nintendo.

5.5

Wccftech Rating

Endless Ocean Luminous

Endless Ocean Luminous

Endless Ocean Luminous offers some agreeable laid-back moments, but a lack of depth and complexity, even compared to the 15-year-old Wii entries in the series, waters down the game’s appeal. Endless Ocean Luminous was always destined to be a niche product, but even the diehards may find the game’s narrow focus on procedural generation and unexceptional online play over almost anything else a bit fishy.