Review of Endless Ocean: Luminous.

Endless Ocean: Luminous deserves credit for one thing: there isn’t much like it.

The latest Nintendo Switch exclusive game, courtesy of Nintendo and developer Arika, is an unconventional twist that has challenged my notions of what constitutes a game as “good.” That’s because Endless Ocean: Luminous doesn’t have much at all; It’s basically just a game about swimming around and scanning fish.

To be clear, this isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. Endless Ocean: Luminous For the first few hours, the game combines a completely relaxed atmosphere with a strong sense of mystery, but the game’s single-player structure occasionally feels like it’s designed to waste time. A promising multiplayer mode might give it some legs, but the point is: you’re better Really If you want to make the most of it, take a look at sharks, for example Bright.

Endless Ocean: Luminous Plot

This section will be short because, frankly, Endless ocean it was never about history.

For those who don’t know: Endless ocean It started out as a few fairly popular Wii games before laying dormant for almost 15 years and only now resurfacing in the final days of the Switch. Each game has a thin veil of plot that gives some context to your diving activities, but that’s not the main appeal – at least not for me.

Anyway, you play a faceless diver whose job is to document the various sea creatures and other treasures found in a fictional region called the Veiled Sea. All of Veiled Sea’s unique qualities scream out for a video game setting; It changes randomly with every dive, you can find fish from all over the world in it and none of them show any hostility towards humans.

The early parts of the story mode do hint at some more interesting ideas, such as ancient dead civilizations, but are immediately undermined by mechanical gatekeeping. Endless Ocean: Luminous Blocks progress in Story Mode based on how many scans you have completed in total. Therefore, sometimes you have to take a solo dive outside of the story and scan things for a while just to complete the next mission.

I can’t lie: this completely killed my interest in ever finishing the story mode and seeing what, if any, more exciting concepts it plays around with later. This happens earlier in the game than it should, and honestly feels like a way to get more engagement out of the player on the cheap. Not a fan.

Endless Ocean: Luminous mechanics

It’s unfortunate that story mode is in Bright comes to a halt at points because the game as a whole leaves a pretty sweet and unique first impression.

On my first few dives I was able to fully see the vision. From a mechanical perspective, you can literally just swim and scan. It’s wonderfully simple and eminently accessible, even for people more interested in the sea than video games. Other than a very small and unnecessary technique to maximize swimming speed, there are almost no nuances at all.

To be clear, I don’t think any of this is the case bad. It’s just that Endless ocean was never interested in being anything other than what it is. This series was created during Nintendo’s Wii heyday of making games that appeal to non-gamers – and it shows. This is a game where fish don’t attack you and you can’t die.

The thing is, it works too. These first freedives feel a little magical, as you can easily spend an hour exploring a randomly generated seed of the Veiled Sea, scanning marine life ranging from the real and everyday to the fantastical and technically extinct. Occasionally you’ll find artifacts near wreckage or just alone on the ocean floor, but that’s not as exciting as finding a great white shark for the first time.

So it’s a shame that by my fifth or sixth dive I felt like some of the mystery had been solved. I found it surprisingly difficult to find fish that I hadn’t scanned yet (even though there are hundreds in the game), and the rewards for scanning started to wear off for me. These usually include access to later parts of the story and cosmetic upgrades for your diver. Bleh.

Luckily, there is a solution to the monotony Endless Ocean: LuminousSolo Experience: Multiplayer. Bright offers shared dives for up to 30 players online, and while I was only able to do about an hour of it during the pre-release review phase, it was light my favorite part of the game.

In multiplayer, everything works the same except there are up to 29 other people nearby. Players can mark their discoveries with unlockable emojis, interact via an extensive list of emotes, or simply work together to uncover the entire map. Small environmental missions give everyone something to work towards, but if you want you can also just goof around with strangers for an hour.

I found the experience extremely relaxing and unlike anything I’ve done in a multiplayer game in a while. The lack of voice chat actually added to the experience too, as I never had to deal with someone getting mad at me for not playing objectives or whatever. Bright is not such a game in his opinion.

Endless Ocean: Luminous graphic

As with any Switch exclusive Bright must function without the limitations of graphics hardware that was outdated when the Switch launched seven years ago. Considering that, it does a pretty good job.

What the environments and animals lack in detail, they make up for in readability. Environmental landmarks and rare fish are easy to spot from a reasonable distance, even in the murky depths occasionally found in the Veiled Sea. While these depths are harmless to the player, they effectively enhance the atmosphere of Luminous and often make the ocean feel oppressive and eerie.

Endless Ocean: Luminous Soundtrack and audio

I’ll keep it short. The music inside Bright is mostly atmospheric and unobtrusive. It’s the kind of thing you’d hear while taking a bubble bath or falling asleep. I don’t hate it, but I won’t put it on my running playlist either.

The only audio problem I have Bright is that the fictional AI companion that gives you instructions in story mode appears to be a text-to-speech program rather than a human voice actor imitating one. For a first-party Nintendo game, it sounds cheap and incongruous.

Endless Ocean: Luminous Challenge and difficulty

As I already mentioned, Bright Basically, it doesn’t pose any significant challenge. It’s a game about making yourself comfortable with a bottle, wine or food and watching whales. I like that, but you might not.

Endless Ocean: Luminous Performance

Endless Ocean: Luminous runs at a fairly consistent 30 frames per second on the Switch and I didn’t notice any significant errors in my time with it. There are no complaints here.

Is Endless Ocean: Luminous is it worth buying?

At $50, Endless Ocean: Luminous is just under full price, but still somewhere above what you might consider “budget.” Regardless, this is not a traditional game and probably shouldn’t be viewed through a traditional dollar-to-hour lens.

If you like the sea and the hundreds of strange little freaks that live in it then Endless Ocean: Luminous is about as close as you can get with any recent video game. The basic acts of diving and scanning are fun to a certain extent, and where that point lies depends greatly on how much you care about marine wildlife.

I just find it hard to recommend it Bright solely based on his solo offerings. The multiplayer mode with 30 divers is promising and could provide hours of (ideally stoned) fun for a group of friends or strangers, but I didn’t have nearly as much fun playing the game alone.

At least Endless Ocean: Luminous exists, however. We probably need more games like this and fewer gigantic open-world RPGs.

subjects
Nintendo Nintendo Switch