Missing the charm of the first 2 games and there is less bio diversity. The auto generated maps can become very samey, I vastly preferred the hand crafted maps of the originals. The story might as well be non existent. But, playing online with friends carries this game. If you get in a vc with people it's fun to just explore the ocean. If you try to compare this to the other EO games it falls very flat, but on its own it's a fine game that could've maybe used more time in the oven but has strong online.

It's not on the same level as the first two. It's very grindy and based around procedural generation to find the things you need to fill out a Log and Mystery Tiles. It's got a lot of poorly laid out design elements and frustrating decisions...however I am still enjoying myself a lot?

It might be my love of Marine Biology but exploring with my friends is really fun even 15 hours in, filling out the logs together and progressing has just been chill. You'll load into a map not knowing what to expect and find Dinosaurs or super deep Abyss zones with so many cool creatures (Not sure why there are no Jellyfish or Octopodes but...sure).

Story mode is ass though, its basically 30 seconds to 2 minutes of a basic mechanic with a cutscene or sometimes just the cutscene and then you're back to the menu. I can't do the last Story mode mission without filling out the Board though so I guess we'll see what happens there.

Otherwise if you just want a kinda fun Marine exploration game to play with someone or even by yourself, it's not half bad.

Man. I love fish, I love animals, I love taking pictures of both of these, and I loved Endless Ocean on the Wii. This game is not like the originals. I started this game with a higher opinion of this than I think a lot of people, it was fun, kind of clunky mechanically, but the core was strong enough to be a good time. The more I played though, the more baffling decisions I encountered. There’s so many axed modes and features from the Wii game that this feels like if you ported the idea to an iPhone game more than a third entry of the Endless Ocean series, which sucks. I got my money’s worth out of it, and overall it’s fine, the features cut are things I could overlook if the game was as good as the originals and it’s just not. Not to mention, I have encountered so many glitches that halt progression, and even gotten softlocked out of the ending from what I can tell because one of the items I need to complete the 99 tasks you have to do to pad the game out to hell and back just didn’t spawn in the already rare randomly generated formation, all of this just makes me wonder how this game was okayed in the state it’s in, missing any of the typical “shine” from a Nintendo published title, with things that scream a lack of QA testing.
Overall the lack of an aquarium mode the change to randomly generated maps from set maps, making exploration a lot more tedious to get what you want, and just lack of good QOL features… makes the game all in all very disappointing.

been thinking a lot about the death of le third places and how any and all third places are now virtual unless ur like a supremely wealthy person or other rare exceptions. thinking about like why I connected so heavily to red dead redemption when I was like 13 wasn’t because it was a violent and fun video game but bc it allowed me to connect w a part of america that I was seeing vanish before my eyes in real time growing up, gentrification or whatever etc. seeing a true untouched (well obv colonization or whatever but u understand what I mean, as untouched as possible) area of america that was long gone before my parents were even born was v special. I enjoyed exploring every nook and cranny and collecting flowers more than I ever did progressing the story. that’s how I feel w this,, it’s smth incredibly special to me and I love how this blends reality + fantasy + the past into a very real and very alive virtual third place. idgaf about the story mode or the online community,, all I care about is being able to experience things I’ll never be able to irl,, things that have been long gone or experiences that are locked out for me as someone who is uhhh poor lol. every night for the past week my life has looked like this for me and my bf https://youtu.be/nB7MdrLWZOc?si=oOECS8-oHP8GjrSv

maybe ur all haters idk !!!!

Wow, okay! I have really conflicting feelings about this one.

Let's start with the good: graphics and atmosphere are awesome. Trailers didn't make the game justice in that regard. The decision to make randomly-generated maps each dive was great, especially for a online game. There's also a wide variety of animals, even extinct ones, with detailed descriptions for them, for those curious. And most importantly, it really excels in being a relaxing, contemplative game.

But it stops there. Arika and Nintendo had this really interesting concept in their hands and did nothing else with it.

I played a bit of the first Endless Ocean to understand what I was into with Luminous prior to its release, and I gotta say, the only upper hand Luminous has are the controls (pointer controls on the original are BAD in 2024). But other than that... The original 2007 game has a more diverse soundtrack, more content (including a boat where it serves as your base and even has some land animals), and, most importantly, a better integrated story.

Luminous's story mode is a collection of cutscenes that are a GRIND to unlock. You gotta go in two, three dives just to unlock a chapter. And said chapters are often just 3 minutes long. A full dive is 1 HOUR long. The story isn't anything special, although it has a nice message. Also really ain't a fan of Sera, the AI character, voiced by AI. Feels a bit tonedeaf for a huge company like Nintendo to use AI voices in their games, when the AI in voice acting discussion is at its peak. At the very least, they used AI voices for a AI character, so it's not that awful. HOWEVER, why couldn't they translate the game for more languages if that's the case? The game is sadly not available at all in my home language, Brazilian Portuguese.

And although it's basically a multiplayer game, you always feel you're by yourself. Communication is basically through emojis and emotes you barely ever use. And because you're in the sea, you barely pay attention to other player's customized outfits. I don't think anybody ever noticed I patterned by diver's outfit to look like Samus, and that's a shame.

And I feel the game is further hindered by... The Switch's own shortcomings. Better yet, Nintendo's own dumb ideas. As in pricing such a simple light game for $50, and making such a multiplayer game without built-in voice chat. Since the Switch overall does not have voice chat.

But, despite all these shortcomings, Luminous is still... really addictive for some reason? Like, I know it's barebones but I still see myself going back to it. Still haven't finished the story, but I can see myself grinding my way to finishing it, because, after all, the core experience is fun... Even if Nintendo and Arika didn't do much with it. My 2.5 stars is just that: it's a good experience... halfway completed.

All I'm saying is that, at its current state, maybe if they had released it for $30 (or hell, made it Nintendo Switch Online-exclusive for "free"), and if it had somehow voice chat, it'd be the PERFECT game to relax and wind down chatting with friends if it was cheaper and it had voice chat. I could even see it becoming a hit.

Maybe Arika would have a hit in their hands if they ditched their relationship with Nintendo with the franchise and released it on PC on something. In case you don't know, before Endless Ocean, Arika released two games on a franchise called "Everblue" on the PS2, that played similarly. The first Endless Ocean even reused assets from Everblue. Maybe it's time for a another sucessor on another platform?

My first dive into the Endless Ocean series, does Luminous swim above my expectations or sink well below them?

In the current era of game development where more and more large publishers are finding development so expensive that they have to focus almost all of their time and resources into big, familiar, and proven ip, it is really nice to see Nintendo and Akira work together again on an ip whose last game was around 15 years ago on Wii. Seeing Endless Ocean return in the HD era was a nice surprise even as someone whose only interaction with the series before this was testing the Wii discs I own to make sure they work.
So what exactly is Endless Ocean? Well it's basically an ocean exploration game where you swim around and scan fish as well as pick up treasures you find sparkling away and that's about it. Honestly I think that's fine, it makes for a really good relaxing experience in a similar vein to Animal Crossing. It does mean you'll probably feel burnt out by the gameplay if you're playing for multiple hours at a time but if you play for an hour or so at a time and take your time with the game then there's a pretty fun experience to be had exploring the ocean and learning about the many creatures that call it home. Like I didn't know there was a fish called Thanatos that just loves killing things! There's also extinct and prehistoric creatures in the game to find as well as unique species called UML that appear when you scan a certain number of creatures marked by an orange dot.
There isn't anything like oxygen management or aggressive fish to worry about here either, this is literally all about getting you into the ocean to explore and learn and it's a pretty chill and relaxing experience.

There's a few modes in this game to choose from. A story mode that sees you learning about a special Coral Reef that provides life to the world of Endless Ocean that is slowly dying for some reason. It's fine for what it is but the biggest issue with it is that to unlock more chapters, you have to scan a LARGE number of fish. Like Chapter 2-1 is something like 500 fish you need to scan which is pretty close to the 570+ unique species in the game so it's clear from the beginning that you just need to scan the same creatures over and over and over again to make progress in the story mode which isn't that fun when you get no real incentive for doing that.
Solo dives see you dive into a randomly generated ocean space where you can take your time to explore and scan all you want. This could've been a good fun mode if it wasn't a large random open space because for one person, you don't feel like you're making much progress on a map due to how big they are. That and structurally you'll be seeing the same kind of shipwrecks, crevasses, and caves over and over, it just becomes pretty repetitive, pretty quickly for solo players.
So the real focus of the game is actually the group dives via the online mode where you and friends or randoms can work together to explore a randomly generated ocean space like how you would in solo dives. The difference here is with multiple people, you can have the creatures and map of these places explored at a good pace and have the UML show up a few times during a session. People can tag items and creatures they find as well and it's another pretty well done online experience where you get a pretty friendly and welcoming time. These dives are also time limited to an hour which also helps to keep the mode from outstaying its welcome. This is what the game feels like it was designed for and where I got the most enjoyment from.

There's also a Mystery Board where if you find certain objects during your dives, you uncover one of 99 squares on the board, you can learn about an ancient civilization that called this ocean its home. It's a neat extra thing to give you a little bit more to do on your dives.

Endless Ocean Luminous is an unexpected but welcome return to the series. There's a relaxing and chill experience to be had here exploring the ocean and learning about many different creatures but if you're playing solo then it can get repetitive real quickly unfortunately. Online players will get the most fun out of this one.

It's been many years since I've played Endless Ocean/Forever Blue on Wii, so I was looking forward to this. It was fun at first. Then I did several more solo dives to make slow progress through the story. Something felt... off. So, I went back and... well, my memory was right.

Swimming around freely and looking at sea creatures will never not be a good time, but this is unfortunately quite barebones compared to Forever Blue 1 (can't speak for 2 as I haven't played it yet).

Just looking at it, it looks worse than on Wii. The UI is basic and bland and the water effects aren't as good, the music is boring. The ocean is completely randomly generated, what few setpieces and landmarks there are get repeated often, and all the fish just kind of swim around wherever, so there's rarely a true sense of discovery. The fish don't interact with you at all. You can't feed them, you can't pet them, they won't even swim away when you get near. There's no tools/equipment. There's no boat and no crew, just you, your boring AI companion, and one other equally boring guy. The "story" is really short cutscenes that require hours of mindless grinding.

And yeah, OK, sure, Forever Blue 1 was still a really basic, casual game, but it had a lot more stuff to sink your teeth into. It had some effort put into it. Luminous feels very cheaply made, and not in a charming artsy way, more in a "they really didn't care" kind of way. Personally, I don't care if there's a story or not, but the basic diving and cataloguing just doesn't compare to the first game. The multiplayer doesn't save it, either.

Still enjoyable on a basic level if you're really into marine biology, but sadly unremarkable.

I've been a fan of Endless Ocean for years. Not once did I imagine I'd actually get to see a new entry in the series, so I was shocked and delighted when Luminous was announced. Even when mediocre review scores started popping up after the game's release, I was undeterred. The first Endless Ocean game had pretty average reviews when it was released after all. So the day I got back from college after finishing my finals, I immediately picked up a copy. In retrospect, the warning signs were all there, but I am still bitterly disappointed to say that this is a poor, bland excuse for a game.

The first red flag is that, for the first time in the series, the titular ocean is truly endless. Each time you start a new dive, you are dropped in a randomized location that can contain a few different types of biomes and structures. Initially, it's fun to explore and see all the different things, but there's only so much room for variety. Within a few dives, you'll start seeing the same simplistic structures again and again. It makes me yearn for the wonderful diving locations in Endless Ocean 2, filled with unique touches and genuinely breathtaking set pieces. I would rather have a few well-crafted maps than an infinite amount of generated slop.

But the scenery isn't what you're going to be looking at in this sort of game, no, you're looking at the marine life. And as far as that goes, I am baffled by the decisions this game made. There are over 200 more species in this game than there were in Endless Ocean 2, but the variety feels much smaller. With the exception of some special encounters, Luminous has no pinnipeds, sirenians, otters, sea birds, modern marine reptiles except turtles, sea horses, jellyfish, nautiluses, horseshoe crabs, sea sponges, or sea slugs (all of which are present in at least one of the previous games). There are also significantly fewer cetaceans, upsetting to a whale enthusiast such as myself. So if they cut so many species out, how did the roster get beefed up to 578? The one thing I will praise the species roster on is the inclusion of tons of prehistoric marine life. That's new, and very cool to see. But as for the rest... well, there's 11 nearly identical species of tuna. That helps. This game has a lot of very similar looking fish species and when that isn't enough, it turns to good ol' palette swaps. Sometimes these swaps are fun references to special creatures from the other games. Sometimes these swaps are just slightly green tinted whale shark. I love fish and it doesn't need to all be charismatic megafauna to get me to care. But this game couldn't even do that right, because it removed zoom spots from the first two games. You're no longer able to zoom in on dedicated spots for small creatures to show up, instead you get to scan a few pixels that are allegedly a fire goby or something. You never get to appreciate the beauty of the smaller life you're finding because you can't see it most of the damn time. And speaking of not seeing! The title of the game, Luminous, is a reference to its most confusing decision. Every creature, prior to being manually scanned by you, is covered in a blue, silvery sheen that obscures their features. This makes it easy to tell which creatures you've already scanned or not, which is nice if you're just trying to get through the game. But maybe you want to use the diving game to, I don't know, relax and look at the fish?? No can do, you've gotta manually uncover every critter you want a good look at. There's no passively swimming around taking in the sights. If you want to look at fish, you've gotta earn it.

What can you do with those critters once you've scanned them anyway? Put them in an aquarium? Feed them? Train them? Pet them? Use a highlighter in the water near them? Blow a whistle at them? Nope. All of these options you had for interacting with creatures in the previous games are gone. You can take a picture if you want. That's it. Listen, we're already going for verrrryyy unrealistic with these games. No, you shouldn't be encouraging people to touch wildlife, but there is a magical glowing coelacanth the size of a car swimming past me. I think we can take an acceptable break from reality to actually. Have features in the game you can use.

There is no aspect of this game that doesn't fall far, far short of its predecessors. The gorgeous (if geographically out of place, seriously what the fuck was an Irish folk song doing in the Amazon) vocal tracks in the first two games are gone. The story in this game is so bare bones it might as well not exist. There are NES games with more complex plot points. The first two Endless Ocean games weren't exactly Moby Dick (aside from the presence of whales), but they had a real earnest charm about them, and did actually try to deliver an engaging experience. GG and his very real and cool American saying "Hasta la pizza!" live in my heart forever. Calling Sera and Daniel cardboard cutouts would be an insult to cardboard. I can't believe this game honestly tried to pull a fake-out death on us like anyone would give a shit. And how do you even access this mediocre story? Well, you can't progress organically through maps since there are infinite maps, so you just need to grind between bitty chunks of the story. Awkward, but not unbearable, ok. But to actually complete the game and finish the story? You gotta fill out the mystery board. The mystery board is a board with 99 squares on it that each represent a mystery of the ocean. Performing a task will unlock its square, and you need all 99 squares cleared to access the final chapter. A pain, but this must be where all the side quests and stuff went, right? Fun tasks for the mystery board? Solving riddles, doing guided tours, photographing something specific, something, anything we actually had in the last games? No, there's not hints about how to unlock the squares on them, you just need to wander around aimlessly until you open a randomly generated chest or scan a particular animal (one of them was even broken for the first weeks after launch and would softlock your game!). There's no side content to speak of. No unique encounters outside of a few brief story missions. The special creatures in this game, UMLs, are unlocked the same boring way every single time. They look cool at first, until you've seen them spawn at least a dozen times because did I mention that this game locks the ending behind finding an extremely rare variant of these UMLs three fucking times?? Imagine if a Pokemon game wouldn't let you see the credits until you caught a shiny. It took me almost 40 hours to find three variants and see the lackluster finale for myself. and that was with grinding with other people.

It's miserable seeing my beloved Endless Ocean dragging its carcass ashore in such a state. I didn't have zero fun, swimming around with people on multiplayer was cool, it was nice to zen out and scan fish for a while, and some of the new creature designs are very cool. Is that worth your time and money though when you could just play Endless Ocean 2? No. Go play Endless Ocean 2. That's the takeaway. No more ocean games, we've peaked. Everyone else go home.

An extremely disappointing follow-up to the Wii duology that preceded it over a decade earlier, and a very bafflingly-designed game in its own right even if you don't compare it to what came before. A series once defined by gripping narrative, exploration, and immersion has been reduced to a shell of its former self in the name of online multiplayer, which isn't even that great in of itself either. I never inherently expect sequels to be direct evolutions of the original as there's no one correct way to make a sequel, but this game definitely proves there's an incorrect way to do it. The vast amount of elements excluded from those entry doesn't hurt nearly as much as the blatant lack of attempt to make up for it with new ideas in any way. It is quite literally a game where you scan fish for hours on end in a series of maps that all look the exact same to unlock 5 minutes of story, and repeat. And if that wasn't bad enough, the end of the story is locked behind an absolutely monolithic grind to complete the "Mystery Board" which, due to the game's terrible randomly generated maps, isn't guaranteed you'll ever complete in a lifetime without looking up maps others have found online to fill in the missing pieces, and one of those entries requires a massive grind anyways. I'm not one to abandon games on a whim, I'm a JRPG veteran that has seen many, many hours of grinding through, but even this was too much for me. Just save yourself the headache and pick up Endless Ocean: Blue World on eBay, it's 80% cheaper and 1000% better than whatever this is.

Not worth getting. In short, this game is extremely boring and somehow made the ocean feel absolutely lifeless.

Endless Ocean 2 was one of my biggest childhood games growing up so I was looking forward to a new game in the series finally, but this game takes everything 2 did right and chucks it in the trash. The main thing to do in this game is explore and that’s just about the only thing to do, but exploration in this game is painfully boring with the randomly generated maps. The Veiled Sea is interesting for maybe about 30 minutes and then it quickly becomes apparent that the vast majority of what you get to see is the same flat seafloor over and over again with nothing new. I’m pretty sure each map has 1 designated “special” region, so you might get a map with a big iceberg you can enter, or a deep sea region, or a freshwater region. These are the most interesting places to explore but once you’ve explored them once, any magic they had quickly vanish once you roll them again. There’s nothing new to do in any of these regions. You’re either aimlessly scanning fish to meet scan quotas or aimlessly swimming to try and find 7 random arbitrary fish to spawn a UML or find something for the mystery board.

The story mode is one of the worst parts of the game. Each chapter is maybe 30 seconds to a minute of gameplay and you’re completely locked out of leaving the extremely limited story space you’re stuck in. Often times there isn’t even any marine life in these story segments despite all the coral around. It’s kind of jarring. And the story itself is laughable. The story mode as a whole is so shallow it could be entirely removed from the game and pretty much nothing would be lost.

And if you do want to actually complete the story mode, and you know, complete the game, it’s locked behind the ludicrous requirement of clearing the mystery board. 99 things you have to search for in randomly generated maps that aren’t even guaranteed to have what you might need. You can spend 2 hours searching 1 map and just find repeats for things you’ve already found. You can spend up to an hour trying to find random fish to spawn a UML only for it to be a repeat that you’ve already found. You can swim for up to 20 hours or more and never find the big circle that wants you to take a sawtooth shark to it. The game doesn’t even tell you what you have left to find to clear the board. The only thing to do in this game is swim and hope.

You’d think that at least discovering all the different species of fish would be interesting but this game butchers this as well. The game tries to throw pacific, atlantic, antarctic, deep sea, freshwater and prehistoric fish all in 1 big body of water and it makes no sense. It’s not immersive when you’re finding chinook salmon swimming alongside giant squid in a coral reef.

Rare creatures are especially dumbed down, you’ll find something like Thanatos and it’ll be a special moment - only to realize that there’s about 10 more of Thanatos on the same map. And repeat for every single legendary creature taken from Endless Ocean 2. Cocoa Maharaja, Gugnir, Apollo, Phantom, they’re all very common. One time I spawned into a new map for the first time and right next to me was a Singing Dragon. UML’s take the place of legendary creatures but they all have the same extremely disconnected requirement to spawn and before you can even make your way over to it you get a cutscene from across the map showing it in full detail.

You might think, that can’t be it, right? There has to be more. But besides playing the same gameplay loop in multiplayer, yes, that is literally it. Once again, you just swim, scan, and hope you find stuff in randomly generated maps.

Overall an extremely disappointing game and a waste of time to try and complete in full.

Endless Ocean: Luminous is fucking slop. I pirated it to see if was worth paying $50 for and it is not. Thank you, and good night.

Luminous does a good job making you feel a sense of wonder sometimes, but the Switch is so old that the graphics do not compel, and the gameplay does not compel. The game is at it's best when you're in a fugue state with no neural activity in your brain and your eyes are blurred out of focus and your brain tells you a sweet little lie that you're immersed in something. The reality is nothing is happening, and you will not remember the unremarkable visual stimuli happening across your screen the moment it passes. I am not angry, just disappointed.

Here are better games (* marking especially banger titles) if casual underwater exploration interests you:

Abzu *
Aquanaut's Holiday
Aquanaut's Holiday 2
Aquanaut's Holiday: Hidden Memories *
Endless Ocean
Endless Ocean: Blue World *
Everblue
Everblue 2

I'm enjoying it and I do have genuine fun doing shared dives, finding new creatures, going to the bottom of the ocean and discovering mysteries on the board but the story mode is a whole lotta nothin and being able to find all the creatures at random really detracts from the wonder I felt playing the first game. The larger and rarer (and in Thanatos' case, scarier) creatures don't excite me that much because they're everywhere, so nothing feels novel. That being said, customisation is fun and it is a nice, relaxing game if you view it objectively. Still, being in a series does inevitably warrant comparisons to previous games so I can't say it's not disappointing in some aspects.
In short, it's undeniably fun but don't go in expecting anything like the previous entries.

I have some good and some bad news.
Endless Ocean is back, but in the worst way possible.
in a way that the Story is so bad that it makes me personally want to apologies to the first for being rather minor and the second look like an untouchable masterpiece that can not be replicated. also makes me want to finish the game that I originally got to try to replace the game of my childhood with despite the cringe dialogue, Beyond Blue .
why?
because this is 80 percent "please buy the Online subscription , pretty please?" while the rest is playable to a non multiplayer, single player.
and oh boy I hate that.
now you may be wondering why I still give it a high rating despite my rage?
it plays like it did those years ago and I can't complain about that. I have even seen worse games that have unplayable glitches. I am looking at you , Cat Cafe Manager on the switch.
what I am more upset with is that that the only reason why Nintendo would even try to bring this back , not because of the fans who have missed this game but as a way to get people to buy and use the online subscription. I mean in the defense of Nintendo you gotta get money to keep up maintenance but also considering the stuff that Nintendo is infamous for like most company's that care for money then workers, I kind of don't trust that.
if their is one hope I have from all this, is that at least we could see maybe the other two get adapted for the switch. hopefully.
if their is one thing I can say, if you need a game to sort of simulate diving and seeing sea critters if you do not have the money then this game could be good to recommend for that.

Bueno si te lo tomas como un spin-off sin ambiciones de ser el juego del año.
Pero como tercer título de la saga... las comparaciones son odiosas pero como EO1 y EO2 no hay ningún otro juego y es así.
Muchas cosas a mejorar (ost inexistente, historia más bien sosa y nada de nada integrada con el gameplay, lo de los mapas random que le quita todo el atractivo a la exploración porque literalmente son las cuatro mismas zonas pero movidas de sitio, el farmeo de peces sin piedad, por decir algunas) y pocas que resalten como algo positivo (la variedad de animales en la enciclopedia está bastante bien... y poco más).
Quiero pensar que tenían una deadline de dos días porque si no es imposible concebir que el mismo team que hizo los dos juegos anteriores haya hecho semejante cosa pero en fin al menos es... un juego, supongo.

Me da pena decir esto, pero estoy un poco decepcionado con este juego. No es que sea malo, funciona bien si lo que quieres es un escaparate en el que ver peces bonitos y descubrir especies de las que probablemente nunca habías oído hablar, pero el resto de la experiencia es bastante mediocre.

Hay una notable falta de la personalidad de los anteriores, no solo por lo poco emocionante que es descubrir especies nuevas una vez ya llevas varias inmersiones, sino por la sensación de poco cuidado que da todo.

La interfaz es cutre, la voz generada por IA da una sensación aún más desagradable, la calidad de los modelos de los peces es inconsistente (algunos son preciosos y otros parecen de hace dos generaciones) y los entornos son bastante sosos en su mayoría.

La idea en sí no me parece mala y es agradable echar el ratito viendo peces sin más preocupaciones, pero no puedo decir que esto sea un buen juego, lamentablemente.

Incluso el modo historia, que sin ser nada del otro mundo es totalmente inofensivo, está lastrado por unos requisitos de progreso francamente absurdos.

Una pena que la franquicia haya vuelto así cuando podría haber sido algo mucho más interesante.

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It's such a shame to say this, but I'm a bit disappointed with this game. It's not bad, it works if you're looking for a showcase to look at pretty fish and discover species you've probably never heard of, but the rest of the experience is kinda mediocre.

There's a noticeable lack of the charm the previous games had, not just because of how unnoteworthy it feels to discover new species after you've been in a few dives, but for the overall feel of unfinishedness everything has.

The interface is bland, the AI-generated voice makes it all the more disagreeable, the fish model quality is inconsistent (some are gorgeous and some feel from a couple generations ago) and the environments are mostly pretty boring.

The idea itself isn't bad and it's nice to spend some time looking at fish without a care in the world, but I can't say this is a good game, unfortunately.

Even the story mode, which is unremarkable but harmless, is held back by some frankly absurd progress requirements.

It's such a shame this franchise came back like this when it could've been something more interesting.

Maaaan. I was so excited to see Endless Ocean back when it showed up in a Nintendo Direct. I hadn't played it myself because I kind of checked out of console games during the Wii generation, but I did watch Zorak's LPs of the first game and Blue World ages ago. (Those may have aged extremely poorly, I haven't watched them in years and a lot of things I remember enjoying from the old days of Something Awful have aged poorly.) I was really excited to have the opportunity to actually play one on the Switch, both because it's a weird, unexpected series I wanted to support and also because holy shit, there was an anomalocaris in the Direct trailer! I love prehistoric freaks!

Listen. The edutainment factor here is good. I love the prehistoric freaks. I love learning about fish via the logs. They have my good buddy sacabambapsis. Do they have hallucigenia? Do they have the tulley monster? I don't know, I burned out on the rest of the game. Endless Ocean: Luminous eschews all the flavor of the original two games in favor of some weird multiplayer raid mode experience, I guess?

In multiplayer mode, you're dumped in a big procedurally generated square and you and some other people have to go on a scavenger hunt for fish that ostensibly have Strange Biomarkers which really just boil down to making your sensor turn orange and your controller vibrate. You can't actually communicate with the other people by the way, outside of tagging things and maybe emoting if you're in their field of view long enough. If you're in the middle of scanning fish you don't have registered or trying to take a picture of fish you don't have in your guide when the scavenger hunt ends, you get interrupted by a cutscene revealing the Ocean Cryptid you're looking for. I like the Ocean Cryptids, I think they're cool, but it's all RNG as to which one the map deigns to give you. If you get close enough to another player to become Dive Buddies you can see what they've tagged and maybe collect stickers from them, but if they leave you can no longer do that!

So if that's multiplayer, how's singleplayer? Honestly, a lot more chill, but also more frustrating in a lot of ways. Good luck mapping an entire procedurally generated ocean square! Good luck tracking down those Special Animals! At least you won't get interrupted by cutscenes and it's easier to find New Creatures because they haven't been scanned by someone else. It's really weird how it interacts with the story mode, though, because story mode has so little effort put into it that it feels like a glorified tutorial. But in order to unlock more story mode, you have to scan more fish and perhaps miss out on features you can try? I didn't know until the story mode kind of directed me towards it that. there was an in-game photo dictionary for the fish. that you could complete. and so I missed a bunch of fish pictures I could have taken. that I have no idea when I'll see them again because everything is fucking randomly generated in this game.

And then there's the final story mode entry where you have to clear out the entire Mystery Tablet. Which, like, why bother. The story mode's Nothing. They replaced our beloved Mission Control girls with an AI. AI is truly taking all of our jobs! You gotta, like, save Coral Yggdrasil or whatever with the help of Daniel, who is a loser. But anyway the mystery tablet is all about finding RNG bullshit like treasures and Ocean Cryptids and solving riddles about what critter you need to guide to a disc that you can't actually mark on your map in any way so you just have to remember where it is. The critters will also potentially leave you for no discernible reason on the way there. Was I going too fast? Did the turtle get stuck on geometry? I have no idea. Which is balls since this is the only way to interact with the critters. Like it's cute to have a giant isopod ride on your oxygen tank. I LOVE that. But to what end?

Listen. I think there's a time and place for procedural generation. You got your roguelikes. I like Hades okay. I liked the original Dragon Quest Monsters alright. I like Pokemon Mystery Dungeon (even if I'm not as big on the gameplay). But between the procedural generation here and the dogshit story mode I'm just like. Where is the humanity here? The old games' stories weren't anything special but they were like, there. If you found a ship at the bottom of the ocean it'd probably have a story to it. There was a sense of progression in that if you wanted to dive to billionaire-crushing depths you had to find a way to do it through the story, you know? I mean, I enjoyed diving into a horrifying underwater cave with no actual threat to my life, but eh. Ehhhh. It's fun to see a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean, but you see the same ship a bunch of times and it's just There. It's an environmental asset. It doesn't have a story to it, the RNG just decided you get to see it this time. You have to roll the dice if you want to see something with a whalefall or an iceberg or an undersea temple. You can have like five of the same legendary cryptid from previous games in the same map.

I like to hope that this is just a bizarre attempt to chase trends and that Arika will get another chance to make a more traditional Endless Ocean game at some point. I'll admit, I did have enough fun that I debated whether or not I wanted to give this another half star, but the more I played it the more I was frustrated by what it could have been as opposed to what it was.

There aren't even penguins in this game, for Christ's sake. I don't know, maybe just give us some insane story about time travel and let us poke a tulley monster. I'd love that game. Please give me that game.

It would take a lot of work to convince me that this game was not a hit piece to prove that smaller and older franchises are not viable.

I wrote some shit down below that I'm sure has been said elsewhere and better, but I already wrote it so I'm not deleting it. I'm gonna talk about something else that I'm speculating on.

Did they want this game to be good? Let's think about this. The Endless Ocean franchise hasn't had a game since 2009, then all of a sudden (13 years later) we hear there's gonna be a new game in a few months. That's exciting and surprising for fans of the series, like me. Can't wait (although background alarm bells were already ringing for me [I never trusted the "roguelite map," Thanatos' model looks so bad, and I think the look of the characters is so much lamer than what we had in the last games, and all of that was shown in the first trailer]).

So next the game comes out, and it's got less features and mechanics than the previous games. How come? Were we running low on development time? I hope not, it'd already been over a decade since the last game, you may as well take your time with this one. Was it a problem with the budget? I REALLY hope not, as if that's true you are charging $50 for a game you didn't quite finish (also, Endless Ocean Blue World cost $30 back when it released in the US in 2010).

Alright, so I've given them the benefit of the doubt that the game did not run out of time or money to make sure Endless Ocean 3 had all of the bells and whistles from the first two games. Which leads me to the conclusion that they had simply never planned on making Endless Ocean Luminous as complex of a game as Endless Ocean 1 or 2. They had always planned on making less and selling it at a higher price.

Ok, why would they do that? Corporate greed following the general trend of seeking higher profits for less effort? Yeah, sure. But I also think that they wanted this game to do badly. Or at the very least, they don't particularly mind if it does.

So there's a simple way to group the people who play Endless Ocean Luminous into 2 categories: people who have played previous Endless Ocean games and people who are new to Endless Ocean games. I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume that people who have played previous Endless Ocean games are gonna be disappointed with this one more often than not. The Endless Ocean games are cult classics and here comes this new entry that doesn't even do as much. The aforementioned "cult" of these "cult classics" will not like that. Which means that the group of people who were most likely to buy this game is now a lot smaller.

As for the new players, you just need to win them over with the fun and engaging gameplay loop! But, oh wait. There are three things to do in this game. And you must do them hundreds of times. But, who knows, maybe enough of the new players will like the game anyway.

Ok, so really, how can I believe any of this? I think this game was sort of a test. If it was popular, cool, that means "less effort with higher price tags" can work and the executives can take that idea and run with it. If it fails, the execs get to go "ahh, we should've known! these old video game franchises are so risky, it's probably best that we just stick a couple of proven franchises and non-franchise IP's." And instead of a big variety of games being produced, we see less and less of these smaller franchises, and more individual games that get shuttered after one game, because "we tried doing sequels and reboots of games once before and everybody said it sucked!" Like how Netflix cancels shows ASAP.

I really just struggle to imagine that this game was made in good faith as an Endless Ocean game when it clearly does not compare well to the other Endless Ocean games.

Here's that shit I wrote back before I decided to just write my little conspiracy theory instead:

The first Endless Ocean in 14 years and it's so much less than either of its prequels (except for the price!). No more hub world in between dives. No more walking on small islands or beaches, or even poking your head above the water, because all of that would require designing and programming an entirely different kind of gameplay, and that's a whole lot of work so why bother? No more specifically and intentionally put together maps, now it's just generated! <-that's where I got fed up with talking about the lack of content and made my pivot