Inspired by the announcement of long-awaited but much-unexpected third game in the series Endless Ocean Luminous at the February 2024 Nintendo Direct and something that I perhaps should have posted during the Tales of the Sea Giveaway that was going on at round the same time, here’s the Wii-era cult classic Endless Ocean.
Admittedly, I’m not entirely sure how to handle this recommendation, given that the original Endless Ocean games are almost twenty years old at this point and exclusive to a system that was discontinued in 2013. So, there’s a certain logistical difficulty to actually playing them.
Though, for what it’s worth, even a preliminary, minimal-effort eBay search turned up this:
Now, I’m not saying you have to spring for a Wii of your own or copies of the Endless Ocean games, but you don’t really have any other choices to legitimately play them at this point.
Of course, you could still experience them by, for example, watching a stream of the games. In fact, I’ve been watching this delightful stream of the second Endless Ocean game by a YouTube channel called Mandy’s Gaming Garden:
Quick administrative matter: in Japanese, the games are known as Forever Blue, a reference to their status as spiritual successor to developer Arika‘s previous game Everblue. Further complicating things is the fact that the North American and European releases having numerous but fairly minor localisation differences.
Most notably is the fact that the second game is Blue World in North America and Adventures of the Deep in Europe.
On top of that, some of the human characters, unique named animals, and places have different names between versions. In the first game, your sidekick’s name is spelled with a K in North America (making her Katherine; like Kat Darkstone) but spelled with a C in Europe (Catherine).
Funnily enough, she actually kinda looks like Kat Darkstone with glasses…
Admittedly, there’s not actually much gameplay in the Endless Ocean games and not very much going in terms of stakes. They’re a bit more involved than old-school point-and-click Adventure Games and you are exploring in real-time. If anything, they can probably be described as Marine Biologist Simulators: you spend the game scuba diving, exploring various environments (different parts of the same sea in the first game; all over the world in the second), making friends with dolphins, and basically learning about fish.
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
There’s very little urgency to the games, you’re technically limited by your Oxygen supply, but that’s almost never an issue in the first game and becomes less of an issue in the second as you progress through the game.
Both games do have storylines and sidequests (more on that later), though the main appeal is just dive in (I’m not sure if I’m making a pun here, or not), explore some cool locales, learn about fish, and relax to soundtracks provided by New Zealand’s greatest export Hayley Westenra in the first game— her version of the song Prayer being especially beloved by the fanbase — and female Irish folk music supergroup and PBS mainstays Celtic Woman in the second.
And, yet, despite all that, there’s actually a not-insubstantial amount of legitimately scary stuff in the games — particularly the second.
Photo by Daniel Torobekov on Pexels.com
The scariest parts of the first game are basically a theme park haunted house where things just look scary but can’t actually do anything to you. The second game features a handful of aggressive creatures that can hurt you, though all they actually do is smack you around with their tails (which is actually kinda anticlimactic when it’s an Ancient, Evil Shark God coming at you), which reduces your Oxygen, which is essentially your health, but when you run out, all that happens is that you have to go back to the boat or, at worst, restart from basically the last checkpoint.
Both of the Endless Ocean games — and based on what we know so far, Luminous is proving to be no exception — could be considered Magic Realism works. Even notwithstanding the fact that the games don’t really bother with physical or biological accuracy (you can, for example, go diving in Antarctica in a bikini), there’s clearly things going on that are clearly supernatural.
There’s the aforementioned Evil, Ancient Shark Gods. There’s a ghost ship in the first game. There are underwater ruins in both games. Some of the animals are either abnormally intelligent or apparently outright telepathic. Several prehistoric animals show up — and not in the sense of “the coelacanth has survived as a species for the past 360 million years“, but with full-on implications of “somebody Jurassic Park’d the anomalocaris.”
On the other hand, some of things are ultimately ambiguous and could have mundane explanations. There are real-life examples of human settlements being sunk into the sea by earthquakes or tsunamis. It’s unclear if several of the animals identified as gods are actually gods, or just particularly impressive animals that have come to be identified as gods by locals, though that doesn’t explain away the fact that they’re apparently been living for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Both games revolve around uncovering ancient mysteries, though the storytelling is a lot more involved and in-depth in the second game.
Whereas basically the only other on-screen human character in the first game is Katherine, who can’t swim and therefore spends the entire game on the boat helping you at a distance, the second game has an entire team of human characters with their own personalities and helpful abilities when they’re diving with you.
The first game has you following a series of clues to discover a new whale species that may or may not be a supernatural entity (as discussed above). The second game involves a global adventure to uncover the history of an ancient marine civilisation that apparently used its power to control whales to spread across the world — it’s basically an Egyptian-flavoured version of Atlantis. Fittingly, Plato himself says the myth of Atlantis originally came to the Greeks via Egypt.
Adapted from original images by Soly Moses and julie aagaard on Pexels.
FYI: That’s not a spoiler. The game starts with a flashforward that makes all of this clear before going on to explain how we got here.
I mentioned this when I first posted about Luminous, but the announcement was the most excited I’ve been for a game since I literally started crying tears of joy when they announced Rune Factory 5.
Art via nintendo.com.
And, as it happens, Luminous has launched since I wrote the first version of the post.
Now, for context, Endless Ocean is a niche series with a small but passionate cult fanbase and there hasn’t been a new game in 15 years, so said passionate cult fanbase has been playing the same game for the past 15 years.
Based on preliminary reviews, Luminous is either guilty of being too much like the first two games or not exactly like the first two games.
For one thing, Luminous is a lot more like Endless Ocean 1 than Blue World. The story is a lot more minimalistic and the main appeal is the exploration and fish-finding. Notably, while certain animals — notably the returning Ancient, Evil Shark Gods — do have aggressive attack animations, they can’t actually hurt you anymore.
But, like, the aggressive animals were the worst part of Blue World. The scripted, story-relevant moments of “Ahhh! A shark is chasing me!” were fun.
The first time they happened.
But that initial thrill quickly turned into “Man, I wish these stupid sharks would stop chasing me so I could finish this sidequest”…
Incidentally, the reason why they don’t attack you anymore is explained away in-game. The Veiled Sea is clearly a weird place, and one of the way that manifests is by rendering aggressive species — up to and including Ancient, Evil Shark Gods — placated and docile.
A lot of the fanbase is absolutely furious that the game isn’t just Blue World, but again. But for what it’s worth, the professional reviews are basically consistent with the other few games. It is the lowest-rated of the three, but not by a major margin and Endless Ocean is undeniably a niche series that’s going to be a hard sell of a lot of reviewers.
While there is a fairly basic story mode, the main selling point of Luminous is that thanks to the laws of time and space apparently not applying to its locale of the Veiled Sea means that there aren’t set, discrete diving areas, or even some kind of contiguous overworld to explore. The game uses procedural generation to randomise the dive map every time.
There’s a certain level of consistency in the design that don’t change: there are shallow water areas, there are polar region areas, there are deep sea areas, there’s a pretty cool sunken ruins area that houses all of the extinct species. That does change is where on any given map they occur or how much of the map they take up.
Admittedly, it can be a little rough and could have been coded a little better so there’s more internal logic to the maps or so that the supposedly unique mythical animal returning from Blue World don’t appear multiple times on the same map.
On the other hand, that ties directly into Luminous‘ other main gimmick. Discrete, pre-generated maps wouldn’t work for what Nintendo and Arika are trying to do with Luminous. The second major selling point is the ability to share one dive with 10 random players (via matchmaking) or 30 players sharing a code.
Photo by Ariann on Pexels.com
While it is possible to dive solo, what you’re clearly supposed to be doing is going online to explore one map with multiple other people, because exploring uncovering the map, then sharing points of interest is what the game is being built around — notably, much of the game’s lore, surrounding an ancient race called the Oannes who inhabited the Veiled Sea millennia ago and may or may not be aliens (that’s speculation, not a spoiler), is found piecemeal through objects found in dives.
Ultimately, there is a point to all this. The goal of any given dive is to find seven fish noted to be giving off strange biometric readings in order to pinpoint a special animal called a UML (it stands for Unique Marine Life), basically Luminous‘ answer to the legendary creatures from Blue World. It’s a neat gameplay loop, some the individual UMLs are pretty interested, and one that’s definitely a lot more fun when you’re sharing the mission with multiple other people.
Fundamentally, I get why Luminous isn’t exactly like Blue World. It’s been 15 years. That’s enough enough for a entire generation of potential players to have grown up and never even heard of Endless Ocean, with Luminous being their first introduction to the series.
I’ve read a lot of angry, angry comments from longtime Endless Ocean fans acting like Luminous personally came to their house, burst through the door, kicked their dog, ate their lunch, then kicked their dog’s lunch.
Honestly, I cannot comprehend getting that mad about a video game…
But, also, I read a heartwarming Reddit post from a Dad whose autistic daughter who wants to be a Marine Biologist absolutely loves the game because she can just swim around and look at fish.
And that hits close to home for me…
Fundamentally, no, it’s not an exciting game. But it is a fantastic game to play while listening to a podcast or watching a movie in the background, or even just relax to because it asks so little of the player in terms of stakes or difficulty.
I’m sure plenty of people will write off Endless Ocean as boring and repetitive and I will admit that it’s a series that’s not going to appeal to everyone, but there’s an obvious appeal to people who are interested in the ocean and marine life, and it’s such a unique experience that there wasn’t much to compare it to back at the time, and even more recent similar underwater games like Abzu and Subnautica aren’t quite the same.
My other recommendations are here.
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