I've already taken a beginner's diver course on holiday in Bali and acted stupidly and watched two deep sea documentaries on Netflix, so you could say I'm… when it comes to divingan absolute expert.
Additionally, and probably more relevantly, I have played the first two Endless Ocean games on the Nintendo Wii extensively and with great pleasure, which arguably makes me the best person to review Endless Ocean: Luminous for the Nintendo Switch .
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A dive like back then
To get more serious and do a bit of soul striptease: I have a lot of emotional connection to Endless Ocean 2 in particular. When I moved from Austria to Germany in 2010 and met my girlfriend here, I also got to know and love her family, and Endless Ocean 2 from my private Wii collection turned my quasi-mother-in-law into a video gamer.
She's now pretty well versed and plays all sorts of much more complex titles on her Nintendo Switch, but it all started with her clumsily paddling through the blue sea with the Wii remote, consistently turning to the right, while we shouted “left!” in unison. screamed and she was thoroughly amused by it.
So yes: sweet memories. But even before the emotional component came along, I was a big Endless Ocean fan, especially the second part from 2009. Sure, it's a completely casual thing, but it does what it wants to do almost perfectly.
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Source: Nintendo
Endless Ocean 2
More sea than you would think
The extremely simple gameplay (swimming around, scanning fish, feeding, petting and healing with a kind of pulse gun) was extremely enhanced by the various, very different diving environments (including the Greek Sea, an Arctic sea, an Amazon river and a South Sea Atoll) and numerous side activities (dolphin shows, diving tours, an aquarium to fill, a private reef that you can freely design, collectibles) and well-hidden secrets at every nook and cranny.
There was also a small but very atmospheric “overworld” in the form of an island on which the character lives and can move, generally the possibility of going ashore in all sorts of places and exploring flora and fauna there and a not complex, but Surprisingly motivating story, carried by the small group of NPCs around you, who definitely grew on you as the story progressed.
If you wanted, you could easily spend a three-digit number of hours on the thing before you'd really seen everything it had to offer!
A successor appears
That was a lot of text about the predecessor in a test that is actually supposed to be about the successor, but this context is important to show why Endless Ocean 3 disappoints me so much.
In Endless Ocean: Luminous you swim around and scan fish, and, uh, that's pretty much it.
Different areas? None. The swimming areas, or rather the one swimming area in Endless Ocean 3, is randomly generated from a set of predetermined assets and environments, and it's painfully noticeable in the design. The area, which is always completely rectangular, consists mostly of sand, but in between you go down into a piece of deep sea, there is always the same wreck lounging around or a coral reef juts up unmotivated.
Riff-like instead of rogue-like
Randomly, the environment changes slightly every now and then – there are more ancient ruins around you or a larger part of the area is dedicated to the deep sea – but in the end these are just small cosmetic changes.
Source: Nintendo
There is probably also an area of ice water that you can be accidentally thrown into, but in the 30 dives I did for this test, this didn't happen once for me. Only once, in the course of the story (more on that later), did I travel in particularly cool water, and then only in a local area and for a few minutes.
To go ashore? Not at all, you can't even stick your head out of the water and look around like you used to. The world of Endless Ocean: Luminous takes place only underwater and is uncomfortably claustrophobic.
No different levels of information about the sea creatures depending on how and how often you interact with them, no feeding, no pulse gun, no nothing; no cozy island to return to at the end of the trip, no oxygen gauge to pay attention to, no additional equipment necessary to explore the deeper areas…