Diving into Disappointment: The Unfulfilled Potential of "Endless Ocean: Luminous"

The vast world of gaming has seen an impressive rise in non-violent genres, offering players a respite from the adrenaline-fueled chaos of typical action games. Among these tranquil experiences, "Endless Ocean: Luminous" dives into the underwater realm, encouraging players to explore the ocean's depths without the threat of danger. However, despite its potential for discovery and adventure, the game falls short, marred by sluggish progression and unrealistic elements.

Exploration and Gameplay Modes

In "Endless Ocean: Luminous," players can choose from various gameplay modes that cater to different styles of exploration. Solo Dive is an individual exploration mode where you can venture into randomized maps alone. For those who prefer company, Shared Dive offers the same experience but with friends, leveraging Nintendo's Switch Online service, albeit with its usual connectivity issues. The Story Mode stitches together short missions with objectives and dialogues, guiding players through brief narratives while they uncover underwater secrets.

Despite the promising setup, the game quickly reveals its limitations. The Solo and Shared Dives lack substantial content, often leading to repetitive and monotonous play. The Story Mode, while providing some structure, is undemanding and sometimes feels like an extended tutorial rather than a fully-fledged narrative experience.

A Tedious Progression System

The progression system of "Endless Ocean: Luminous" hinges heavily on scanning ocean creatures, which is critical to unlocking further story missions. Players must hold the L button to scan marine life, accumulating data points necessary for progression. However, the sheer volume required for these scans quickly proves to be a major drawback. Early gates set at 500 scans become increasingly demanding, with subsequent gates requiring 1,000 and even 2,000 scans. This exorbitant requirement makes the gameplay feel more like a chore than an enjoyable exploration.

The repetitive nature of scanning, coupled with the randomized maps, often leaves players frustrated. The slow accumulation of progress points after hours of scanning can strip away the game’s relaxing vibe, replacing it with dissatisfaction. The limited number of unique species further exacerbates this issue, raising questions about why such a high number of scans is necessary for story advancement.

Character and Narrative Depth

The narrative in "Endless Ocean: Luminous" is sparse and lacks substantial development. Players assume the role of a new diver, accompanied by an AI companion and occasionally joined by Daniel, a fellow diver with a brash yet cowardly demeanor. The story missions are brief and often uneventful, sometimes ending abruptly. Rare moments of excitement occur when players encounter massive or fantastical fish species, but these instances are infrequent.

While the game attempts to weave a meta-story involving an ancient relic with 99 slots that players fill by discovering artifacts or completing achievements, this aspect feels more like a checklist than a compelling storyline. The lack of engaging narrative elements diminishes the potential for a captivating underwater adventure.

Gameplay Imbalances and Inconveniences

The demanding scanning requirements introduce several small annoyances that significantly impact the gameplay experience. It is easy to unintentionally scan fish you've already registered while trying to catalog new ones. Each scan triggers a zoom-in effect, requiring an additional button press to exit the detailed view. When multiple species are scanned simultaneously, they're grouped together, making it challenging to identify and mark new species quickly.

These minor inconveniences accumulate over time, detracting from the game's enjoyment. Additionally, the map segment in Solo Dives requires players to monitor their progress painstakingly, which can lead to missed opportunities to spot new marine life or depth changes that reward deeper exploration.

Levelling Up and Customization

As players undertake dives, they earn experience points to level up, increasing their dive capacity. This enhanced capacity allows them to tag larger sea creatures to swim alongside them, which is essential for solving certain riddles. Unfortunately, the solutions to some of these riddles are often too rigid, frustrating players when their logical attempts fail due to highly specific requirements.

Leveling up also unlocks severely limited customization options, such as color palette swaps for divers' suits, stickers for profiles, and emotes. However, these additions do little to enrich the overall gameplay experience, leaving much to be desired in terms of personal expression and character customization.

A Quasi-Educational Museum Experience

With a variety of sea life on display, "Endless Ocean: Luminous" feels somewhat like an interactive aquatic museum. The thrill of discovering new species is palpable, and the game attempts to educate players with interesting marine facts narrated by the AI companion. Despite these efforts, the overwhelming number of required scans makes it impractical to fully appreciate the educational content.

Moreover, there's no indicator for which facts have already been heard, making it difficult to track which blurbs players have listened to and which remain undiscovered. The repetitive appearance of similar-looking species further complicates this issue, detracting from the game's potential as an educational tool.

Unrealistic Representations

Part of the allure of exploring the ocean lies in its mysterious and often treacherous nature. However, "Endless Ocean: Luminous" deviates significantly from realism. Players have unlimited oxygen and need not worry about temperature or depth, removing key challenges associated with real-world diving. Aggressive species pose no threat, and fish species appear randomly across the map, resulting in illogical placements such as large creatures in shallow waters or deep-sea dwellers at mid-depths.

The Switch hardware limitations further hinder the visual experience, with fish, coral, and the ocean floor lacking the photorealism necessary to evoke a true sense of wonder and grandeur. The absence of realistic elements thus detracts from the game's immersion and sense of discovery.

Multiplayer Limitations

The game's design suggests that Shared Dives with friends are meant to be a primary feature. However, the multiplayer experience is hampered by Nintendo's reliance on digital codes for joining games and the lack of integrated voice chat. These limitations prevent players from fully enjoying a collaborative underwater exploration, reducing the shared diving experience to little more than a coordinated effort to scan fish, which may not sustain long-term interest for most players.

Unfulfilled Potential

"Endless Ocean: Luminous" aims to blend various elements into its gameplay, such as realistic SCUBA simulation, relaxed exploration with friends, and a story-driven quest for underwater marvels. Unfortunately, the game falls short in all these areas. Its attempt to capture the majesty of the ocean is undermined by tedious, repetitive tasks and a lack of commitment to any single gameplay style. What should have been an adventure into the depths of Earth's largest and most enigmatic regions ends up feeling like an uninspired, monotonous routine.

In summary, while "Endless Ocean: Luminous" holds promise as a tranquil and educational game, its execution leaves much to be desired. Its extensive scanning requirements, sparse narrative, unrealistic elements, and multiplayer constraints turn a potentially magnificent exploration into a tiresome journey lacking the depth and excitement of real underwater adventures.