Endless Ocean: Luminous

Boring in multiplayer and frustrating alone, Endless Ocean Luminous is a tedious, aggravating slog that feels endless in all the wrong ways.

The SCUBA simulator has relaxing chill vibes for a little while but quickly runs out of oxygen.

Endless Ocean's procedural generation keeps its exploration engaging enough for a while, but its Story mode is poor. As long as you're willing to forgo plot (and any meaningful interaction with the species you encounter) in favour of exploring random underwater environments, there's still a good deal of fun to be had here.

Endless Ocean: Luminous attempts to revive a niche Wii franchise as an online exploration experience, and fails miserably in the process. In comparison to the likes of Subnautica, this is an empty, cold, and boring ocean space to explore, devoid of any real reason to play beyond its generally relaxing ambiance and the opportunity to learn some facts about underwater animals. Even taken on those terms, it's weak, its online play is basic and bland, and its story does little to engage beyond teaching you the ropes. It didn't need to be this boring, but it is.

While Endless Ocean Luminous feels limited as a single player game, it works far better as a communal activity. Whether it's with friends or random players, Luminous is at its best when there are more fish (figuratively and literally) in the sea. There are a few things that hold it back from being truly transcendent, like the limited ocean life animations and the story's overall structure, which is told through all-too-short individual chapters. With that said, Endless Ocean Luminous doesn't make a big splash, but it does feel like a relaxing swim.

Endless Ocean: Luminous’ calming ocean exploration and lovely multiplayer components wear thin due to slow progression hooks that turn every aspect of it into a long chore. With tons of features from previous installments missing, anyone who wants to see its miniscule story to its end will need to tread a lot of water to find the pearls.

Endless Ocean Luminous offers some agreeable laid-back moments, but a lack of depth and complexity, even compared to the 15-year-old Wii entries in the series, waters down the game’s appeal. Endless Ocean Luminous was always destined to be a niche product, but even the diehards may find the game’s narrow focus on procedural generation and unexceptional online play over almost anything else a bit fishy.

Endless Ocean Luminous offers a relaxing diving experience, but its repetitive mission structure and shallow story mode limit long-term motivation. While the multiplayer focus and serene atmosphere may appeal to some, the lack of variety and reliance on random dives make the overall experience frustrating at times. Also, the story mode is much more a tutorial mode than a full-fledged story mode.

The ocean is something particularly fascinating. There are endless possibilities for exploring various angles of the ocean in a game - from the wonder present in such different ecosystems, to the sense of dread that that vast unknown space can bring - and there are several games that do this very well. Unfortunately, however, Endless Ocean Luminous chooses the most boring angle possible: introducing you to the ocean through a barely interactive experience that requires you to complete tedious tasks in order to progress, and which results in something that seems less about exploring the ocean than about a brief dip in a pool with fish.

It has been slim pickings for Nintendo fans recently in terms of first-party content. Even so, I would only recommend Endless Ocean Luminous to fans who are already madly in love with marine life and to whom spending countless hours swimming and scanning sounds like a relaxing evening, and not simply a meaningless grind.