Endless Ocean has been one of my favorite series of games for a long time. The first one was released in 2008 on the Wii, and then the sequel Endless Ocean: Blue World followed in 2010. Endless Ocean: Luminous was released in May 2024 on the Switch. I had extremely high hopes for Luminous, but I feel like I have not been this disappointed by a game in a long time. I loved Blue World so much that I feel like almost obligated to keep trying to like Luminous, but the longer I play, the more disappointed I feel.
Gameplay
Endless Ocean: Luminous is a cozy game, it is intended to be relaxing and a way to explore. You play as a scuba diver, and you explore the oceans and the animals within. You can scan the animals as you go, and salvage treasure. As you scan animals, you’ll learn a small bit about each one.
Unfortunately, that is about as in depth as this game gets. Since there are two games in the series that came before this one, I had expectations. In Blue World, there was so much that you could do – in included an island hub, a dog (you could pet!), you could go ashore and explore small islands, dolphin companions that you could train and dive with, the ability to pet and feed the fish, an aquarium, and the ability to customize your gear beyond color changes and stickers (and your character. Like, if you want to be a female.) Luminous removes… all of that.
In Endless Ocean: Luminous, you can no longer leave the water at any point – so no shore exploration or land animals. There is no island hub, no companion animals to hang out with, and you can not interact with animals outside of asking them to ‘swim with you’ for a bit. In Blue World, with some of the larger animals, you could swim along side them or hold onto them to go faster. Luminous strips out all of the things that made Blue World so incredibly charming.
All of that aside, the most disappointing part of the game is simply – the ocean is so empty! The oceans are created randomly, and the maps are very large – but they are so very, very barren. There are places where you might see a small coral reef, or a few rocks, and in some places, you’ll find cave systems to explore – but the vast majority of the map is filled with nothing. Just squares of sand and water, with no rocks, no coral, no animals. Just empty.
When you reach the border of the map, you have a very visual drop off – in the corners, you have an actual right angle to complete the square. Not even an attempt to make it look like a real ocean out there, just… a squared drop off.
Having just played Subnautica, which had an amazingly life-like and vibrant ocean, and not that long ago Blue World, Luminous feels lifeless.
Playing the game feels… grindy. The maps are so big that it takes ages to uncover all of it, and that wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so empty. To advance chapters in the story, you are required to scan specimens – even though there are only about 500 different creatures in the game, you need to scan over 8000 animals to get through the first four chapters. It is incredibly repetitive, and means scanning a lot of the same animal over and over.
Luminous also seems to be very reliant on multiplayer to make this game work – it boasts of being able to dive with up to 30 other players at once. However, there is no chat, no way to interact with them outside of emotes or stickers in the game, and you can’t even see how many players are with you unless you manage to swim close to them in the map. If you do participate in shared dives however, it will help progress through the grind a bit faster, as it shares progress across all of the players. Blue World had an online function as well, although Nintendo has long-since retired the Wii’s online capabilities – and it only supported one friend at a time.
The only part of the game that started to feel a bit fun was hunting down the “UMLs” (unidentified marine life). Seven special animals appear on a map that you must scan to trigger a mystery creature, and then you can scan it to learn about it. If you’re doing a solo dive, this can take … a while. In one case, it took me 85 minutes to locate the 7 fish and the UML. Doing this multiplayer can dramatically speed it up, but then I found it became repetitive and I saw the same UML 5 times in a row. If you are trying to play through this to find them all, I’d strongly suggest looking up Dive Site IDs that coordinate to past maps other players have found – and the folks on Reddit are happy to share that.
Story
Again, it’s so hard not to keep comparing it to Blue World. Blue World has a cute, not-complicated but entertaining story and a handful of characters to help you along the way. Luminous has only two characters – and one of them is an AI! Worse still, they decided to have the AI as the only voiced character, which sounds, exactly as you would imagine.
Yes, she will introduce herself at the start of every single chapter. The other character only speaks in… bubbles, and while he is a bit entertaining, he really just serves to provide the other half of the conversation to the AI.
The story is incredibly simple – the World Coral is dying and you must scan fish to gather light to restore it. That.. is about it. It’s not incredibly engaging, and some of the story chapters are just a 1-2 minute cut scene in which you do literally nothing. And in order to even see that, you have to scan several thousand animals.
I have not actually completed the story at this point – because to unlock the last chapter, you actually have to complete all 99 Mysteries that the game includes – most of which involve scanning objects that you must find in your randomly generated maps.
I ran out of patience after unlocking about 38 of them. I have no issue with a game encouraging you to collect or unlock things to get special gear, but I have a huge issue with locking the last chapter of the story behind a 100% collection requirement.
Overall Review
This is the lowest score I’ve given a game to date. The harder I try to like it, the more disappointed I become. The difference between this game and its predecessors is so vast, that my partner started looking into the development of the game to see what had happened – from what we dug up, it looks like even though the same development company worked on this one as the last one – the individuals on the team changed. The folks behind Luminous work primarily on mobile games… like Tetris. (And there is even a Tetris mention within the game itself).
Everything from the gameplay, the simplified story, the lack of customization – and how did I forget to mention, the extreme downgrade in music – just feels lackluster. If you want a game like this one, I would strongly urge that you try Blue World (If you have a Wii and can find a copy), or Abzu. I’ve seen lots of review sites mention Subnautica as well – but I would not put Subnautica in the same category at all.
Was it fun, though?
At times, I do enjoy exploring and scanning new animals. Just about 10 hours later, when it became swimming through vast expanses of empty ocean and scanning the same animals hundreds of times – I realized I wasn’t having fun at all. I wanted to love this game. I was so excited for so long. I preordered it as soon as it was available, and eagerly awaited it.
As I sat on the couch swimming through empty squares of sand and water, I let myself quit before reaching the end of the story mode. It wasn’t fun. I’m incredibly saddened by this.
If this were the first game in the series, or if you haven’t played the first two – it might not feel so bad. With as much as I loved Blue World though, Luminous just did not shine for me. It feels like too many steps back.
If you happen to play it and love it – I’m happy for you and I hope you have many hours of diving ahead of you. I’d love to hear positive feedback on it if you have it! For me, however, I’ll hold out hope that maybe DLC can happen down the road to add to the game and make the ocean really feel endless again.
The Bardic Unicorn 