peapal alveryah makayo
Coleman John
Of course, a game will never capture the true beauty of the real thing, but it is a good way for those who can not go themselves to simulate the experience and have an adventure. Whenever there is a new game that explores the ocean floors, I am absolutely on board. Throughout the years, three console games in particular caught my attention.
The first one (or should I say two as there are two games in the series) is Endless Ocean (and Endless Ocean 2: Blue World). I found these games by chance in my high school years and was immediately drawn in as this was my first diving simulation experience. The first game was fine and I beat it with ease, having a simple storyline and one large open-world area. The second game, however, was the much superior game, having an extensive story, multiple areas, mini-games galore, and a plethora of creatures to interact with.
Abzu is very unique in terms of story. There is no dialogue and leaves room for many different interpretations of what is going on. To put it as best as I can, you are a diver who awakens in the sea. Upon exploring, guided by a Great White Shark, the diver discovers wells that help restore the ocean life and protect it from the strange pyramids found in the sea.
Lastly, Beyond Blue is about a small team of marine researchers. You take the role of Marai, a young woman with a deep connection with a particular pod of sperm whales. You explore the regions, scanning and tagging animals for research when you find out some shady things are going on in the depths. The safety of the beloved pod is at stake and Marai is out to find out why.
Abz was probably the world I was most immersed in. The vivid color schemes each representative of the season and the areas in which you were exploring stood out beautifully. There were certain points in the game where the score would really pick up as you were having a special moment, whether it be swimming with a pod of orcas, joining a group of blue whales on a hunting dive, or reuniting with an old friend. The emotion you were meant to feel during these moments were amplified by the amazing soundtrack. The interactivity in this world was solid as well. The seaweed moves with you, the animals go about their business until interacted with; just details like that make a huge difference.
My other issue with the immersion in this game is just like Beyond Blue where you get music at some points, usually when coming across a key location or special creature, but most diving time is spent in silence. This would happen in Endless Ocean 1 as well, but they actually gave you the option to turn on the games unlocked songs or allow you to download your own music to play while diving. In 2, they have such lovely new age classical songs that fit certain areas perfectly, mostly be provided by the Celtic Women, and inside areas like the Valka Castle where this music is being played on a loop, I feel it provides importance and, again, calms the nerves.
Each game is filled with critters to encounter (it would be kind of weird to have an ocean game without them). There are certain animals seen in each game, as mentioned earlier, a few more including orcas, whale sharks, parrotfish, and sunfish. As well as animals, there are sometimes other human beings to interact with as well!
Beyond Blue has the smallest catalog of animals, and it was rather disappointing considering how much time and effort they put into making these animals so lifelike. Granted, they chose some of the more popular animals to put into the game, but it still felt like a rather empty world compared to the other two games.
I definitely favor Abz and Endless Ocean over Beyond Blue. Compared to the two, the game was a little lack-luster. Does this mean I hate it? Not at all. It was still very enjoyable for me. I just saw so much potential for this game and I feel like it fell short of those expectations. Seeing how much the previous two games had offered in 2016 [Abzu] and 2009 [Endless Ocean 2], I felt as though a game from 2020 should improve and build off of these two fantastic games.
Endless Ocean Luminous is the third game in a series I have never played, but that hasn't mattered a bit. It's a diving game and I can barely swim, but that hasn't mattered a bit. It's a game in which nothing much happens, and what does happen only happens very slowly. Don't mind. It's a game with a thirty-player multiplayer component, which is theoretically the big draw, but feels like the wrong way to play.
This is a diving game. You're deep beneath the oceans, wet-suited up, and you're a scientist of some kind, which in this game means you point at fish. Fish come past? Point at them. Flock of fish in the distance? (Is flock the right term?) Point at them too. Point at big fish and small fish. Point at sharks and minnows. You get the idea.
By pointing at these fish, and holding down the L button as you do it, you're scanning them. It's quite cool. The individual fish are outlined in the UI and you get a bunch of light streaming off them which you can collect. This part - only this part - reminds me a bit of an action RPG where baddies scatter glowing plasma that you absorb, feeling all that XP goodness flow in as you do. In Endless Ocean Luminous, the more fish you point at allows you to open up new parts of the story, the chapters of which are all locked behind certain fish-pointing amounts. I thought the story was fine and kind of lovable in parts, but that wasn't why I was pointing at the fish. Pointing at the fish is its own reward.
I'll be honest: it's become a bit of a groove I've settled into, or perhaps 'strange middle-aged routine' is more accurate than 'groove'. Every night, I set aside thirty minutes for Endless Ocean Luminous, just to go in, splash around and point at fish, and I will probably continue to do this once I've finished writing about the game.
Why? Well, for one thing, it's very peaceful. There's very little drama in Endless Ocean Luminous, even when the plot gets cooking. This is why I don't want to play with 29 other people online. It's lovely to be underwater, to be alone in this world of shifting blue that changes every time you dive into it (although you can hang onto specific seeds for dives, if you want, which you probably won't). There's sand and rock below you, and there's the shimmering of the surface above you. And who knows what you'll find? Sometimes I explore thin channels of beige rock with tight corners. Sometimes it's forests of kelp, or strange coraly formations that look like submerged beehives. This stuff is filled with fish to point at, so there's exploration and just a little bit of busywork to keep you going. It's mindless in a way that brings me a deep kind of calm. I probably shouldn't be proud of this.
And then at times Endless Ocean Luminous suddenly pulls a mystery on you. Call it Endless Ocean Numinous: I'll be down on the sea bed and I'll see a gap, a hole beneath me. I'll dive in and there will be darkness below me, a tunnel inviting me down. I'll see fish and sharks below me which I know I haven't yet pointed at. Some of the game's collectables will probably be down there, and I'll probably find an easy cloud of fish to point at to nudge me closer to unlocking the next story chapter. None of this is why I will explore, though, or why I'll enjoy exploring. There's a surprisingly effective combination of qualities in play here: underwater beauty, absolutely no danger, and the lightest of interactive elements. Again, apologies that this works so well for me in this particular instance.
While I'm admitting personal shortcomings, I should say: I'm the kind of person who loves fish tanks but never pays much attention to specific fish in them. I just love this little block of curated seabed in someone's waiting room, and I love the general ribbony passage of life within it. The specifics don't matter in some cases, just as I couldn't really tell you much about the plot of Endless Ocean Luminous, or about how the ping system works in multiplayer, or about the details of the individual fish that you scan as you play. It's just this block of a watery world and I get to head in and zone out. And I zone out because the stuff I'm meant to do here is so minimal. For this particular game, I can say: If there was more to it, I probably wouldn't want to be here for its own sake in quite the same way. If Endless Ocean Luminous was slightly better at being a game, I would have moved on already.
Now, before we get into the negative stuff, let's start by pointing out that if you're looking for an incredibly low-energy, low-effort sort of gaming experience where all of the focus is on simply scanning marine life and then reading a tiny informational excerpt about each of them in order to expand your underwater knowledge, this is 100% the game for you. In fact, you'll likely never find another game more suited to your very specific needs. Please enjoy. For the rest of us, as much as learning about all the amazing creatures that live under the sea is a captivating pursuit, we're not sure we can justify the price tag given that there is precious little else to do here.
Endless Ocean: Luminous takes the basic premise of its predecessors, 2007-08's Endless Ocean and 2009-10's Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep, plonking you in tight-fitting scuba gear beneath some very pretty waves. Here you'll use a scanner (hold down the 'L' button) to catalogue an admittedly impressive array of aquatic biology as you embark on solo or shared dives.
There are various tiers of animal, from your average Joe Starfish to some great big epic monstrosities with scary names that we can't remember. STINKFIN. There. Something like that. Scanning this stuff is fun for a little while, no doubt about it. The fish all look great, there's an addictive quality to scanning a whole bunch of them at once, it's certainly nice to watch your catalog fill up, and you'll unlock customisation options as you go, but boy-oh-boy, there really isn't much more to it, certainly in terms of mechanics.
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