Endless Ocean was cool, but its sequel is the one that gets hyped up more. It’s greatly expanded… but at what cost!? It’s quite good though.
Much like its predecessor, this is a game about scuba diving, exploring the natural world, discovering animals and finding sunken treasure. This time around the game is more story-driven, with an extensive quest log to guide your dives, and a more fantastical bent as you uncover the secrets of a lost civilisation.
There’s a set of four tropey characters that come together to form your crew: a French teenager with (dead) daddy issues (also her mum is dead, but no, it’s 99% about the dad… ugh) and her gruff grandfather, a brash American focused on loot, and a Japanese supergenius who runs an aquarium. With the exception of the grandpa, they all become available as diving partners alongside whatever dolphins you “befriend”, giving you access to their skills and insights during a dive. This makes the experience a little less lonely, but is usually optional. Between expeditions you return to your cozy island base, an interactive 3D menu screen where everyone hangs out.
The scope is quite broad in concept, a globetrotting adventure that sees you diving in a coral reef, at the poles, in the Amazon, etc. Each location is smaller than the first game’s map, but there are no restrictions based on your boat position, so it feels much more freeing to traverse the entire map (barring hazards etc.). It breaks the illusion of the plot somewhat to have a small, struggling diving company jetsetting all over Earth constantly, but whatever.
I can’t overstate how much of an upgrade this is over EO1: there’s new functions like a treasure detector and high-tech healing/calming gun(?), interactions with dangerous animals, streamlined animal logging with many new species, tons and tons of quests to do, treasure to find, and equipment to buy. Not to mention it looks much nicer, and is fully playable with the Classic Controller! The control scheme is a little unconventional but it works, and no more wrist pain, thank you very much. The laid-back gameplay is still there, but there’s lots more layered on top of it to engage with in different ways, it’s great.
The expansion of the concepts does lead the game into some potentially troublesome directions. The more overt fantasy and sci-fi elements that creep in could break the realism. The importance of “salvage”, retrieving and selling sunken valuables, could be considered ethically dubious, or achaeologically irresponsible. Most troubling to me was the aquarium subplot, where you are led to prop up the morally questionable industry of capturing and imprisoning animals, even putting on dolphin shows! I found myself uncomfortable, even angered by this game insidiously normalising—if not glorifying—the practice of abducting cetaceans and forcing them to do tricks.
Sorry for the rant, but that sort of thing feels really out of place, a huge blind spot, in a game about experiencing the beauty of nature; especially when some quests are explicitly about conservation and recognising the negative human impacts on marine ecosystems. Your companions will also frequently pipe up with interesting facts about animal behaviours, etc., which is really cool and fun, and completely ignores the cruelty that the game is enabling elsewhere. What kind of message does that send? Sigh.
Anyway. I bummed myself out. The game is cool, and has a lot to recommend it. This kind of virtual experience promotes fascination and appreciation of that mysterious world under the surface, and this game for the most part handles this well. Navigating menus and such is a little clumsy, but they’ve packed in so much content and things to do that I can overlook a lot. Except the aquarium thing.
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