Man. I love fish, I love animals, I love taking pictures of both of these, and I loved Endless Ocean on the Wii. This game is not like the originals. I started this game with a higher opinion of this than I think a lot of people, it was fun, kind of clunky mechanically, but the core was strong enough to be a good time. The more I played though, the more baffling decisions I encountered. There’s so many axed modes and features from the Wii game that this feels like if you ported the idea to an iPhone game more than a third entry of the Endless Ocean series, which sucks. I got my money’s worth out of it, and overall it’s fine, the features cut are things I could overlook if the game was as good as the originals and it’s just not. Not to mention, I have encountered so many glitches that halt progression, and even gotten softlocked out of the ending from what I can tell because one of the items I need to complete the 99 tasks you have to do to pad the game out to hell and back just didn’t spawn in the already rare randomly generated formation, all of this just makes me wonder how this game was okayed in the state it’s in, missing any of the typical “shine” from a Nintendo published title, with things that scream a lack of QA testing.
Overall the lack of an aquarium mode the change to randomly generated maps from set maps, making exploration a lot more tedious to get what you want, and just lack of good QOL features… makes the game all in all very disappointing.
Overall the lack of an aquarium mode the change to randomly generated maps from set maps, making exploration a lot more tedious to get what you want, and just lack of good QOL features… makes the game all in all very disappointing.
It's not on the same level as the first two. It's very grindy and based around procedural generation to find the things you need to fill out a Log and Mystery Tiles. It's got a lot of poorly laid out design elements and frustrating decisions...however I am still enjoying myself a lot?
It might be my love of Marine Biology but exploring with my friends is really fun even 15 hours in, filling out the logs together and progressing has just been chill. You'll load into a map not knowing what to expect and find Dinosaurs or super deep Abyss zones with so many cool creatures (Not sure why there are no Jellyfish or Octopodes but...sure).
Story mode is ass though, its basically 30 seconds to 2 minutes of a basic mechanic with a cutscene or sometimes just the cutscene and then you're back to the menu. I can't do the last Story mode mission without filling out the Board though so I guess we'll see what happens there.
Otherwise if you just want a kinda fun Marine exploration game to play with someone or even by yourself, it's not half bad.
It might be my love of Marine Biology but exploring with my friends is really fun even 15 hours in, filling out the logs together and progressing has just been chill. You'll load into a map not knowing what to expect and find Dinosaurs or super deep Abyss zones with so many cool creatures (Not sure why there are no Jellyfish or Octopodes but...sure).
Story mode is ass though, its basically 30 seconds to 2 minutes of a basic mechanic with a cutscene or sometimes just the cutscene and then you're back to the menu. I can't do the last Story mode mission without filling out the Board though so I guess we'll see what happens there.
Otherwise if you just want a kinda fun Marine exploration game to play with someone or even by yourself, it's not half bad.
The most disappointing game I've played this year. I can't even say "so far" because It would be impossible to top this.
Not worth getting. In short, this game is extremely boring and somehow made the ocean feel absolutely lifeless.
Endless Ocean 2 was one of my biggest childhood games growing up so I was looking forward to a new game in the series finally, but this game takes everything 2 did right and chucks it in the trash. The main thing to do in this game is explore and that’s just about the only thing to do, but exploration in this game is painfully boring with the randomly generated maps. The Veiled Sea is interesting for maybe about 30 minutes and then it quickly becomes apparent that the vast majority of what you get to see is the same flat seafloor over and over again with nothing new. I’m pretty sure each map has 1 designated “special” region, so you might get a map with a big iceberg you can enter, or a deep sea region, or a freshwater region. These are the most interesting places to explore but once you’ve explored them once, any magic they had quickly vanish once you roll them again. There’s nothing new to do in any of these regions. You’re either aimlessly scanning fish to meet scan quotas or aimlessly swimming to try and find 7 random arbitrary fish to spawn a UML or find something for the mystery board.
The story mode is one of the worst parts of the game. Each chapter is maybe 30 seconds to a minute of gameplay and you’re completely locked out of leaving the extremely limited story space you’re stuck in. Often times there isn’t even any marine life in these story segments despite all the coral around. It’s kind of jarring. And the story itself is laughable. The story mode as a whole is so shallow it could be entirely removed from the game and pretty much nothing would be lost.
And if you do want to actually complete the story mode, and you know, complete the game, it’s locked behind the ludicrous requirement of clearing the mystery board. 99 things you have to search for in randomly generated maps that aren’t even guaranteed to have what you might need. You can spend 2 hours searching 1 map and just find repeats for things you’ve already found. You can spend up to an hour trying to find random fish to spawn a UML only for it to be a repeat that you’ve already found. You can swim for up to 20 hours or more and never find the big circle that wants you to take a sawtooth shark to it. The game doesn’t even tell you what you have left to find to clear the board. The only thing to do in this game is swim and hope.
You’d think that at least discovering all the different species of fish would be interesting but this game butchers this as well. The game tries to throw pacific, atlantic, antarctic, deep sea, freshwater and prehistoric fish all in 1 big body of water and it makes no sense. It’s not immersive when you’re finding chinook salmon swimming alongside giant squid in a coral reef.
Rare creatures are especially dumbed down, you’ll find something like Thanatos and it’ll be a special moment - only to realize that there’s about 10 more of Thanatos on the same map. And repeat for every single legendary creature taken from Endless Ocean 2. Cocoa Maharaja, Gugnir, Apollo, Phantom, they’re all very common. One time I spawned into a new map for the first time and right next to me was a Singing Dragon. UML’s take the place of legendary creatures but they all have the same extremely disconnected requirement to spawn and before you can even make your way over to it you get a cutscene from across the map showing it in full detail.
You might think, that can’t be it, right? There has to be more. But besides playing the same gameplay loop in multiplayer, yes, that is literally it. Once again, you just swim, scan, and hope you find stuff in randomly generated maps.
Overall an extremely disappointing game and a waste of time to try and complete in full.
Endless Ocean 2 was one of my biggest childhood games growing up so I was looking forward to a new game in the series finally, but this game takes everything 2 did right and chucks it in the trash. The main thing to do in this game is explore and that’s just about the only thing to do, but exploration in this game is painfully boring with the randomly generated maps. The Veiled Sea is interesting for maybe about 30 minutes and then it quickly becomes apparent that the vast majority of what you get to see is the same flat seafloor over and over again with nothing new. I’m pretty sure each map has 1 designated “special” region, so you might get a map with a big iceberg you can enter, or a deep sea region, or a freshwater region. These are the most interesting places to explore but once you’ve explored them once, any magic they had quickly vanish once you roll them again. There’s nothing new to do in any of these regions. You’re either aimlessly scanning fish to meet scan quotas or aimlessly swimming to try and find 7 random arbitrary fish to spawn a UML or find something for the mystery board.
The story mode is one of the worst parts of the game. Each chapter is maybe 30 seconds to a minute of gameplay and you’re completely locked out of leaving the extremely limited story space you’re stuck in. Often times there isn’t even any marine life in these story segments despite all the coral around. It’s kind of jarring. And the story itself is laughable. The story mode as a whole is so shallow it could be entirely removed from the game and pretty much nothing would be lost.
And if you do want to actually complete the story mode, and you know, complete the game, it’s locked behind the ludicrous requirement of clearing the mystery board. 99 things you have to search for in randomly generated maps that aren’t even guaranteed to have what you might need. You can spend 2 hours searching 1 map and just find repeats for things you’ve already found. You can spend up to an hour trying to find random fish to spawn a UML only for it to be a repeat that you’ve already found. You can swim for up to 20 hours or more and never find the big circle that wants you to take a sawtooth shark to it. The game doesn’t even tell you what you have left to find to clear the board. The only thing to do in this game is swim and hope.
You’d think that at least discovering all the different species of fish would be interesting but this game butchers this as well. The game tries to throw pacific, atlantic, antarctic, deep sea, freshwater and prehistoric fish all in 1 big body of water and it makes no sense. It’s not immersive when you’re finding chinook salmon swimming alongside giant squid in a coral reef.
Rare creatures are especially dumbed down, you’ll find something like Thanatos and it’ll be a special moment - only to realize that there’s about 10 more of Thanatos on the same map. And repeat for every single legendary creature taken from Endless Ocean 2. Cocoa Maharaja, Gugnir, Apollo, Phantom, they’re all very common. One time I spawned into a new map for the first time and right next to me was a Singing Dragon. UML’s take the place of legendary creatures but they all have the same extremely disconnected requirement to spawn and before you can even make your way over to it you get a cutscene from across the map showing it in full detail.
You might think, that can’t be it, right? There has to be more. But besides playing the same gameplay loop in multiplayer, yes, that is literally it. Once again, you just swim, scan, and hope you find stuff in randomly generated maps.
Overall an extremely disappointing game and a waste of time to try and complete in full.
As a fan of the first two games this is probably the most disappointing game I've ever played
It’s fine, nothing special. Pick it up on a sale if your into this type of game
An unfortunate step back from the other games in the series with a disappointing lack of content or a real story, locking a lot of content behind innocuous grinding. That said, I'm still glad this game exists. At its core, I don't think it sacrifices being an Endless Ocean game. It's something I consciously enjoy even with its faults and I'm optimistic that the developers will take the feedback of this game seriously, unlike games like ACNH or Pokemon SV which are fundamentally broken and disgrace their series but sold so much anyway no one in charge gave a damn to listen to feedback. Multiplayer is good fun and it's got a great variety of sea life to see. Sad to see this isn't the game a lot of people wanted and I can agree to an extent, but I don't think it's all bad.
Missing the charm of the first 2 games and there is less bio diversity. The auto generated maps can become very samey, I vastly preferred the hand crafted maps of the originals. The story might as well be non existent. But, playing online with friends carries this game. If you get in a vc with people it's fun to just explore the ocean. If you try to compare this to the other EO games it falls very flat, but on its own it's a fine game that could've maybe used more time in the oven but has strong online.
i really want to write a proper review on this game but it would honestly be so negative i will simply tell you all to just play the first two EO games instead. at least EOL has lots of fish! that's it tho!
There are some weird looking fish out there!