Developed for the Nintendo Wii by Arika

Published by Nintendo

Rated "E" for Everyone

Contains mild violence, mild suggestive themes

Endless Ocean isn’t about saving the world. There is no master plan to foil, no one to rescue, and no bomb ticking away under a table. Instead it offers you the world itself and waits for you to discover it. It tempts you with an endless supply of intriguing mysteries, captivating tasks, and a sense that behind every corner and inside every nook is something wondrous, just waiting. The only sense of urgency comes from your own curiosity as you rush to try to experience it all.

The first Endless Ocean was a relaxing diving simulation and an underwater journey of intrigue and delight. It offered simple point-and-swim controls and a beautiful sense of atmosphere. It revealed layers upon layers of blue worlds, mysterious ruins, and a diversity of eye-opening marine life, captured with an impressive sense of detail. The sequel, subtitled “Blue World”, explodes in creativity. It expands to a full adventure where you assemble a fellowship of companions, each with special skills, and travel to all corners of the globe to chase cryptic clues and mysterious monsters, both on land as well as in the ocean. It offers a larger selection of marine life, now with even more detail, and many dramatic scenes of them engaged in the kind of moments made popular by nature documentaries such as Planet Earth or BBC Life. Large, undersea giants perform ballet-like mating dances or move at exhilarating speeds in impressive displays of feeding or hunting. From the Deep to the tropical, the cold to the downright dangerous, Blue World delivers a diversity now of both locales and creatures.

Your base is an island in the South Pacific where you can stretch out on a hammock, take a shower, train dolphin friends, and call in the local trader to appraise your treasure. Her name's Nancy and she'll both sell you a wealth of gear and cut your hair. Nineball Island is owned by renowned marine adventurer Jean-Eric Louvier and his granddaughter Oceana. Their family has a history with an ancient legend called the “Song of Dragons” and when you arrive to work for them and start chatting about it, it ignites young Oceana and sets the three of you off to follow its trail, a haunting song played mysteriously from one ancient ruin to the next. The use of music here only emphasizes the absence of any vocal tracks. All the characters deliver their dialogue through subtitles on the screen, a shame as some human voices would deliver the emotional impact the game is driving for in its tale.

Underwater, you again can click on fish to collect their details, visit their miniature homes, feed them, photograph them, in some cases ride with them or call them over with a whistle. An underwater pen which lets you draw reminders in the air returns, but new is a “multisensor” scanner which duplicates the senses of a hammerhead shark to help you scan the ground for treasure, kind of like an underwater metal detector.

In the first game sharks were all teeth and deep, bass notes. Now they can all-out attack you on sight, but instead of chomping they simply knock the air out of you. To fend them off you’re given a “Pulsar gun” to point-and-shoot the sharks and other toothed nasties, to stun them momentarily or drive them off. As if to balance out the violence of shooting, the Pulsar can also be used to point-and-heal creatures who are weak or ill. I’m not sure how the science on that works and it’s worth noting that, as much as the game delivers a wealth of accurately portrayed species with detailed encyclopedic entries, the game does play fast-and-loose with how the real world works at times. In one section you’ll be asked to hand-feed a polar bear. I highly, highly, recommend you never do that under any circumstance.

A new feature I haven’t tried is the Wi-Fi Connection which allows you and a friend to connect each other’s Wii console and copies of the game over the internet for a shared diving experience. I’m writing this before the game’s release, I simply don’t have anyone to swim with, but the idea is that the two of you can explore Nineball Island (sitting on deck chairs, shopping, etc.) or dive into any of the maps you’ve unlocked. You can communicate with each other by painfully typing out messages using your Wii remote and an on-screen keyboard, which doesn’t seem worth the effort, or by voice with additional Wii Speak microphones. A better idea I think as you can actually talk and look about you at the same time.

On land you can take on the tasks of curating an aquarium, designing an artificial reef, rescuing stray pets, deciphering codes found on coins against constellations in the sky, and helping others with their various salvage, research, conservation, mapping, and photo projects.

It’s impressive how every little task, no matter how small, gets its own elaborate story arc and sense of intrigue. For example, young Oceana has her own side-business selling your maps, the ones you fill in for reference as you dive. She fills you in on how well they’re selling “on the charts” until one day, one of the maps comes back with a dark, mysterious shape on it, and…

The local trader sells beach furniture including a wacky totem pole. One day, the totem pole starts to mysteriously whisper, something about the north and animals with long……

With a few magazine photo assignments under your belt, you start to build up a steady stream of revenue until one day you learn of a diver whose lost his memory and needs you to create photographs to help him get it back…

This goes on and on, with new hints and clues of mini mysteries arriving at every turn, from the start all the way to the game’s end where even then it ignores the credits and just keeps on going. 

One of the brilliant ways that the game takes simple activities and gives them a sense of challenge and stimulation is through the use of time. Every location changes between sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight, with different species of life appearing at different times. The weather can also change as will the different phases of the moon, all of which can play a role in giving places you’ve already visited something new to uncover. Some elements will only appear at certain times, in certain weather, and during specific moon phases.

Many companies have come up with a novel use for the Wii's motion controls, but most seem to run out of inspiration very quickly. Arika's "Wii diving" system has lent itself not only to creating a full-scale adventure, but an entire video game world where, no matter where you point the Wii remote, the possibilities are endless.