Endless Ocean

Endless Ocean is a sort of non-game edutainment New-Age experience for the Wii that lets you live out your every fantasy of poking and petting fish. You play the role of an experienced diver and guide for the little island of Manoa Lai, commissioned to spend your days leading diving tours, exploring the sea bottom for shiny things, and playing psychiatrist to your obsessive neurotic marine biologist friend who can’t swim.

First Impressionsby Tanx - Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

As you explore the various regions of the map you encounter a plethora of fish, critters and other sea life, all of which you gain trivia about by molesting with sharp jabs or frantic scrubbing. You’ll do a lot of hand-waving with the Wii-mote to accomplish this, leading to other family members looking at you funny as you wave vigorously at the TV. Whether it be jellyfish, shark or poisonous spikey thingee, your character has a tactile obsession that would lead to tragedy in an actual ocean… it feels like it is all you can do to keep your character from putting things in his or her mouth.

At first I was waiting for a, well, plotline or something to evolve from all this swimming around, but what laughably passes for a narrative concludes unexpectedly about 4 hours into the game, and you are left with just the joys of finding new and rare fish. There are also the many artifacts to collect, which glitter and chime when you come across them and many of which unlock new outfits for your character. The problem here is the random placement… an artifact can show up in a spot you’ve been over a hundred times before, or nowhere at all. This random occurrence defeats some of the fun of finding things… you found it because the game happened to place it in front of you, not because of a thorough search or clever thinking on your part.

Animal placement is also random, especially on the prow of your boat, which attracts seals, penguins… and at one point a freakin’ polar bear! I don’t know how or why a polar bear showed up on my little south pacific sailboat, but I’d be diving for shore in a second if I saw one of those man-eating bloody terrors menacing my poop deck (ever see Grizzly Man? Polar Bears are worse!) Luckily, Endless Ocean represents a sort of nature-hugging happy place where every animal is your friend, and vicious 600 pound polar monsters mostly want to roll around and have their bellies rubbed. I’m not sure that’s the best lesson to teach the kids.

But some of the other lessons are very apt! I was visiting a friend recently and was able to see his huge saltwater aquarium for the first time. Casually glancing into the tank I asked, “say, isn’t that a sailfin tang over there? Ah, I see you have blue chromis!” This was a bit of an extreme break in reality for my friend, who had been confident that none of his friends had any knowledge of fish. Twilight Zone music was probably playing in his head as I correctly identified most of the critters in the tank and rattled off a few trivia facts about each… Endless Ocean seems to have served its purpose well!

I expected I’d be done pretty soon with this game, but it must be said that Endless Ocean is strangely addictive. There are actual magic moments when you encounter some strange new life-form… the underwater world is both vast and terribly weird. I admit to liking games that teach me something useful, and I now have a passing familiarity with common tropical fish…. that’s a lot more than I learned from… uh… just about most games I’ve played. It is also nice to settle into a kid-friendly game without an ounce of subversion, violence, sexual tension or any other adult theme… this one’s truly a family-friendly offering.

How could the game be better? Much as the Wii-mote is fun, I pined to see some of the underwater wonders in HD. The mechanism for learning about fish could be much more developed, with different or more complex requirements and deeper info. Manoa Lai history could be explored with in-game books a la Myst… the mythology and culture could have been developed in more depth and made interesting. Heck, the game really could use some built-in beach reading of some kind or another. And if the programmers could figure out a way for your TV to give you a tan while you play… that would be good too. And Wii flipper attachments. I think I’m on to something here…

Played For: about 12 hour

Will I play it more: yeah, maybe. Whenever I need a refresher course on tropical fish.