Endless Ocean semi-review
Endless Ocean is basically just a SCUBA diving simulator for the Wii. And it's not all that "simulative" either, since the sharks don't eat you, you can't drown or even get lost, and your job is to "just hang out and dive whenever you feel like it." :) While there are goals and unlockable areas, you're not required to do anything you don't want... dive when you like, enjoy the pretty scenery. You can't lose. (Although, as my son found out, you can lose your client when giving diving tours... I haven't figured out how he does it, but he's managed to escape his client and get them lost twice. I, on the other hand, am a five-star rated guide. :)
The Wii pointer control works well, although there's really nothing here that makes it a "Wii game"... a joystick would have worked as well, and a mouse would have given the same performance.
The sea creatures are mostly well-done, though I feel like, being the focus of the game, just a little more fine-tuning would have made them a lot more seamless and realistic. The immersion is slightly broken when you bump into bigger animals... you can see yourself in third-person view (the default) and the collision algorithm is both general and weird. You never really touch anything, but sometimes the collision detection fails and you get a whale fin passing through your thigh.
One of the (always optional) goals of the game is to learn about the sea life... this is kind of cool, because it's informative. There are three levels of knowledge, and the first is usually lame... it describes the visual attributes. Dude, I'm looking at it, I know it's blue and yellow and disk-shaped! The second and third level usually tells you something more interesting. But I've gotten to where I don't even read the first level information on anything but the more interesting specimens, like the vampire squid. The lack of interesting first-level information (and maybe too much information, considering how many fish there are) has my seven-year-old disinterested in learning about the fish.
What I love
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The immersion. Just swimming around and exploring is very cool... a lot of work went into designing the terrain. It's cool to round a bend or swim over a cliff and discover some amazing view. There's an undiscovered cave complex, an unexplored deep trench (with weird deep-sea creatures in it) and who knows what else... there's quite a bit of the map I haven't explored.
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The optional structure. There is just enough structure to give you something to do beyond swim around and look at stuff. A magazine columnist will ask you for pictures of specific fish, clients will ask you to guide them on a dive and to point out a specific fish for them, and Katherine, the leader of the expedition and your "boss", will give you ideas about what to go do. But it's optional... if you don't want to take pictures, nobody's going to fire you.
As the game progresses, you get new features (night-diving gear, a camera, deep-sea equipment) that give you more options and open up new areas that you couldn't reach before because you didn't have the equipment or skill. But it opens up pretty fast, and it isn't based on reaching some score or level. I believe some of it is based on accepting prior assignments (will the reporter talk to you about the rumors of an underwater cave if you never shoot photos for him), but I can't be sure, since I have accepted every request so far.
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The map. It shows you where you've been on a dive... makes it really easy to see what you've missed. I do wish that carried over from dive to dive, though... I'd like to push a button and see everywhere I've ever been.
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Some of the music. Haley Westenra has a beautiful voice and the sound of many of her songs fit very well. Unfortunately, "the music" also falls into the "What I hate" category as well.
What I hate
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The cut-scenes. EO's real strength (and goal) is to simulate diving in tropical waters, but it keeps interrupting the experience with cut-scenes. Enter a majestic new area and instead of getting to goggle around in wonder, you lose control and get shown various views that show off the scene really well, but have nothing to do with what you could actually see from your vantage point. It does this when you encounter really impressive sea life, too... like your first encounter with a sperm whale you get to see it swim by in a cut-scene, from a pre-set angle not related to where you are, but when the cut-scene is over, you can't find it anywhere. They really undermine the impressiveness of the biggest events by taking away control and totally destroying the immersion... which is a real crime when immersion is the whole point. Instead of getting to explore this new wonder, you're given a quick slide-show of all the highlights.
Also, there are too many cuts in general... getting close-up to a small object isn't seamless. The screen goes black between the main view and the close-up view. Same with grabbing hold of a dolphin or whale to hitch a ride... I suspect it's loading some kind of "dolphin plus diver" model, since you otherwise never actually touch the creatures. I wouldn't mind a little automation where the computer takes over to guide my diver into position, but the blanked screen and abrupt change in viewing angle sucks. For a game in which simulation is the core element, they could have made the experience more seamless.
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The Wii controller when it's not acting on its strengths. But that's Nintendo's fault, and I'll talk about that in its own post.
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The tedious "interaction" with the fish to learn about them. The interaction bit is weird... you have to get them to warm up to you by poking, petting, grabbing them, or feeding them. Sometimes (though rarely) this results in taking waaaay too long trying to interact with a creature to get the "acceptance" spark to get them into your catalog. There was one deep-sea shark that I spent minutes poking, petting and grabbing and never got him to "accept" me. I gave up. This part of the game shouldn't be challenging. Who wants to spend five minutes shaking the controller at a shark just so you can learn its name? (Knowing that you're going to have to do this on three different dives to get all three levels of knowledge, too.)
But if you're going to guide clients and get good ratings by showing them the fish you want to see, you're going to have to learn the names and be able to identify fish on sight. So far, the clients have asked to dive in specific locations and to see fish that are found in those locations... but I suspect we'll reach a point where they ask to see something without telling me where to find it. This is kind of fun, and the tours are always optional... but I'd like to maintain my five-star guide rating. :)
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The selection and implementation of the music. You start out the game with only two songs available. At the beginning of a dive, you get to choose one, and it plays that song OVER AND OVER AND OVER during the entire dive. This is okay for the generic "background theme music" stuff, but most of the songs have vocals (by Haley Westenra), and as beautiful as her voice is, I can only take hearing "Prayer" so many times in a row. And as appropriate the sound of some of her music is to the mood, the songs were not written for the game... "Prayer" wasn't chosen for its lyrics, it was chosen for its ethereal sound. Some of them do not loop well, but loop and loop and loop they do. There's nothing like a startling orchestral hit every three minutes to make you jump. The songs are not stylistically or thematically consistent (a problem with Westenra's albums in general, I think... Broadway, opera, folk and ethnic all crammed together), so some of the music just doesn't work so well. When you reach the bottom of the deep-sea trench, Westenra's singing a version of "Shenandoah," an American folk song that is, depending on the lyrics, about a river, valley or Indian chief. Not, emphatically, about the mysteries of the deep.
As you progress, you unlock more songs, usually when you discover a new area, and the new song starts playing during the discovery. This is cool, but it means listening to a very limited selection of music during the early parts of the game... six hours of play and I've only unlocked about half of the songs (five, I think). I'm going to have to buy an SD memory card so I can load up a better selection of "undersea songs"... at least it has that feature.
Overall
I find the game very compelling. If it were just diving and exploring, it'd get old pretty fast, but there's enough built-in goals to keep things interesting. New goals get introduced rapidly, and I've still got a lot of stuff left to explore.