drawing people’s main BC Oc with mine part 1/? Finished: Evelyn.
I lokie can NOT draw faces, sorry😭 if you want me to draw your black clover Oc along side mine just say so and I will! Any Black Clover oc!
Evelyn along side he Captain of the White Wolves, Arika, on a mission together assigned by Julius himself!( PS: I can’t draw backgrounds either 🥹✌️)@pvnksolar
Tokyo-based developer Arika is best known for their Tetris instalments, Street Fighter EX and derivatives, and more recently Nintendo's glut of online battle royale games. But between all these they used to have a little series of diving adventures, starting on the PS2 under the name Everblue until the fourth entry on the Wii in 2009. Well, after a gap of 15 years the Endless Ocean series has been resuscitated… should it have been left adrift though?
As a faceless member of Project Aegis, your diver "character" has been tasked with preserving the ecological balance of the Veiled Sea, a mysterious place which seems to shift every time you dive (thus explaining away the randomised map). This sea is inexplicably home to creatures from all over the world, be it saltwater or fresh, even long-extinct species. The unique ecosystem relies on a special coral formation which has been dying, and it's your job to… scan a lot of creatures, I guess, and also solve the many mysteries of the ancient Oannes civilisation, before something something underwater currents disrupted, something something extinction of all life on Earth!?
The stakes may be artificially high but there isn't really any urgency to the gameplay (except in multiplayer, which I'll get to). Each dive is a fresh run into a randomly generated map, where you'll leisurely swim around and scan, and scan, and occasionally pick up a jpeg of salvage. The broad goal of a map is to find seven special instances of creatures that glitch out your sensors, which spawns in a large and unique animal with some fantastical element to it. These are of course randomly chosen, and even have rare variants so get grinding! The 99 secrets of the Mystery Board also rely on random spawns; this huge RNG element is a big change for the series, and not a welcome one.
A lot about this game screams "cheap", and while dropping you in a random map each time is supposed to be good for replayability, it means that the majority of the seafloor landscape is incredibly bland, just sand and rocks with small reef structures surrounded by fish doing nothing at all. Beyond this there are formations including more interesting occurrences like icebergs, depths, or ruins, but they're all rigidly locked into a grid structure and each of these large landmarks are exactly the same every time you encounter them. It doesn't take long to see all the biomes and scan 90% of all the fish types, and then you're expected to keep going on more and more dives to roll the dice on getting the spawns you need to progress. The curated, detailed, designed environments of the previous games have been replaced by mishmashed maps sloppily slapped together by an algorithm and it's immediately clear how much of a step down this is.
The "story mode" is laughably abbreviated, a series of brief cutscenes and mini-dives in truncated areas which introduce you to a half-hearted "rival" character Daniel, your onboard AI Sera, and the plot such as it is. Daniel has text dialogue but is silent, you of course have no voice or text, while Sera is voiced by some kind of text to speech program, and ends up sounding like the TikTok AI voice. Since it reads out the descriptions of all the aquatic life you scan, this voices quickly gets grating. Unlocking new stages in the story can be very grindy, requiring thousands of fish scans, then gating you off from the finale until you solve all 99 Mysteries by randomly stumbling upon them in dives. I soon turned to online resources that shared and documented interesting dive site seeds or ones that contained specific solutions to the mysteries, just to get it over with.
Your choices for dives are solo or shared. A solo dive lets you pick a specific seed, and has no restrictions. The experience is very chill and relaxed, although you do soon end up seeing the same stuff again and again. Scanning is just about all you can do; there is no interaction with the animals you meet, and other features from previous games have been stripped out, streamlining the gameplay overmuch. There are no threats or hazards; sharks merely glide by you unconcerned, even the scary unique boss creatures from the other Endless Ocean games, which appear here as mere reused assets.
Multiplayer dives are quite different, although they use the same generated maps. You can't pick specific maps in this mode though, for some reason. Since this requires a paid online subscription, I was lucky that my second-hand cart came with its unused coupon for a seven-day trial so I could try out this mode. Here other players will randomly drop into a shared instance, and your coverage of the map is pooled with others, revealing landmarks and objectives. Your time in a multiplayer map is limited for some reason, so you have to swoosh around in an efficient and optimised (aka boring) manner. You can also tag specific creatures and salvage to alert others; an odd quirk is that I couldn't figure out how to unlock more tag images aside from interacting with other players' tags. The customisation menu has stickers, emotes, and wetsuit palettes but they're all awfully expensive and this cosmetic system I found quite shallow and unsatisfying.
An additional game mode reveals itself… sometimes. This is another example of the new Nintendo trend of time-limited events. Great. These ones do seem to cycle in the long term, but there are off times where it's simply not an option, and weeks between availability of each map. These are special multiplayer-only instances, where maps have been curated with specific location and creature spawns. Imagine that. Still, because they're built with all the same blocks as any generated map, they have a similar feel and after a run or two they also become stale. While active the event map also seemed to draw attention away from the normal multiplayer mode, so my random maps became barren of other players, but still time-limited! In the end I didn't spend much time in shared maps; interaction with others was too sparse and constrained, and the mode lacks either the chill vibes or the ability to target objectives discovered by the community to tick off the Mystery Board.
While there's a large variety of creatures to find, I couldn't help noticing the categories that were present in earlier games but largely missing here, like pinnipeds, birds, river dolphins, octopodes, seahorses, sea slugs, even jellies. Not to mention that all creatures have a garish blue or yellow filter over their models initially, to indicate they haven't yet been scanned on this dive (this is explained as bioluminescent bacteria that gets disturbed by your instruments, which doesn't make it any less unsightly). I was pleased by the large number of prehistoric animals you can encounter, and it generally looks nice as the first HD entry in the series, but these other issues on top of the blandly passive behaviour of all creatures makes this a poor nature simulation.
For a full price game (70 Aussie dollarydoos!!) Endless Ocean Luminous has quite the budget feel, between the sauceless generated maps to the lacking story and characters to broad feature cuts across the board. It's a poor successor to the legacy of Arika's now 25-year-old series; for diving games in the HD era you're better off with Beyond Blue for a more authentic look at nature or Abzû for a cinematic adventure. At least it doesn't require Wii Remote pointing, I guess.
