Tell me about Endless Ocean?
I don't recall much of the first game unfortunately but the second (Blue World) I can talk your ear off about.
It's a diving simulator on the Wii with scary areas that freaked me out as a kid lmfao. There's mythical animals to find but the game is grounded in real-life locations and you're tasked with finding an ancient temple that was sunk beneath the ocean a thousand years ago. You gotta avoid sharks and get photos of animals, you open an aquarium, you go everywhere from the Arctic to freshwater Amazon rivers to the open ocean to coral reefs, and you get to document the species you find along the way in a bestiary. You also get to help solve the disappearance of your friend's father.
You also get to train dolphins and porpoises, uncover treasure (I had a crush on the chick who appraises your salvage WHOOPS), take photos, bring clients on diving trips to find certain animals, have random events under proper circumstances, and go deep-sea diving which is INSANELY fun and INSANELY scary cuz Something Is Down There With You and you never actually find out what it is (though you do meet a giant squid and watch it fight a sperm whale, which is cool!)
Technically I never actually... Beat the game. I beat it in the technical sense, but in the post-game activities you're supposed to reopen the Temple of the Gods once you get a million monies, but I never got enough money and then one day my Wii shat the bed and I lost my save. And that was a good 3-4 years of work, so I quit out of frustration because I only had about 100k left to go.
But god, I love that game. It's been long over a decade since I played and if I could find a Wii somewhere I'd dump DAYS back into it. It's a part of my childhood and was MASSIVE to little outback Blu who'd never even seen a lake before, let alone been able to reckon with the vastness of an ocean he'd never seen.
I have it to thank for my love of the ocean, and also because it taught me about the bends once I finally went diving so I knew I had to surface slowly. I still got the bends 😅
