The limitations placed on you are never arbitrary there are no figurative guards who block bridges until you speak to the king. Fish can be captured as well, but only on film, after which they are entered into a database and can be displayed in your aquarium.

Almost every item you find underwater will be used either in the construction of new buildings on Valencia Island, given to people who are trying to collect particular sets of items (medicine, art, furniture, etc.), or, worst comes to worst, sold to the pawn shop for some extra scratch to take to the auction house. The game's story proceeds at an even clip, directing you towards landmarks or wrecks to find some crucial item or another. They may not feel like real places, but by traveling through them in the game's first person perspective, they do feel like places. Everblue 2 is filled with such spaces, such as a sunken luxury liner or lost pirate ship. I realised several years ago that what I enjoy most in games is visiting places I otherwise never could. All you listen to as you explore the underwater environment is the breathing of your respirator, and the pinging of your sonar, leaving you to immerse yourself fully in the alien world that Arika has made. Aside from a single, rare piece no music plays while underwater. I find that I don't really mind this, however, as the ability to permanently strip a wreck bare would be genuinely depressing given how much effort went into building them. Other details about the game support this as well, like how, aside from plot critical items, every item in a wreck will respawn when you leave the ocean, allowing you to stock up on the same collection of items to sell back on land when you feel the need to grind money. I know enough about diving, however, to know that Leo should probably have died of decompression sickness several dozen times over the course of the game, so that leads me to suspect that Arika wasn't terribly interested in realism for the game either.

As far as qualifications goes I am not at all the person to review Everblue 2 as a diving simulator. I've barely even set foot into the ocean.

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