Ecco the Dolphin (Sega CD)

Ecco the Dolphin, Sega CD, Novotrade International, 1993

This review comes from a deep (pun intended) and personal place. I've written in past reviews about my next-door neighbor Sega cousins, who I, as a Nintendo die-hard, lived through vicariously. Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage, even back to Shinobi on the Sega Master system, their house offered something different (and also, they could watch Rambo, and Baywatch, and Beavis and Butthead). One 1993 summer afternoon, as I let myself in through their backdoor, I noticed something had happened to their Sega Genesis. It had...grown.

Into a dolphin?

Yes, now it was connected to some kind of strange-looking CD player, with a couple of blue, rectangular game cases sitting next to it. It turns out this was a SEGA CD, some new Sega Genesis add-on that apparently gave it mystical powers. I popped in the first CD game (after figuring out I had to take out whatever cartridge was in the Genesis). This game took place in a sewer, and some guy kept calling me a pencil neck. It wasn't the most fun game, but holy cow!, it had movies in it, and people talking. Like actual voices, in a video game! How was this magic possible?! I took out Sewer Shark (maybe I'll review that one later), and put in the next game...and my entire world changed.

Into a dolphin?

This music. This music was coming out of my cousins' TV, and it wasn't video game music. No bloops and bleeps. No low-quality sound bytes. This was music. Beautiful, evocative, ethereal music,  music that transported me under the sea, under the dopamine sea, and into the world of Ecco the Dolphin.
I don't know how many times those cousins kicked me off of their Sega CD that summer. They never even bought another game for it, and eventually sold it. They were all technical types and just didn't get it. They didn't get the feelings. Every time I went to their house during that first summer of President William Jefferson Clinton, I played as much Ecco as they could stand. I tried to stash a sheet of level passwords in their den, but it always seemed to go missing. Due to the missing password sheets, I never got past Ecco's fourth or fifth level. When they sold the Sega CD, I think I cried. By then, though, the early-90's had given way to the mid. Puberty happened, I got a Nintendo 64, and what Sega CD?

Might as well have dumped it in the ocean. Sorry, dolphins.

But then, as adulthood took deeper and deeper hold--a wife, a kid, a desk job--a powerful thing called nostalgia glowed on the horizon. The dream of the 90's was alive again in my calloused, 2010's heart, and the only solution was to finally buy my own Sega Genesis and Sega CD, and to finally get my hands on my own copy of Ecco the Dolphin. This time, the password sheet was going to stay put.
Diving back into the game, Ecco the Dolphin is just as I remember it. With the 2D indie-gaming re-revolution currently taking place, Ecco's bright and detailed graphics look great. The sight of Ecco flapping his fluke and zooming past the cobalt outlines of submerged cliff walls as they jut tan and rocky from the surface overhead brings a tear to my eye. The diversity of environments, from the bright corals in calm blue bays, to the subtle oranges in the evening sky over silvery, ice-laden arctic seas, to the sun setting over the marble statues of Atlantis, to the Giger-esque blacks and greens of its latter levels, Ecco the Dolphin is a 16-bit sight. It's also loaded with undersea fauna, from simple fish, to dolphin pods, to turtles, whales, and octopi. If you have any sort of thing for the ocean, this is your game. No other series has delved into it like this.

Not even Call of Duty.

While Ecco looks great, even the best 2D games of the 90's require a bit of imagination from the player. In my opinion, nothing stimulates the mind like music. Spencer Nilsen created the New Age, oceanic soundtrack that captured my imagination so many years ago. It is still just as entrancing now, with high-quality keyboard samples plunging the players ears into aural bliss. Perhaps the only flaw in the soundtrack, which I can only see today because I both own the game, and now have the skills needed to complete it, is that about halfway through, the score starts to repeat itself a bit, with later levels featuring some of the same music as the earlier ones. Still, it's great, 50-minutes of original music, and it always fits. The soundtrack becomes so inextricably linked to the game, that when my eight-year-old son saw Ecco running on a regular Sega Genesis cartridge, with its quite-different-from-the-Sega-CD, bloopy-bleepy soundtrack, he said, "Hey, that's not Ecco music!"

However, this is the most Ecco image ever, featuring Ecco talking to an Orca in an undersea cavern, with an air pocket overhead, and a magical ancient crystal glyph behind.

As a younger person, the sound and graphics immersed my imagination so deeply, the gameplay was almost secondary. Now that I've experienced 25 years of increasingly more technologically advanced games, the gameplay really has to stand out. It's clear that Ecco's chief designer, Ed Annunziata, wanted to do something a bit different with his game. For one, Ecco's ocean environment means that he can swim in any 2D direction. Anunnziata uses this feature to go against the "kill all the bad guys and progress" grain of the time. While Ecco the dolphin can indeed kill bad guys, like jellyfish and sharks, the player will mainly find themselves using him to solve environmental puzzles. Path ahead blocked by rocks? Saw a weird wreath of spikes a while back? Use your sonar to push the spikes through the rocks to create a path. Need to swim down against strong currents? Find a large rock, and push it down in front of you to gain egress. Yes, there are times Ecco does have to fight to proceed, generally against bosses, but these times are few and far between. Having open environments, instead of straight ahead paths, enhances this gameplay.

Actually, you can't get more Ecco than sliding across the ice like Ecco's belly is skates.

The game uses the Genesis controller's joypad and three-button setup to allow Ecco to speed up, quick dash, and fire off sonar, respectively. Ecco can speed along just like his blue hedgehog Sega co-mascot, and the player will likely spend several minutes just making Ecco jump through the surface and spin in the air as high as they can. If the player holds down the sonar button, the sound wave bounces off the nearest wall and comes back, and true to the real-life dolphin ability of echolocation, shows the player a map of the nearby surrounding area. Ecco will need to utilize all of these abilities to save his missing pod, progressing through the game's 30+ levels, through the tropics, the arctic, shipwrecks, ancient underwater ruins, prehistoric seas, and outer space. Yes, this game's story is insane, as Ecco not only time travels, but tangles with aliens on his quest.

Ugh, another Pteranodon picked me up. I hate it when that happens.

Much has been made of this game's difficulty. I remember being stymied by the game's slightly esoteric nature as a middle-schooler, but playing through as an adult, I felt much smarter and more able. Woohoo, life goals! Anyway, in a brazen display of cockiness, I said, "This isn't so hard. I don't see what the big deal is." Then I reached the game's penultimate stage, "Welcome to the Machine." If there's a game where Pink Floyd references don't seem out of place, it is Ecco the Dolphin. I am pretty good at video games, particularly non-fighting, 2D ones, but Ecco's last few stages, which abandon the game's previous formula for constantly scrolling action, had me tossing the conroller. "Welcome to the Machine," is a constantly twisting labyrinth, filled with aliens and death, with the screen not only constantly scrolling, but constantly changing scrolling directions, as well. Get stuck behind a jutting pipe when the scrolling changes directions, and you're extra soggy toast.

The only video game level expressly designed by Satan.

Ecco the Dolphin also includes an important component of mammal life, breathing air, to the difficulty equation. Yes, Ecco can drown and has a constantly-depleting oxygen meter right beneath his life meter. Forget to head to the surface, or an air pocket at the top of an underground cave, and poor Ecco will die. The Sega CD does mitigate the difficulty a little, by including save glyphs in the game's longer levels. The Sega CD version also has more levels than its Sega Genesis cousin, and even a fully animated intro, and some FMV dolphin documentaries hidden in a middle stage. It is truly the definitive console version of the game. However, it does not completely eliminate some of the Genesis version's problems.
While the esoteric element of many levels can be a bit frustrating, that frustration is augmented by some silly game control and enemy interaction issues. For instance, at select moments, Ecco will have to move a sinking object horizontally. The game doesn't really have an input for this, and the player will nearly have to glitch the object where they need it to be. Also, though Ecco has five bars on his hit meter, if he gets jammed against a wall for a second by an enemy, particularly one in the latter levels where there are no save points, he is dead in less than a second. This is absolutely maddening. Oh yeah, and the over-the-top difficult final boss battle? Lose (which you can technically do in under a second), and yet get to start over at the beginning of "Welcome to the Machine." So depressing.

It's why whale just hangs out in his ice cave all day now.

Flaws and all, though, I'll take it. There's yet to be a video game quite like Ecco the Dolphin on the market...outside of its direct Genesis/Sega CD sequel and a Sega Dreamcast reboot. Ecco the Dolphin is a reminder of the incredible quirkiness of the early 90's, something the decade didn't quite payoff (and I say this as an unabashed 90's lover). This was a time a headlining game could feature a seafaring, spacetripping dolphin as its protagonist, and no one would bat an eye. It is a time encapsulated for me, in one game. May it be remembered forever, or until we nuke, climate change, or supervirus ourselves to death, at which point, ideally, cockroaches will gain video game-playing abilities to keep the artform alive. Thanks, Ecco.

Graphics: 8.8/10.0
Sound: 9.5/10.0
Gameplay: 7.5/10.0
Lasting Value: 7.5/10.0
Overall (Not an Average): 7.8/10.0