Ecco The Dolphin

It's time to roast a sacred cow.  

When I started GOTBP a year and a half ago, I was thinking a lot about how video games have come to be perceived over time.  I find that unlike most media, there is a very concrete consensus on which games are good and which are bad.  This is compounded by the fact that there is little room for any dissension from that consensus.  Want to really aggravate a group of gaming nerds?  Easy. "Chrono Trigger sucks!"  There.  Now I'm the most hated person on the internet.

Just for the record, Chrono Trigger most certainly does not suck.  It's awesome.  And so are a lot of titles that gamers must dogmatically worship if they want to be included in the club.  I think Super Mario World is as great as the next person, ditto Mega Man X, The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy whatever number, etc.  However, I've made it clear that I have no problem breaking from that groupthink.  I have taken potshots at Halo, Skies of Arcadia, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and a number of other sacred cows.  I have no problem saying they are overrated.  But overrated doesn't necesarily mean bad.  Halo and SOA are both very good games and THPS is pretty damn fun for like 10 minutes at a time.  

Unfortunately I can't say the same for this week's entry.  I have heard since I was young how, as an SNES kid, I had really missed out on Ecco the Dolphin.  Genesis fans sung, and continue to sing, its praises as a unique and stellar title in the console's library.  It was unlike anything else out there! They said.  And they were right.  Ecco is certainly a unique specimen.  I can't say I have ever played something quite so unique.  I can think of a grand total of one game (two if you count its sequel I guess) that would compare in any way to this.  But just like overrated doesn't necessarily mean bad, unique doesn't necessarily mean good.  

Ecco the Dolphin is just plain lousy.  I can't fathom what anyone ever saw in this game, at no point in my time with it did I ever feel any sense of, well, anything.  It isn't fun, there's not fast paced action, no running and gunning, no platform jumping or enemy dodging.  But its not deliberate or slow paced or strategic either, there are some puzzles and there's a lot of nothingness to explore.  But its just that, nothingness.  It doesn't tell an epic story, there's no character development or detailed plot or relatability. It isn't relaxing, the game is brutally difficult and punishes you harshly for failing.  So again, I ask, why waste your time?

The game starts with Ecco wandering aimlessly around the ocean, talking to other dolphins and eating fish.  I have to give them some credit, they did a good job with the tutorial and the way it was integrated into the game was ahead of its time.  Just when you have the controls down and get your bearings, a giant tornado comes and sucks up all the dolphins, shooting them out to all corners of the ocean. It's like a sharknado, but with dolphins.  As is customary, its up to you to find and rescue your friends.  I suppose it could have been worse, but the plot just screams "I was so high when I programmed this" to the point where its just ridiculous.  And that would be okay if this was all expanded upon, but it basically just boils down to "aliens did it, save the dolphins."  

As for the actual gameplay?  Yuck.  The controls are horrendous, Ecco rarely goes where you think he's going to and its a huge pain to move on diagonals with a D-pad.  But this game demands it.  You will find yourself spinning in circles before you are able to orient Ecco to where you actually want him to go.  But the biggest problem?  The hit detection.  You have a massive hitbox and if even one pixel touches an enemy, it counts as a hit.  Ecco's primary attack is charging enemies, but the attack only hits if you connect with a foe in the last few frames of it's animation.  And you need to make your mark exactly.  If you don't hit the pixels that make up Ecco's nose on the exact correct part of the enemy, it doesn't count as a hit.  In fact, it usually means you are going to take a hit yourself.

And that's a massive, massive problem because there's no on-hit invincibility. In most games, you are immune from getting hit for a second or two after contacting an enemy. This allows you to regroup and take another shot at avoiding or eliminating the threat. One minor enemy can, and will, drain your health in seconds if you're not careful.  This had to be a design oversight, there is no way they would do this on purpouse.  I understand the game isn't supposed to be a platformer or action game, but that should be even more of a reason to avoid this BS.  Because this game is such a mess, I'm not sure where the actual challenge was supposed to come from, but I know for a fact it wasn't a combination of busted controls, lousy hit detection and the first enemies in the game being able to drain your life out from a single mistake.

This is further compounded by how harshly you are punished for failing.  If you die, you go back to the beginning of the level.  You have to go and re-do everything you have already completed, unlocking crystals, talking to allies, destroying enemies, everything.  If these were minutes-long levels, that would be okay.  But they are long, drawn out affairs with confusing, nonsensical tasks like escort missions.  Oh yeah, they're here, along with unnecessary stealth as part of the always fun package of games like this.  Look, I have no problem with a game making you play deliberately, but you have to move so slow and do so much waiting for things beyond your control that it gets boring quickly and leads to quite a few game overs.

Oh yeah, this is where I should mention Ecco needs to breathe.  Remember everyone, dolphins are mammals and as such can't breathe underwater.  Like their real life counterparts, virtual dolphins need to come to the surface and breathe out of the blow holes on the top of their heads.  Ecco is no different, he needs to surface, either in an undersea cave or on the ocean's surface, every two minutes or so.  What? Did  you think this was going to be the kind of game that made those areas intuitive to find? While also not forcing you to swim painfully slow through an unending tunnel?  Ha ha.  Good one.  It's poorly executed and while I understood why they did it, the game implements the breathing in just about the worst way possible.

All of this might have been tolerable if the exploration was as good as advertised.  But I found myself spending most of my time swimming through the same background in various shades of blue.  There are so many areas that are just nothingness and navigating them is a chore.  The underwater caves aren't much better, everything looks the same and its very easy to get lost.  I have to give them credit again, the visuals are technically impressive, but they aren't interesting in the slightest.  The same is true of the sound.  Technically it sounds as good as any Genesis game out there.  But sound quality is meaningless wheny every track is dull.

I'm sorry, Ecco the Dolphin is not a good game.  In many ways, I see what they were going for.  But it just doesn't work.  The dark triumvirate of bad control, bad hit detection and no on-hit invincibility dig its grave and it boring, lifeless world bury it.  Yeah, the final boss is massively creepy, but that's about all it offers.  And this has nothing to do with the game being "too old school."  Trust me, I hate hearing that excuse from people when they bash a game.  It's usually a matter of their refusal to take the time to learn whats going on.  That wasn't the case here.  It's not buggy or broken and is actually quite technically impressive for its time, so it doesn't go down with true bottom of the barrel stuff like Rocky an Bullwinkle.  But Ecco the Dolphin is not worth your time.  It took me a long time to get my hands on this and I was massively, massively disappointed.  Maybe Nelson was right?  Maybe we should nuke the whales? (Hey, gotta nuke something)  I don't know about that, but I would like to send a preemptive "Hah-Hah!" to anyone that wastes their time or money on Ecco the Dolphin.  I was so excited to finally get my hands on this, what a disappointment.

3.5/10