If you're around my age (perhaps a bit older) or younger, you'll of course have those games from your childhood that intrigued you, but you just didn't “get”, for lack of a better word. They were supposed to be fun, and they started out so interesting, or scary, or funny, but then that wretched, difficult gameplay stepped in and made the whole thing feel like a chore with no reward.

You go through life, that one game occasionally breaching the surface of your thoughts to remind you, “I was really cool, but you were too dumb to beat me! Don't you want to know what I'm all about? Can you really stand to not know what happened?” At some point, you know you'll have to find a way to play that game if only to satisfy your curiosity.

For me, that game was Ecco the Dolphin. There weren't many people who owned a Sega Genesis who didn't have the game, but I never met anyone who actually beat it. The game is absolutely insane, but with no clear direction on how to go about clearing the levels, it sometimes felt like sniffing the forbidden rubber cement would be more productive.

Ecco is a fantastic sci-fi story (yes, you read that right) that has the misfortune of having mind-numbing difficulty until you get the hang of how the game plays several levels in, if you hang around that long.

Story

So, what's this silly dolphin game all about? Would you believe me if I told you it involved outer space, time travel, and mythological civilizations?

The game starts out simple enough. You're a dolphin named Ecco, swimming around with all your dolphin friends, speaking to them by shooting your echolocation at them. They tell you things like, “The marks on your head look like stars in the sky.” As far as I know, this is normal dolphin chatter. We may find out one day...

Anyway, one of the dolphins asks you how high you can jump, so get a good running start and jam that dash button all the way to the surface. You breach and shoot up when WHAM! This is probably the first jump scare I'm aware of in games, if you don't count the jingle in King's Quest II that alerts you to the sudden appearance of an enemy.

A tornado rushes in from nowhere, sucking up everything from creatures along the sea bed to the dolphins themselves like a giant vacuum. Ecco alone plunges back into the waters, which are now empty and void of life. Ominous music starts to play and you may now exit the area.

It's your job to find out what happened to your pod, but before you can get going on that proper...

The Gameplay

The gameplay rears its ugly head. Once you figure out how the game flows and what makes it tick, it's not that bad. However, the game presents you with an immediate, tedious come-down from that heart-pounding opener by sending you through a tedious stretch of levels where you don't do much to advance the story at all, although you do get some nice upgrades if you actually do the quests in a couple of them.

You find out that there's one creature who may be old enough and wise enough to give a clue about the freak thing that took your pod: an old blue whale who's gone to the north to die, because Ecco is an optimistic game (still the beginning of the game, so this isn't a spoiler).

This gives the game time to get you familiar with how Ecco plays, and it's here that most players drop out, never to discover the bizarre twists and turns this seemingly shallow game about a dolphin searching for his friends and family will take you.

It takes a while to get used to the gameplay, simply because it's underwater. You can move in eight directions, but there are so many obstacles that it's difficult. There are currents that prevent you from taking certain paths, or at least make it challenging to find a way through them; paths that take you to dead ends; rock barriers that require you to push special shells into them in order to destroy them; and, of course as a mammal, your oxygen meter that is constantly forcing you to look for air pockets or make a mad dash back to the surface.

There are also a bunch of annoying enemies that respawn too quickly, some that you can't kill at all! It's a shame that the story grinds to an abrupt halt because this gameplay isn't that bad when combined with a clear, fun goal that isn't go-find-the-idiot-dolphin-who-got-lost.

The Music

I just wanted to say a word or two about the music in this game before I go on, as it's fantastic. Normally, I don't have many good things to say about Sega Genesis music. The Super Nintendo had way superior sound, and any game that was ported to the Genesis from Super Nintendo takes a serious dip in sound.

That said, Ecco makes perfect use of that quirky Genesis vibe, making it one of the best soundtracks of any game on the system! It's ambient, ominous, unsettling, and fun. Take a listen for yourself via the Sega CD version.

Ecco is Awesome

This is the part with spoilers, so if you want to give a thumbs up, comment, or donate, just scroll as fast as you can to the bottom! I'll give you a couple of lines of blank spaces to avoid the spoilers as you read this. If you want spoilers, then just keep reading.

So, what happened to Ecco's pod? They were abducted by aliens. I really want to put a meme here, but that would be spoilery for those just scrolling by. Yes, aliens. The Vortex Queen, to be precise, and she looks suspiciously like the alien from Aliens. She also has a hankering for dolphin flesh, making me think that The Cove was even more misguided in its fixation on demonizing the Japanese than I thought. They should've totally focused on how alien invaders are way more interested in abducting sea life than human life!

In order to get to outer space, you have to find the lost city of Atlantis. They apparently made a time machine that a prophecy says Ecco should use. You see, they themselves were enemies of the Vortex Queen.

You use the time machine to go back some 55 million years in search of retrieving an orb from a bizarre, ancient creature called the Asterite, which just looks like a large strand of DNA. He needs this orb brought to him in the future in order to give you power-ups that will help you survive in space, but his younger self isn't nearly as friendly.

You must then use the time machine again to go back to when your pod was abducted and allow yourself to be sucked into the spaceship with them, thrusting you into the last act of the game!

Conclusion

This game is a joy. It's a mind-warping joy that so many people never managed to appreciate because of some terrible levels at the beginning of the game. There's a sequel to the game, and I sincerely hope for more Ecco games in the future. A movie would also be a lot of fun, too. Let's resurrect this amazing series!