Ecco Summary from TV Tropes Wiki

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Ecco The Dolphin

"Man, maybe they should have forgotten the name Ecco and just called the series Jesus Christ There's Sharks And Aliens Everywhere." - Anon.

A Sega video game series about a time-travelling bottlenose dolphin who fights space aliens. His friends include a pteranodon, a telepathic strand of DNA, and flying dolphins from ten million years in the future. Or, if you ask some people, a telepathic crystal and various alternate future dolphins.

The games feature notoriously difficult gameplay, which focuses on solving puzzles with the ever-present Oxygen Meter hanging over the player, and surreal storylines focused on a dolphin's perspective on alien invasions (that don't involve leaving with a thank-you note). Despite the apparent silliness of the premise, the alien (sometimes literally) setting, atmospheric music and minimalist dialogue create a lingering sense of eeriness.

The series was originally for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, and began with Ecco the Dolphin. In this game, Ecco's pod was snatched from the seas by a mysterious storm, so he set out to find them, helping other dolphins along the way.

As the storyline went on, it got progressively more bizarre: first, Ecco went to see a blue whale for advice. The blue whale didn't know much, but sent Ecco to talk to the Asterite, the oldest being in the seas with the appearance of globes arranged on a double-helix. The Asterite, with no explanation, recognised Ecco and told him it could help him, except it was missing a globe and thus not at full power. The solution: travel to Atlantis and go back in time 55 million years to retrieve the wayward sphere. In Atlantis, Ecco discovers that the source of the storm was a species of hiveminded alien who had lost the ability to make their own food and was thus harvesting from Earth's seas every 500 years.

In the end, Ecco saves his pod and destroys the Vortex aliens - or so he thought.
Ecco: The Tides of Time picked up where the original left off. Turns out the Vortex Queen was Not Quite Dead and had followed Ecco to Earth, whereupon she killed the Asterite and began a takeover. On top of that, Ecco's time-travelling in the first game had split the timestream in two. Whoops. The second game, then, followed Ecco's adventures as he sought to save the Asterite (also Not Quite Dead) and the good future of Earth. It ended with Ecco vanishing mysteriously into the "Tides of Time."

Then, save for an Edutainment Game called Ecco Jr. and a few remakes, the series vanished from the face of the Earth for several years.

Its return came in the form of Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future for the Sega Dreamcast, which brought the series to three-dimensions and completely ignored the universe and storyline that came before it. About the only things it had in common with the original series was the protagonist being a dolphin named Ecco, aliens, and time travel. It also introduced a dolphin/human (and /whale) society, where the original games relegated humans to backgrounds in Atlantis and the odd background sunken ship. Fan reaction was mixed.

In Defender, the plot centered around the Foe aliens breaking the timestream by stealing dolphinkind's "most noble traits" - Intelligence, Ambition, Compassion, Wisdom, and Humility - in the past, before they could unite with humans. It was of course Ecco's job to get these traits back, over the course of three different alternate futures: Man's Nightmare, Dolphins' Nightmare, and Domain of the Enemy.

One was a dying world with polluted water, no humans on account of them having gone extinct in their war against the Foe, and stupid-but-still-sapient dolphins who either worshipped men as a benevolent force which had uplifted dolphinkind from being mere animals and eagerly awaited their return or regarded them as a nasty species that had enslaved dolphinkind. It turns out both factions were probably right.

The next reality happened after Ecco sent back Intelligence and Ambition, turning dolphins into a surly bunch of warlords who drove humans from the seas. Arguably the prettiest section of the game, since the dolphins used a lot of organic-looking technology, and since it includes Hanging Waters, aka "Let's See How Many Mythology Gags Can Fit In One Level".

The final alternate reality saw every trait but Humilty restored to dolphins. In this one, the Foe took over and turned Earth into Mordor. And... that's... about it...

All in all, Ecco is a very bizarre, haunting, frustrating, and strangely charming series. Don't expect to see any more of him in either the Genesis or Defender storyline anytime soon.
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This series provides examples of:

• Adaptation Decay or Adaptation Distillation (Your Mileage May Vary) - The comic book adaptation in Sonic The Comic, which preserved the basic plot elements, well depicted the setting and characters, but cut out most of the time travel elements (for example, Ecco retrieves the Asterite's missing pearl from a giant squid and the abyssal plain in the present, not Atlantis).

• Bad Future - Central to the plot of Tides and playable in a few levels. Defender of the Future has three Bad Futures to go through in total during Ecco's quest to restore the timeline to its proper state.

• Bag Of Spilling - You start Tides with the powers the Asterite gave Ecco in the first game, but they are lost when the Asterite is killed. Which of course occurs just before the first real level of the game.

• Bull Fight Boss - The Globe Holder from Tides has elements of this in the second phase, although it's not really a "boss." The great white shark in Defender is a somewhat straighter example.

• Crowning Music Of Awesome - The Sega-CD & PC versions all versions have an epic soundtrack, though the CD/PC ones are for the most part completely different.

• Crystal Spires And Togas - "Atlantis Lost" of Defender.

• Discontinuity - Quite a few fans of the Genesis games hold this attitude about Defender, although the plot has almost nothing to do with the first two games anyway, so take that as you will.

• Dolphins Dolphins Everywhere - And orcas, and whales, and porpoises...

• Doomed Home Bay - Jump really high to trigger the apocalypse!

• Downer Ending - One interpretation of Tides of Time. You spend the Playable Epilogue chasing the Big Bad through Atlantis, trying to beat her to the Time Machine and destroy it before she uses it to mess up the timeline you just spent the whole game fixing. When you get to it, you use it instead. A scrolling title card (set to the rather chilling title theme) tells you the Vortex Queen beat you there and warped into prehistory, you went after her, and you were never heard from again. This Troper was in tears at the ripe young age of seven.

• Escort Mission - Each game (even the edutainment one) has at least one, though in the original they are optional. They're also not too bad as escort missions go; in the Genesis games, your charges are invulnerable, and the Defender one isn't killable. They're arguably not even true escort missions, since you don't have to protect them or even keep them in sight, they just follow you automatically and unerringly.
o Defender had an irritating glitch during the most difficult escort mission (there were several, but only one required any real effort). You were meant to protect a dolphin so he could lead you to a door and open it for you. Sometimes, after going through a short tunnel, he would manage to swim inside a rock on the other side and become stuck. Made irritating by the fact that a Power of Sonar gem would have made him obsolete anyway.

• Everything Is Even Worse With Sharks - Well, naturally. Sharks are some of the tougher enemies, often taking three to five hits to kill. Ecco himself is transformed into a shark several times in the second game, mostly so he can rampage about the level eating everything.
o And for an excuse to choose between getting munched by One Hit Kill sharks, or turn yourself into one and proceed to get attacked by other dolphins.

• Everything Trying To Kill You - Ecco's enemies are fairly reasonable for the most part, but the prehistoric levels of the first game feature Goddamned Trilobites and seahorses who shoot their young at you.

• Floating Continent - In the Good Future. The flying dolphins say they were "born of the great eruptions", whatever that means.

• Flying Seafood Special - At least, if they don't have dolphin-safe tuna millions of years in the future.

• Gainax Ending - The other interpretation of the Tides of Time ending. It is implied the Vortex Queen, upon arriving in prehistory, got stomped by the local wildlife (goddamned trilobites!), and was unable to dominate Earth's ecosystem, instead integrating into it and evolving into stuff we already had. Not weird enough? According to a Word of God interview — god only knows how reliable the source, but it sure sounds cool and it's not like we're going to see another game — Ecco knew this would happen and didn't even bother using the time machine to chase the Queen at all! He used it to go to the time of the Atlanteans, for "specific reasons reserved for the 3rd game."

• Genius Loci - The ocean in the good future, according to the future dolphins.

• Goddamned Crabs/Pufferfish/Trilobites - There are quite a few enemies in the Genesis games that make you see the positive side of driving things to extinction.

• Hailfire Peaks, naturally all with an Under The Sea twist:
o Green Hill Zone - The first level in every game.
o Underground Level - The Undercaves would be the first example.
o Slippy Slidey Ice World - In which Ecco can literally slip and slide around on his belly atop the ice.
o Prehistoria - And how.
o Eternal Engine - Welcome to the Machine

• Heroic Mime - Ecco does use his voice as a general problem-solving tool, but the player's never privy to anything he says beyond "Queek-queek-queek" and "SQUAAARK!!"
o He also chatters when you press the sonar button out of water in Defender.
 Interestingly, one of the scrapped ideas involved being able to see what Ecco's sonar translated to by singing at a mirror (Defender).

• Hive Mind - The aliens in both storylines.
• Horde Of Alien Locusts - Again, the aliens in both storylines.
• Humans Are Bastards - In Defender, when they take over without uniting with the dolphins. Of course, the dolphins from the Dolphins' Nightmare section are some pretty nasty customers as well, so maybe it's more like Unchecked Dominant Species Are Bastards.

• Locked Door - "SEARCH FOR THE KEY-GLYPH"

• The Maze - At least one in each game, some more frustrating than others.

• Make Me Wanna Shout - Ecco's sonar gets various weapons-grade upgrades throughout the games.

• My Own Grampa - Variant: while retrieving the Asterite's globe in Ecco the Dolphin, Ecco encounters some proto-cetaceans and accidentally gives them the idea to take to the seas.

• New Age - Self-explanatory, really.

• Nice Job Breaking It Hero - "You are the Stone that splits the Stream of Time in two."

• Nightmare Fuel -
o The entire game is a claustrophic, haunting experience. It gets worse. Do not let the fact that the protagonist is an adorable dolphin fool you. Seriously. ◊
o Welcome to the Machine. Not only does it feature a pukish green background and some really unnerving music, but it's also pretty long, even for a level with automatic scrolling.
 And thanks to a surely deliberate plant on the password screen, it's easy to be transported to it accidentally with no knowledge of what awaits you there.

• Nintendo Hard - Controller-throwingly so.

• No Ontological Inertia - The Asterite's powerup only works when it's alive.

• Nostalgia Level - Defender includes two hidden sidescrolling levels based on the Genesis games; one is actually called Passage from Genesis. Also, the Hanging Waters levels are one big Mythology Gag reference to the Good Future water tubes from Tides, although that doesn't change the fact that they look awesome.

• Oddball In The Series - Ecco Jr.

• One Hit Kill - So many things do this you wonder why they bothered letting you keep the life meter for the last few levels.

• Paranoia Fuel - So you've just started Tides of Time. You're zooming around one of the first levels, enjoying the better controls, and suddenly you see a terrifying mass of blue chitin that kills you instantly. It was one of the alien enemies in the first game that you never saw till the last level. One the one fin you don't want to go that fast ever again in case more of them are floating around, but on the other...you have to. Eep.

• Pass Through The Rings - Those goddamn teleport levels from Tides. Predictably, some of this in Defender as well, since it's the only 3D game in the series.

• Playable Epilogue - Tides has one three levels long.

• Poison Fish - Seen in Defender; Among the many health-restoring fish there is one specific kind that'll hurt instead of heal you.
o These Poison Fish are the only way to heal you from a slow death due to Jellyfish Poison. If you're poisoned and eat this fish, you won't take damage and your health won't increase, but the poison will be gone.
 They can also be mildly useful after you learn the Song of Fish. Sharks don't want to eat poison fish, so having a little cloud of them following you around makes a nifty living shield. The downside? Fish are slow, so said living shield is only effective when you don't need/want to swim quickly.

• Porting Disaster - The GameGear version of Tides. It is now thought it was based on a prototype of the Genesis/Mega Drive game. The Game Boy Advance port of the original Ecco isn't quite so atrocious, but removed almost the entire soundtrack, replacing it with a 30-second loop heard during the time travel sequences in the original game.

• Scenery Porn - Lovely shots of the ocean, in both the Genesis games and Defender.

• Scrappy Level - Every game has at least one. Inevitable given the general difficulty, really.
o Ecco the Dolphin features Welcome to the Machine: Five minutes of twisting, turning, auto-scrolling Hell. And just to make things even better, if you lose to the final boss you get to go through again!
o Subverted with the Hanging Waters level in Defender of the Future. It has all the makings of a Scrappy Level, but it's generally forgiven because the concept behind it is so awesome and said concept is executed flawlessly.

• The Sky Is An Ocean: The Tides Of Time features flying dolphins, a giant flying jellyfish, and ocean paths in the sky.

• Somewhere A Palaeontologist Is Crying - The prehistoric levels of Ecco the Dolphin include trilobites, pteranodons, and proto-cetaceans cohabiting.

• Space Is An Ocean - Defender seems to make it apparent that both man and dolphin prefer the "space fetus" method of interstellar travel from the end of 2001: A Space Oddyssey.

• Stable Time Loop - Ecco is sent back in time to find the Asterite's lost globe, but ultimately ends up stealing it from it in the past, and thus being the reason the Asterite doesn't have said globe in the first place. The Asterite itself comes to this revelation when you first meet it, but of course, you're not likely to understand a word it's saying at the time.

• Stalking Mission - Defender. There's a deadly version in Tides.

• Surprise Creepy - You wouldn't think a game about a dolphin could possibly be this eerie, would you?

• Sword Of Plot Advancement - The special powers the Asterite gives Ecco in the first and second games, the dolphins' noble traits in Defender.

• That One Boss - Again, given the general difficulty almost all the bosses are well-hated, but the final boss of the first game deserves special mention. She actually isn't all that bad herself, but if you die you have to pick your way through Welcome to the Machine again. Worse, she has a move that will kill you instantly or even freeze the game forever if you have infinitie life.

• They Just Didnt Care - Arguably Defender; the guy who wrote the storyline has never played the Genesis games, and the original creator of the series was not part of production.
o They cared enough to hire David Brin, the writer of the Uplift series, to pen the script for the new game rather than just getting a staff writer to do it. Just because it disregards the story of the first two games doesn't mean it sucks. Then again, he apparently can't tell the difference between the Genesis games and Defender, so he may only have cared about getting a paycheck. The "arguably" above is well-justified, and it's worth noting that gameplay-wise Defender of the Future wasn't half bad.

• Time Travel - In every single game, apart from Ecco Jr.

• Underwater Ruins - Doubles as Scenery Porn.

• Unpleasable Fanbase - On the other flipper, perhaps this is the only "problem" with Defender.

• Womb Level - Defender's final boss.

• Xen Syndrome - Defender gets hit with this bad during Domain of the Enemy.

• Xenofiction - At least, the Genesis games are.

Ecco The Dolphin - Greatest SEGA Game Ever

As I've said elsewhere, I love Ecco. It was my absolute favourite SEGA game, and not because it's about a dolphin. It's beautifully rendered, well mapped out, the challenge is in solving the puzzles throughout the levels before you run out of air, rather than in violently bashing or shooting everything in your way, it spans a whole ocean and features a huge range of marine creatures, has a great score (with the exception of that AWFUL victory tune at the end) and -- most importantly -- it tells an imaginative and moving story. The ending was actually a real surprise, and it was enough to give me nightmares as a kid. The Machine is f*cking creepy.

Here it is in all its original 16bit glory (Ah, the good old Mega Drive days...) played by cubex55 over at Youtube. Enjoy.



Of course, as this is just a recording of someone else’s game, it’s not going to be as engaging as if you were playing it yourself. You don’t get to explore each level in your own time, it’s all done for you so you don’t have the satisfaction (or frustration!) of having to work it all out for yourself, you don’t get the nasty surprises when the sharks and crabs come at you out of nowhere, or when the ice cubes and rocks come flying out of the walls at you. You also don’t get to play around doing all the somersaults and leaps at the surface that you can when you’re playing it.

I kinda feel cubex55 has cheated a bit in places, most obviously in the Open Ocean stage, where he’s just zipped along at the bottom of the screen, avoiding all the challenges on that level... but I guess if your goal is just to get through the whole thing as fast as you can without dying then that’s to be expected. I prefer to play at a slower pace, paying attention to the details as I go.

This game was always going to appeal to me – I’ve always had something of an obsession with the ocean, and Ecco combines that with time travel and aliens, two of my other favourite themes. It’s all very Aliens meets Cocoon. I think it’s slightly hilarious that Ecco inspires his own distant ancestors to leave the land and return to the water, to eventually evolve into his own species. I love how the oldest living creature is a giant DNA double-helix. (I also LOVE the backwards-flying pteranodon!)


One of the things I really appreciate about the game is that you only get anywhere by helping others. Throughout the game, Ecco has to reunite families and locate the precious things of others that they have lost. I think it’s a good moral.

The PC edition of the original splices in some great cinematic animations to tell the story as you go. It was followed by the even more beautifully rendered Ecco the Dolphin: The Tides of Time and Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future, which lack some of the charm of the original, in my opinion, but have much better graphics and ditch the traditional left-to-right scrolling format.

The Tides of Time

I love this theme, it's from Ecco the Dolphin: The Tides of Time, sequel to my favourite game ever, Ecco the Dolphin. GMCmusic2008 over at youtube re-recorded it, did a beautiful job of it too, you can find it here.

Fishy... For Tom

Have any of you played this? I found out about it through a review over at http://awesomerthanthou.blogspot.com/009/11/game-review-fishy.html

It's addictive, and fun!! The game itself can be found at http://www.freeonlinegames.com/fun-games/fishy.html

Ecco the Dolphin - Book of Days (Enya)

I found this video ages ago... I've watched it hundreds of times, it's a fave. Ecco the Dolphin was my favourite SEGA game, I loved the story (which was essentially a mystery), and it was beautifully rendered with a stunning soundtrack. It was also a largely nonviolent game, the challenge coming from puzzle-solving instead. This clip combines footage from the various Ecco games with one of Enya's better tracks, making it doubly awesome :D



From http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFWTCBrLfpU

Ecco Music - Split the Stream of Time, by Viper.Fox

Very Awesome!!

Viper.Fox has recorded the soundtracks for Ecco I & II and made them available for download... to listen, go to Dark Sea, our favourite Ecco site, here.

Ecco

I would like to devote a few words to my most enduring obsession.


Ecco the Dolphin was the Sega game that I just had to have. I saw it on the telly in a commercial, way back in '92 (15 years ago, Oh MY God!!) and as I have loved whales and sharks since before I can remember, I was instantly smitten. I nagged my mum, I went so far as to sit in front of the TV with one of those disposable cameras after school every day for a week, waiting for the commercial to come on, and when it did I snapped away like crazy(we didn't have a VCR at that point). The pictures turned out a little weird, I have to say. Because I was by no means an accomplished photographer, as a twelve year old, the shots were a crazy mix of shadows and reflections of our seventies-decor living room with a little blue dolphin swimming through it. Eventually my mum caved in and bought a Sega Mega Drive for christmas, with a copy of Sonic 2 for my little brother, Apache Strikeforce or something similar for my older brother, and Ecco for me. I was in heaven.


Though I'd had to wait five months to get it, I was not disappointed. Every opportunity I got, I was on that Mega Drive exploring deep-sea caves with Ecco. The game is beautiful, even in its first incarnation as a side-scrolling underwater puzzle/adventure. The graphics are fluid and the sprites well rendered, the textures are rich, the colours deep and lush. And it's fast. Ecco twists and leaps, dives and rolls with all the grace and agility of a real dolphin, albeit in 2D.


But the beauty of Ecco the Dolphin is in more than just what it looks like, the game is a symphony of rich sound. The music is complex and evocative, at times thrilling, at other times chilling. The sound effects really do echo, conveying a sense of the awesome vastness of the ocean, and Ecco's squeaks and whistles manage to convey an awful lot of emotion. I could lose myself in that game for hours at a time, loving it with every fibre of my being, despite how amazingly frustrating it sometimes was.


It was a hard game. It wasn't especially violent, in fact, compared to the games my brothers enjoyed it was practically tree-hugging, being mostly concerned with the solving of puzzles. Maybe that's why it got a reputation for being gay or girlie. The thing is, though, it's one of Sega's most unique releases, and by all accounts one of its most memorable. I've only recently come to understand from trolling through the Internet that my obsession is not so perverse after all, the game actually has something of a cult following. I was thrilled when I found a number of the story-clips from the Ecco titles recently on YouTube. I also found websites devoted exclusively to the games.


Ecco means a lot to me. I am profoundly moved by the hero's quest, for at its heart, Ecco the Dolphin is a story about loneliness. I won't go into the plot details here, but suffice it to say that as a kid who never found many friends, who didn't ever really fit in, I felt to some extent it was my story that was being told in that game. It's a story about loss, about bravery and determination, about fighting for what is yours even when there is no one on your side, about beauty and horror, despair and terror, mystery and myth.


I don't have many burning ambitions in life, but the one thing for which I deeply, desperately yearn is to see a film made of the first Ecco story, whether composed of cunningly edited live footage of whales, dolphins and sharks, or of photorealistic CGI. It would have to be an art film, more about the experience of the vast cold ocean than about adrenaline. Definitely not a popcorn movie. I often fantasise about how I would do it if I had the money, what it would look like, how it would sound...