Ecco the Dolphin

"Ecco the Reaper"

Come on Mary, don't fear the Reaper...

Human beings have under one hundred years to live on this planet. In that timeframe, they learn to love, to fight for a purpose, and to struggle against obstacles in situations of utmost intensity. These struggles are the very events which give us, the human race, an uncanny surge of our true potential. They let our emotions free to surge through our very veins, fuelling the body with strength, will, and determination. I am here to tell you that I have dabbed into emptiness and the abyss of my very soul in order to emerge from the void as a new person by utilizing the very limit of human spirit. I’m not talking about death. The thing is, after playing Ecco the Dolphin, I’m fairly convinced that the Grim Reaper is a dolphin wearing a black cloak and carrying a scythe.

For one, Ecco is most certainly vengeful like the Grim Reaper must be in order to harvest the souls of the deceased. In no other game but Ecco the Dolphin would the main character die so often. It happens to frequently, in fact, that the dolphin’s various whines and cries during the game can be mistaken for vociferous laughter. And, if Ecco’s utter lack of defense was not enough to allow him to exact his vengeance upon the player, the puzzles he comes across during his journey are so intricately mazy and ridden with dangers that it can take minutes upon minutes in order to get through the marsh. Of course, once you’re out, there’s always the possibility that a red oyster will use its ancient and invincible power of blowing on the dolphin to kill him.

Secondly, only the Grim Reaper could produce such an alluring environment in order to cast its victim into the afterlife without their knowledge. The seas of Ecco the Dolphin are quite possibly the most impressive graphics which were present on the Sega Genesis in its heyday and, to the game’s credit, were artistic and vast in their intricacies. Yet, as I discovered after being unknowingly seduced by the soul harvester’s illusion, Ecco was slowly stealing my soul as the minutes drained on an on. If there is a real Twilight Zone, then I had unknowingly stumbled upon it.

In this artistically portrayed void, I was unaware of the fact that after minutes (perhaps hours) of playing, I hadn’t gotten very far into the game. Ecco the Dolphin is a massive game and boarders on the line of being a quest to finish it. That is, of course, if the player actually ops to finish it after hours of playing the same thing over and over.

Ecco’s most glaring fault is that his game is inexplicably mundane. The lush graphics and various polygons, while first playing, is enough to sit down and try the game. But then, after the interest in the graphics fades - which only takes a couple minutes - Ecco the Dolphin becomes an excursion through a vast sea that holds very little action and interest. Video games, no matter how artful and aesthetically pleasing at first glance, boil down to a simple question after only a few minutes of play: is the game fun?

In the case of Ecco the Dolphin, no. After about ten minutes, everything to be seen in Ecco the Dolphin has already been seen. The sea, which appeared wonderfully detailed at first glance, is now frustrating in its vastness. There is nothing fun about wandering around aimlessly in real life; there is nothing fun about aimlessly wandering around a virtual sea housing little or nothing to do. Consequently, there is no map in Ecco the Dolphin, nor is there any indicator showing where the dolphin should go next. If one gets lost in the seas of Ecco, it very well may take half an hour just to discover the next location to go to. Yet, even if the player doesn’t get lost, there still isn’t any force compelling them to keep playing.

This is mainly because the storyline for Ecco is largely dull and uninteresting. One day, when Ecco and his community of fellow dolphins are enjoying life, they are suddenly fish-napped in a violent hurricane with Ecco being the only one to escape the hurricane’s pull. Eventually involving a group of squidlike extraterrestrials which look mysteriously like rejects from the movie Aliens, Ecco the Dolphin’s storyline is fairly vanilla.

The music is also decidedly plain. Sound effects are consistent and done at the appropriate times, but music has a dull feel to it. Although it could be argued that the soothing style of the music is good, combined with the aimless wandering and large sea which looks relatively the same, the music degrades into the same drabness inherit in the graphics and gameplay as Ecco the Dolphin goes on. Yet, although the graphics, music, and gameplay turn dull after playing the game some more, I doubt that this would've changed if Ecco had been relatively short. This isn't the case in Ecco the Dolphin, however, for the game is massive.

Sections in this game are not only needlessly long, but vast in their number. Consequently, what may seem to be a small, simple game at first game is secretly a beast of a journey hidden in the realm of a tiny Sega Genesis cartridge. The main problem with Ecco, however, is not only the notion that one area isn't very different from any of the others in the game, but that Ecco simply doesn't have much action in it to keep it interesting and, to a further extent, fun.

Consequently, the available actions Ecco can actually do break down to either swimming in a direction, picking up speed to ram his head into one of the rare enemies he comes across, or letting out a soundwave which allows him to solve puzzles by reflecting them off various items such as crystal glyphs (which somehow got so far under the sea, but this is a video game being discussed, not Homer's Iliad). Though the graphics are spiffy, the puzzles which make up the meat of the game serves no purpose other than to hinder progressing further. There is something very wrong when a game boils down to wandering around and looking for the next inane puzzle to solve, especially when the game itself is so long itself that each passing minute inches the player closer to insanity than it does urging the player on to advance. Apparently, the Grim Reaper specializes in aggravation. As if death wasn't enough by itself...

There are games which are challenging and satisfying to accomplish because they are fun. There are other games that, although tedious, have a strong storyline behind them and pick up later on in the game. A good challenge in a video game is very likeable, but the difficulty in Ecco which arises from his lack of health and inane puzzles boarders less on challenging and more on ridiculous. If the gameplay and puzzles had been given more ''umph'' to give the player incentive to go on, then Ecco would have turned out to be a pretty good adventure game. As it stands, however, Ecco the Dolphin has more in common with the Grim Reaper than he does with Ico or Solid Snake, for despite all of his alluring pleasantries of bliss and fun, his drab essence and deceptive attire hides his true soul sucking nature. In this instance, though, it's not your life that Ecco the Reaper siphons from his victims. It's your time.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 03/02/04