"I have to say, this is one of the most unique video game stories I have ever encountered. You play as a playful, happy dolphin named Ecco. Ecco is swimming along with his pack and enjoying life when one day all nearby life is sucked out of the ocean into a giant funnel cloud. Ecco is left as the sole survivor, and he swims off to explore the sea in the hopes of recovering his lost pack.
Ecco’s journeys lead him across the ocean to the lost city of Atlantis. Reading ancient glyphs, Ecco discovers that a mysterious alien civilization named the Vortex has been feeding off of Earth’s oceans for 500 years. Ecco uses ancient Atlantean technology to travel 55 million years into the past, to help his friend the Asterite find his missing orb.
Returning to present day, Ecco gives the Asterite its missing orb and is rewarded with the abilities to both breathe underwater and to damage the Vortex with his sonar ability. Ecco returns to the point in time where his pack is sucked into the funnel cloud, and makes sure he is sucked up with them this time around. Fighting the Vortex on their own turf, Ecco defeats the Vortex Queen and vanquishes the threat once and for all…. (or at least until this game’s amazing sequel).
Pretty different, huh?"
"This game takes place from a 2D side-scrolling perspective. Controlling Ecco, you can move through the water in all directions. One of the buttons increases your speed as you swim. Another is an attack that launches you toward enemies so you can smash them with your bottle nose. The last button control controls your sonar. You can use this sonar to talk to other sea creatures and interact with ancient glyphs. Hold down the sonar button to use echolocation, which gives you a brief, undetailed map of the area. As the game goes on, you can use your sonar to damage enemies. Just don’t expect this ability right away.
There is a learning curve to this game. You will need to jump out of the water and over obstacles from time to time, and the trick to this involves building up speed and timing your charge attack at just the right time (and the right angle) to launch yourself out of the water. All my friends struggled with this when I was a kid, and I think that’s one of the main reasons none of them liked this game.
Another thing that makes life difficult is your oxygen meter. Ecco is a dolphin, and dolphins need to come out of the water to breathe oxygen. As you play, your oxygen meter will slowly deplete. Run out of oxygen, and your health bar will start to rapidly drain. So if you want to be successful playing this game, you’re going to have to keep that oxygen bar replenished or you will not last long. Not only are you solving puzzles, exploring, and fighting enemies, you have to do it all against the clock. Another reason people probably think this game is just SO difficult.
I hate to be that guy, but I never found this game to be that hard. You have to be patient, you have to make sure you’ve got enough oxygen, you’ve got to keep track of where you have been and where you need to go. It really isn’t that bad at all. I do have to acknowledge that the end of the game is pretty tough. The Vortex tunnel and the ensuing Welcome to the Machine stage are extreme trial and error and can get frustrating fast. If you die against the game’s final boss, you have to go back and do it all over again, too. Oof."
Now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about the differences between the Genesis and the Sega CD versions of the game. There really... aren't that many. The music is the most noticeable, but we'll get to that in the sound portion of my review. The FMV sequences don't add much to the game. The extra levels are probably the thing that stands out the most. Gameplay is unchanged. Really, everything else is completely unchanged. Did the original game give you a mid-level continue system when you died, so you didn't have to replay the entire level over again? If not, that is something new - not that I had to take advantage of this too often. I'm somewhat of an Ecco pro, after all.
The new stages themselves are barely worth discussing. I almost didn't even recognize them as new stages when I first hit that section of the game. It's basically more of the same. Most of these stages involve swimming around a maze-like reef area where there are lots of sunken ships. These stages take you deeper into the ocean than normal. but there are plenty of those invincibility crystals around to refill your health and your oxygen meter.I hate to say this, but these new levels don't add much to the game.
Graphics:
Everything is carried over perfectly to the Sega CD. The colors, the crispness of the backgrounds, the smooth dolphin animations, that eerie sense of atmosphere when you are poking around on the bottom of the ocean floor. It's great. You can't really improve on perfection, can you?
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