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Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future
[Rating: 77%]


Platform: Dreamcast
Category:
Action
Maker: Appaloosa Interactive
ESRB Rating: Everyone


It's a good thing dolphins are so cute. After playing this game, I wanted to harpoon most of them. I know it's not their fault, but I had to take my frustrations out on someone. Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future is a graphical tour de force, with clever and imaginative gameplay and a futuristic ocean theme that would make a very interesting sci-fi film. It's also frustratingly vague and really unhelpful when you need it most.

I really, REALLY wanted to like this game more than I did. When the PlayStation 2 comes out, and games like Munch's Oddyssee and Kessen hit store shelves, Sony gamers are undoubtedly going to brag about the incredible graphics in these games. All Dreamcast gamers will have to do is show them a copy of Ecco, and those Sony fans will slink away in emasculated embarrassment. This game has the best graphics yet on the Dreamcast, and probably the best graphics on any video game, EVER.

The entire game world is a series of ocean environments, shimmering with crystal blue water and gentle waves. The low rocks and boulders are covered with sea life of every description. The gentle waves cast a shimmer of sunlight onto the watery habitats below. Sea plants wave slowly in the current. The denizens of the deep that populate these locales are realistic enough to fool Jacques Cousteau, with sleek dolphins that twist, swim, and frolic exactly like their real-life counterparts. Schools of fish swim in formation, and scatter when you swim through them. Sea turtles leisurely drift through the currents. Sand is kicked up from the bottom of the sea floor when you skim it. You can even jump and flip into the air, breaking the surface and splashing back in, individual droplets of spray creating separate ripples. In short: DAMN!!! These are some impressive graphics!!

However, as the mantra goes, graphics are nice, but it's gameplay that's important. And in this game, the gameplay is the particle of sand in the oyster, causing constant irritation. The ocean levels are HUGE, and all your fellow dolphins tend to look alike. As a result, it becomes a little difficult to locate a certain dolphin to talk to him (something you're told to do quite a lot). The guardian shards that are supposed to guide you along your mission to save the Earth are unbelievably vague, and your dolphin buddies are not much better. Most of my time playing this game was spent doing the same thing over and over, trying to figure out just what the heck I was supposed to do next through constant trial-and-error. And even when I thought I had it all figured out, I was almost invariably wrong. In one level, I lost my life and had to continue several DOZEN times. This sort of thing does not make me all that inclined to keep playing the game. Good thing there are unlimited continues and automatic saves!

The problem, I think, is that Ecco combines standard action RPG mission structure (with tasks to complete and NPCs to talk to) with a VERY freeform world. The ocean is a big place, and when it's filled with hundreds of detailed objects, identifying the correct location and the correct object can be quite a chore. The vagueness I mentioned above doesn't help any, either: I spent far too much time following a red herring (no pun intended) in trying to get luminescent fish to follow me into a dark cave, when the correct solution to the puzzle was to get poisonous fish to follow me into a DIFFERENT cave.

The dolphins, as I said, are rendered with astoundingly realistic detail. Ecco, in your hands, can do almost anything a real dolphin can do, from backflips in the air to speed swimming to charging sharks (yes, real dolphins can attack and kill sharks!). You even have to make sure Ecco's air supply is replenished from time to time by surfacing (hey, he's a mammal, and mammals gotta breathe!). Ecco's quest to save the world is aided by his ability to learn "songs" from other dolphins. These are activated by the simple mechanic of the sonar ping (everything from talking to other dolphins to stunning sharks is handled with a single button, very nice). Ecco can also collect other special items and skills on his quest, including health power-ups.

Regular health recharging, though, is done through the very clever and appropriate method of eating fish. If Ecco's hurt, you just charge him through a nearby school of fish, and chomp! You gotta be careful, though-- while most fish are good to eat, some are poisonous, and reduce Ecco's health further! Different fish provide different benefits: some restore very little health, while others restore all of it in one mouthful of sushi-on-the-hoof. Even the poisonous fish are useful, because if Ecco gets stung and poisoned by a jellyfish, only eating one of these fish will cure him.

You have full control over Ecco's other dolphin features as well. Spins, leaps, twists, swimming speed (though that's a little awkward) are all at your fingertips...er, flippertips. While some of these moves don't seem to be all that useful, they're there if you need them! You even have full control over Ecco's sonar, and can use it to give you a temporary map of your location (again by just pressing and holding that single sonar button). This helps quite a bit in trying to locate a certain area, but is bad for navigating while swimming, since it tends to cover and block out the screen (despite being ostensibly a transparent overlay).

Overall, this game looks great and has clever and brilliant controls, but the actual PLAY of the game was just too frustrating for me. I really enjoyed swimming around the sea boulders, and bashing apart sharks as I tried to find the shards of the guardian, but there were way too many moments where I tried everything I could think of to get past an area, and nothing worked. It's never an enjoyable time when I want to toss my controller at the screen, and this game did that to me far too much.

I recommend that you rent this game first, and if you find you're really enjoying it, go buy it. Ecco has a couple dozen different levels, after all, so you're gonna be sitting down with it for a while! But the frustrating missions were just too much for me, and I am sad to report that all the awe and entertainment created by the graphics are just ripped apart and devoured like a great white eating a dolphin. I really wanted to like this game, and I just couldn't.

Good Stuff: The graphics are utterly amazing, and the dolphin controls and storyline are almost as good. Plus, there's a HUGE amount of gameplay for your buck here.

Bad Stuff: It's WAY too hard to figure out what you're supposed to do.

Bottom Line: A brilliant title marred by an awkward mission structure. If you're an Ecco fan, grab it, but others might want to have a walkthrough handy for easy reference for when you get stuck. But even despite that problem, this game should at least be TRIED by everyone, if only to see just what the Dreamcast is capable of.


 

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