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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