Here's an old post I made about Ecco the Dolphin:
The game is atmospheric, beautiful, difficult, frustrating, terrifying, claustrophobic, and chilling. But I have nostalgia for the game, as I am aware a lot of people have a hard time getting the controls down at first, and the game can be very tricky.
(this post may contain some spoilers, its hard to talk about the game without spoiling it, as the user below me mentions.)
Ecco the Dolphin is the first game in a series composed of 3 games, with the last entry being on the Dreamcast (first two on the Genesis). There was also a SEGA CD version of the first Ecco game, but the only real difference was the music. But both the Genesis and CD soundtracks are amazing in their own ways, though I personally prefer the SEGA CD soundtrack.
In Ecco, you play as a dolphin, but right at the very beginning of the game, all of your dolphin friends vanish. And its up to you to go find and rescue them, and figure out what's going on. The game has you swimming around and using you Ecco Radar, which creates a pulse you can use to expel things, but must be recharged at blue crystals. You solve puzzles, rescue dolphins, and survive the hostilities of the ocean.
And the ocean is hostile. The game is very atmospheric, but also very tense. As a dolphin, you must breathe every once in a while, and so oxygen is important. On top of this, the sea is full of danger, from sharks that will come up and gobble you up, to angler fish that you see in the murky and dark depths, to other things I would rather not spoil.
But the game has an amazing atmosphere, is quite challenging, and let's say there's a very good reason the game is one of the prime examples on TV Tropes for nightmare fuel in video games, but I shall say no more.
Originally Posted by Allforce
Someone go ahead and spoil all the great/unnerving parts and/or the ending. I'm never gonna seek this out but the thread has me intrigued.
Obvious spoilers.
The game is about Ecco the Dolphin, who one day all of his dolphin friends disappear, and to find them he needs to go to where no Dolphin should ever go, the depths of the ocean. The music is very ethereal, in both versions, and you have a constant concern of hostilities in the ocean (for health) and getting oxygen before you run out. Which gets harder the deeper in the ocean you go. And the music and sort of bleak graphic style help this, as well as the fact the ocean gets darker and darker the further down you go. And there comes enemies that are tricky, can gobble you up in one bite, and just look pretty creepy (like the real ocean~).
However, what you ultimately find is artifacts way under the deep of the sea that were left here by things that used to be stationed here many many years ago. And Ecco's friends were abducted by an alien race who visits Earth every 500 years for food. They have wasted their own natural food sources, and feed upon Dolphins as they're determined to be the most intelligent animals on Earth, and intelligence is sort of a nutrient for them. You ultimately make your way into an alien ship, which is a giant cyberpunk Alien Meatgrinder where they grind up your Dolphin friends into food, and fight the Alien Queen, who looks like this. And the only way to defeat her is to mutilate her body, by takes out her jaw, tearing at her head, destroying her eyes, etc.
The second game gets more surrealistic than the first game. and starts off immediately where the first game took off. Even though the Queen has been brutally mutilated, she wasn't dead, in part that her body was being used to make something like a Hive back on Earth, as the aliens had planned to move to Earth more permanently to use its own resources for their own gain. However, Ecco meets a Dolphin with unusually large fins, and she claims she is a descendant of Ecco from a ruined future. She takes him to this future.
In the second Ecco game, you travel through time periods. The ocean apparently gains a conscious somewhere in the future, after what humans and the aliens eventually end up doing, and it is Ecco who awakens this closed consciousness. The ocean was once alive, but its consciousness was killed by the aliens many years ago. But by something Ecco did in the depths of the ocean in the first game, he has awakened in ever-so-slightly from the ancient things he found deep in the ocean. Ecco is referred to the one who "the stone that split the stream of time in two," as he has brought forth two possible futures from his actions in the first game, and he can cause either one to happen now.
There are two possible futures for the Dolphins, that you see glimpses of both through the game. One is a bright and colorful world, where dolphins have evolved into the ability to fly and have become the dominant animal on the planet who tries to hold the planets peace. The other is a dead, nightmarish, mechanical world where the aliens win. Ecco travels to the past to collect the pieces of the Ocean's consciousness, and ultimately must also travel to the dystopian future by being willingly captures and then going through strange levels. As the ocean gains it consciousness back, the ocean also creates these sky water bridges that you can take between different oceans.
The game is scarier than the first, partially as its harder somehow, but you deal with ancient huge creatures, more twisted aliens, and more twisted levels.
There's a lot of small moments in Ecco 2, I can't remember when it happens but there's this blood-looking boss that has these really long arms that you have to defeat. There's this one sky water stage where you are chased by a giant unkillable jellyfish that has some pretty scary music, and if you get hit out of the tube, you go to some previous level and have to make your way back. At the end of the game, there are some really creepy-looking enemies that can kill you in one hit and make this noise, as well as when they spot you they get glowing eyes and start chasing you.
And the game ends with the queen escaping in a larva form and escaping to the past, but she can't rule over the fearsome monsters of the ancient sea in her current state, so instead she combines with them, and becomes intergrated with Earths ecosystem, and becomes the basis for life with exosekeltons, such as insects, lobsters, and spiders.
However, the scariest game is actually probably the 3rd game, the 3D one for the Dreamcast and PS2. Firstly, the game is set in 3-dimensions, And the monsters can silently creep up from you from behind, the ocean got a lot darker and had moments of almost absolute silence, and the goals they make you do in the game are far more tense. Like there's this one where you have to sneak up on this shark that can gobble you up and get an item that is stuck in its mouth. And the music is far-more horror like.
This game bears a story in the new continuity that Ecco has created at the end of Ecco 2, which as the alien queen never evades Earth as it was destroyed in the past, but now exists as an Earth element, what happened in the first two games both never happened, but also happened as the changes made exist in this universe. The game is split into four different possible futures, and Ecco finds himself and the world in the best possible future.
In the first future, humans and Dolphins have co-existed and live in a time of tranquility for 500 years, but a new alien race, known as the Foe, are attracted to Earth by the remains of the previous alien race and want what the humans and Dolphins have. They hold the aliens off, but they are not deterred, and suicidally try to find a weakpoint in a barrier that the humans and Dolphins made. They eventually make a weakpoint in a Dolphin city, and Ecco needs to go repair it, but is too late. However, the ship of the Foe creates a gate through time, and the Foe destroy the consciousness of the ocean again, though Ecco manages to defeat them. However, when Ecco returns to his time, he finds Dolphins have become a barely sentimental being and are weak, stupid, and gullible. and that humans are long-extinct.
In this future, man killed themselves off and left the planet in a wreck, with murky water, leftovers of machines, and Dolphins have split into different tribes sort of at war with each other for the last resources on Earth. Ecco restores two of the Oceans consciousness pieces though, which in turn changes the future again.
Ecco restores Intelligence and Ambition to Dolphins, but have made this future where Dolphins are tyrants of the Sea. They have forced humans off the oceans, and banished them unless they wish to be killed. They also look down on all other sea life, especially whales, and capture and use whales to be a source of energy for their cities. They also banish Dolphins who don't believe the general Dolphins beliefs in a banished village, which Ecco starts off in. Ecco restores two more pieces, Compassion and Wisdom, and changes the future once again.
In the last future possibility, Dolphins and Humans once again live in piece, but the last piece needed has caused Humans and Dolphins to lose the war, and the Foe to have won over the Earth.
This game has far more nightmarish elements in my opinion. There's a level where you're in a nearly black cave and there's this giant Eel who's hunting you and can eat you in one gulp, and can come out of holes in the walls. There's a later-game stage where Sharks have become ghostly creatures with sunken faces and glowing eyes in the dark tat wait and slowly come at you, soundless. Then there's a level where you find Dolphin skeletons and there's these shadow Dolphins that go across the walls. And then in the final levels you go through an area full of alien eggs, and break into the alien queen, and I shit you not, through tearing through her vagina. You then go through her body, tear back out through her bladder, then burrow through her rib-cage, and have to go destroy her heart. And there's more, but that's what I recalled and TV Tropes helped me remember some.
Only game I haven't played, and I just remembered existed, is Ecco Jr.. And all games rated E for Everyone.
There we go.
