Ecco the Dolphin (SCD) Review

"Welcome to the Machine" is the worst stage I've EVER played. It completely ruined the game for me. This stage knocks my rating down a few points (I was actually thinking of giving the game a 1/10 because of it). It seems like they designed the stage, then recorded someone exploring their way through it, and somehow decided that it would be a great idea to make the player follow that path with just about any deviation meaning you get squished against the screen edge and therefore die when you guess the wrong path. Because the screen edge is now a wall, the game will stick you into places that would be nigh impossible to get into normally -- if I could have done some of the things that happened on this stage, I would be an Ecco the Dolphin playing god. I wasn't aware that Ecco could swim in reverse, yet he did that many times and committed suicide in my many attempts at the stage. Not only is the stage memorizing a nearly 15 minute trip with annoying enemies to deal with (are they even animated? They reminded me of the 2D mouse/rat cutout in that old Microsoft 3D maze screensaver), but when you do manage to finally get to the end and arrive at the end boss, the end boss doesn't give you a password (well, it does, but you don't get it until you defeat it). So if you don't defeat the end boss, you get sent back to the start of Welcome to the Machine and have to spend another ~15 minutes re-navigating that maze. Needless to say, after my initial extremely short (like, maybe 15 seconds long, due to touching the end boss killing my full-health Ecco) failed attempt, I looked up the password -- I highly doubt I would have spent several days retrying the end boss, as it took me 30 or more attempts at the end boss.

Without that stage, I would give this game a 6/10. Of the 30+ stages, the vast majority of them are extremely simple where you only have to find a few key glyph crystals to open the path to the end. If they would have spread out the dolphins to rescue, instead of finding 3 each in 2 stages at the very beginning of the game, or had you do SOMETHING in the stages other than find key glyphs and kill/avoid enemies, I would have liked the game a lot more. I understand the Genesis version does not have the glyphs you clear away become continue points. To me, this would probably make the game tedious as it's not difficult finding the keys, just time consuming.

In many places, the game did give me the same feel as Pikmin (a game I really liked), in that I would scout out the stage figuring out what I needed to do, many times run out of air and die, then quickly go back and accomplish the task with plenty of air to spare. The two somewhat lengthy (well, lengthy for a SCD game) video clips were an interesting feature -- almost like they were originally going to make the game an educational title, what with the few pages of dolphin facts in the manual. I really think this game is more about atmosphere than anything else.