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Narrative
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A Sega video game series about a time-travelling bottlenose dolphin who fights space aliens. His friends include a pteranodon, a telepathic strand of DNA, and flying dolphins from ten million years in the future. Or, if you ask some people, a telepathic crystal and various alternate future dolphins.
The games feature notoriously difficult gameplay, which focuses on solving puzzles with the ever-present Oxygen Meter hanging over the player, and surreal storylines focused on a dolphin's perspective on alien invasions.
The series was originally for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, and began with Ecco the Dolphin. In this game, Ecco's pod was snatched from the seas by a mysterious storm, so he set out to find them, helping other dolphins along the way.
As the storyline went on, it got progressively more bizarre: first, Ecco went to see a blue whale for advice. The blue whale didn't know much, but sent Ecco to talk to the Asterite, the oldest being in the seas with the appearance of globes arranged on a double-helix. The Asterite, with no explanation, recognised Ecco and told him it could help him, except it was missing a globe and thus not at full power. The solution: travel to Atlantis and go back in time 55 million years to retrieve the wayward sphere. In Atlantis, Ecco discovers that the source of the storm was a species of hiveminded alien who had lost the ability to make their own food and was thus harvesting from Earth's seas every 500 years.
In the end, Ecco saves his pod and destroys the Vortex aliens - or so he thought.
Ecco: The Tides of Time picked up where the original left off. Turns out the Vortex Queen was Not Quite Dead and had followed Ecco to Earth, whereupon she killed the Asterite and began a takeover. On top of that, Ecco's time-travelling in the first game had split the timestream in two. Whoops. The second game, then, followed Ecco's adventures as he sought to save the Asterite (also Not Quite Dead) and the good future of Earth. It ended with Ecco vanishing mysteriously into the "Tides of Time"
Then, save for an Edutainment Game called Ecco Jr. and a few remakes, the series vanished from the face of the Earth for several years.
Its return came in the form of Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future for the Sega Dreamcast, which brought the series to three-dimensions and completely ignored the universe and storyline that came before it. About the only things it had in common with the original series was the protagonist being a dolphin named Ecco, aliens, and time travel. It also introduced a dolphin/human (and /whale) society, where the original games relegated humans to backgrounds in Atlantis and the odd background sunken ship. Fan reaction was mixed.
In Defender, the plot centered around the Foe aliens breaking the timestream by stealing dolphinkind's "most noble traits" in the past, before they could unite with humans. It was of course Ecco's job to get these traits back.
This series provides examples of:
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