History VideoGame / EccoTheDolphin

* BlueHisHeroic: Ecco himself is typically associated with the color blue which is brought even further in ''Defender of the Future'' where he was slightly redesigned with blue skin.

* BadFuture:
** Central to the plot of ''Tides'' and playable in a few levels.
** ''Defender of the Future'' had a couple to go through to restore the timeline to its proper state.

* CosmicHorrorStory
* CrapsaccharineWorld: Who knew a video game about dolphins can be so disturbing?
* CrystalSpiresAndTogas: Any time Atlantis shows up.

* EscortMission: Each game (even the edutainment one) has at least one, though in the original they are optional. They're also not ''too'' bad as escort missions go; in the Genesis games, your charges are invulnerable, and the ''Defender'' ones aren't killable. They're arguably not even true escort missions, since you don't have to protect them or even keep them in sight, they just follow you automatically and unerringly.
** ''Defender'' had an [[GameBreakingBug irritating glitch]] during the most difficult escort mission. You were meant to protect a dolphin so he could lead you to a door and open it for you. Sometimes, after going through a short tunnel, he would manage to swim ''inside a rock'' on the other side and become stuck. Made irritating by the fact that a Power of Sonar gem would have made him obsolete anyway.

* HailfirePeaks, naturally all with an UnderTheSea twist:
** GreenHillZone: The first level in every game.
** UndergroundLevel: The Undercaves would be the first example.
** SlippySlideyIceWorld: In which Ecco can literally slip and slide around on his belly atop the ice.
** {{Prehistoria}}
** EternalEngine: [[AutoScrollingLevel Welcome to the Machine]]
** The second game also features undersea versions of LevelInTheClouds (Sky Tides) and {{Mordor}} (Lunar Bay).

** ''Tides'' brings us [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JQ-Hi43pnc Convergence]], which is a medley of just about every major theme in the game. Too bad you only hear it as you're restoring the Asterite... and during the dolphins' [[TheCavalry cavalry charge]] on Lunar Bay that immediately follows that scene. It's not supposed to play there, but they forgot to kick the music over on the zone change - [[NintendoHard as long as you]] [[ForegoneConclusion don't have to reload the level]] and never pause during it, you'll hear it most of the way to the Vortex Queen.

* NintendoHard: You ain't heard the half of it. As to rub salt on the wound, most of the achievements/trophies for the ports revolve around ''not'' dying until getting to a certain level and until you beat the game ''three times in a row''.
** On his Twitter, [[WordOfGod Ed Annunziata]] [[https://twitter.com/edannunziata/status/285469578635640832 admitted]] to making the game harder on purpose so that kids who rented it wouldn't beat it in a weekend.
* NoBiologicalSex: The Asterite and its ''Defender'' {{Expy}}, the Guardian.
* OddballInTheSeries: Ecco Jr. All the challenge and peril from the main series is removed, turning it into an edutainment game that focuses on exploration, the reason undoubtedly being to throw a bone to young players who were enticed by ''Ecco'''s apparently kid-friendly premise but repelled by its dark, creepy subject matter and sadistic SurpriseDifficulty.

* StalkingMission: ''Tides of Tme'' had a deadly version after the final boss battle, where you had to let the Vortex Queen remove a few doors for you, and then squeeze ahead for the last stretch and get to the time machine before she did.
* SurpriseCreepy: You wouldn't think a series about a dolphin could possibly be this eerie, would you?

* {{Threatening Shark}}s: Well, naturally. Sharks are some of the tougher enemies, often taking three to five hits to kill. Ecco himself is transformed into a shark several times in ''Tides'', mostly so he can rampage about the level eating everything... and for an excuse to [[SadisticChoice choose]] between getting munched by OneHitKill sharks or [[DressingAsTheEnemy turn yourself into one]] and proceeding to [[FriendOrFoe get attacked by other dolphins]].
* TimeTravel: In every single game, apart from ''Ecco Jr.''
* UnderwaterRuins: Everywhere, especially when you visit the lost city of Atlantis.
* {{Uninstallment}}: ''Ecco Water Wars 2'', Sega's AprilFoolsDay joke.

* YouCantThwartStageOne: You can't get to the Asterite before the Vortex break it, and you can't restore the Guardian before the Foe make it through.

* AmbidextrousSprite: The trope is expected for games of this era, but one of Ecco's sprites are mirrored vertically between up and down movements. The animation transition between up and down movement seems awkward in ''Ecco the Dolphin'', as if Ecco instantly does a 180 degree while facing toward or away from the camera.
** Whether intentional or not, he ''very visibly'' does a 180 spin when turning up-to-down or down-to-up in the 2D bonus stages in ''Defender.'' It's pretty comical, and can result in FridgeLogic if you never noticed this issue in the original games.

* AscendedFridgeHorror: One of the main means by which ''Tides of Time'' is DarkerAndEdgier than the first; it simply addresses the darker implications of time travel in further depth than the original did.
** Also, at a couple of points late in the game, you can take a wrong turn and accidentally get [[ForcedTransformation turned into a Vortex creature]]. Notice how the mechanical floating things look like jellyfish? Now take another look at that creature you've turned into. No real legs, but kind of a tail, a large head, and two short arms where the flippers would be. Yeah. That's what the Vortex Queen would turn all the dolphins into, if it didn't outright kill them.

* BossOnlyLevel: The [[BigBad Vortex Queen]] fights in both games take up their own levels.

** One glitch could occur in Deep Water - entering the Asterite's chamber reveals it to be already whole again, but the screen locks in place so you can't leave, and it doesn't respond if sang to.

* GeniusLoci: The ocean in the good future, according to the future dolphins.
* GiantEnemyCrab: The crabs that attack Ecco.
* HaveWeMetYet: The very first thing the Asterite says to Ecco (from Ecco's perspective) is "I remember you! ...Of course it was you... and it was I who sent you... Now it is clear." The Asterite remembers him because [[spoiler:it sent Ecco back in time to steal one of its globes, causing a StableTimeLoop]].

* ImmediateSequel: ''Tides''.

* NiceJobBreakingItHero: "You are the Stone that splits the Stream of Time in two."
* NoFairCheating: That handy debug menu? Select the wrong level and you'll get a glitched-up one, often identifiable by lacking a title and having only a password. You can even end up on the title screen but under player control,except that you couldn't stop the rapid side-scrolling action. Then, the game usually froze. You also have to manually turn the music back on after using said menu (pause and press A). Probably due to this being a debug mode for the developers. The glitchy levels are incomplete and/or dropped levels that the player was never meant to get into.

* PasswordSave: [[SchmuckBait Try filling it out with all N's in the first game.]]
* PlayableEpilogue: ''Tides'' has one ''three levels long''.

* [[WhamEpisode Wham Level]]: "The Library". Up until then you had dealt with a magical talking double-helix, a time machine, and Atlantis, but this is the level where you find out your pod was taken by honest-to-god aliens. And that they'd been harvesting the ocean for centuries.

** Also, at a couple of points late in the game, you can take a wrong turn and accidentally get [[BalefulPolymorph turned into a Vortex creature]]. Notice how the mechanical floating things look like jellyfish? Now take another look at that creature you've turned into. No real legs, but kind of a tail, a large head, and two short arms where the flippers would be. Yeah. That's what the Vortex Queen would turn all the dolphins into, if it didn't outright kill them.

* WantonCrueltyToTheCommonComma: The dialogue in the original ''Ecco the Dolphin'' and in ''Tides of Time'' is rather lacking in punctuation. It's possible that this was intentional and intended to give a poetic, [[{{Xenofiction}} inhuman]] sensability to the dialogue.

* TransplantedAliens: Crustaceans and arthropods are devolved descendants of the Vortex that remained on Earth after Ecco defeated them in the original game and then averted the Vortex Future and repaired the time stream after the queen followed Ecco to Earth and the Vortex escaped into the distant past in Ecco The Tides Of Time

* WantonCrueltyToTheCommonComma: The dialogue in the original ''Ecco the Dolphin'' and ''Tides of Time'' is rather lacking in punctuation. It took until ''Defender of the Future'' to finally have correctly punctuated dialogue. Given that the level transition screens use punctuation correctly, the under-punctuation may be for conveying a {{xenofiction}}-like feel. The characters in these games are non-humanoid, after all.

* SeldomSeenSpecies: Although they're called dolphins, the Movers look more like [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuvier%27s_beaked_whale Cuvier's Beaked Whales]], and the Clan's tusks and general body plans are more beaked whale than dolphin, too.

* ItsUpToYou: The Guardian is so weak that only Ecco can interpret its words and, apparently, find the shards needed to repair it. Relaying its message is not an option.

* EscortMission: ''Ecco Jr'' requires moving some babies to their parent. It's easiest to grab them and swim to their destination.

*** Hilariously, ''Ecco'' creator Ed Annunziata commented on the [=YouTube=] video.

* EldritchAbomination: A very light, very benevolent example, but what exactly is the Asterite? The only answer given is that he, it, they(?) are the oldest entity in the sea, likely the entire world and they appear as a double helix made up of silver globes. They are the guardian of the planet and know events from millions of years in the past and can psychically communicate with any inhabitant of the sea. It is entirely possible whatever this thing is it was at least one of the first sentient creatures to exist on Earth.

At present, the first three games (''Ecco'', ''Ecco 2'', and ''Ecco Jr.'') are available on various official emulators, such as UsefulNotes/PlayStationNetwork, UsefulNotes/{{Steam}}, and the UsefulNotes/{{Wii}} UsefulNotes/VirtualConsole before its closure. ''Defender'' was ported to the UsefulNotes/PlayStation2 but has not seen a re-release since then.

* ShownTheirWork: In the Sega CD version, two of the glyphs in the Library will spin around faster before initiating video clips in a form of edutainment about dolphins, with narration by Alan Bruce. Kind of like a BigLippedAlligatorMoment, really.

* UpdatedRerelease: The Genesis titles received updated versions on the Sega CD, which featured higher quality music, new sound effects, more levels, and FMV sequences. The first game was later re-release again for Windows 95, featuring all of the enhancements of the Sega CD version along with higher resolution visuals, a difficulty system, and a save feature instead of using passwords.

A Creator/{{Sega}} series about [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot a New Age time-travelling bottlenose dolphin who fights space aliens]]. His friends include a pteranodon, a telepathic strand of DNA, and flying dolphins from 10,000,000 years in the future. The games were developed by the [[UsefulNotes/{{Hungary}} Hungarian]] studio Novotrade International, later known as Appaloosa Interactive.

* GainaxEnding: The other interpretation of the ''Tides of Time'' ending. [[spoiler: It is implied the Vortex Queen, upon arriving in prehistory, got stomped by the local wildlife ([[GoddamnedBats goddamned trilobites]]!), and was unable to dominate Earth's ecosystem, instead integrating into it [[StableTimeLoop and evolving into stuff we already had]]. Not weird enough? According to a {{Word of God}} [[http://archive.is/20140103181626/http://ecco-darksea.com/?p=11 interview]], [[GambitRoulette Ecco knew this would happen]] and didn't even bother using the time machine to chase the Queen at all! He used it to go to the time of the [[{{Precursors}} Atlanteans]], for "[[ThePlan specific reasons reserved for the 3rd game]]."]]

** The Vortex are essentially underwater [[Franchise/{{Alien}} xenomorphs.]]

* ThatOneLevel: [[spoiler:Hanging Waters. Try to beat this one without dying once, I dare you.]]

* EnjoyTheStorySkipTheGame: Like many cult classics, people play it for the atmosphere and niche setting. The gameplay itself is little more than a cryptic loop of "sing at [X] obstacle to get to [Y]".

* LockedDoor: Summarized by "SEARCH FOR THE KEY-GLYPH" for the first two. ''Defender'' has a few story-related examples scattered around.

** The second game also features undersea versions of BubblyClouds (Sky Tides) and {{Mordor}} (Lunar Bay).

* HeroicMime: Ecco does use his voice as a general problem-solving tool, but the player's never privy to anything he says beyond "Queek-queek-queek" and "SQUAAARK!!"
** He also chatters when you press the sonar button out of water in ''Defender.'' Interestingly, one of the scrapped ideas involved being able to see what Ecco's sonar translated to by singing at a mirror.