YMMV / Ecco the Dolphin

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Some viewers see Mutaclone from Defender as a Noble Demon who genuinely believed that Ecco's timeline may have been a better world and only decides against letting him have the orb of wisdom because he fears the resulting world may actually be worse than the current one, even interpreting his defeat music as invoking Alas, Poor Villain. Others however view him as just as much of a racist monster as the other Exalted Ones, believing that his idea of a better world would be one where dolphins like him were even more powerful and had more control over the weaker dolphins, also believing that his reason for refusing to have Ecco change the timeline is not because of fear that the resulting world would be worse, but because he does not want to sacrifice his tyranny that he lords over.
• Breather Level:
  • "Big Water" in Tides of Time. There's only one puzzle to it: speak to the leader of the blue whale pod, watch him ram a rock wall blocking access to an Asterite globe, then take it and the other one that was just laying around in plain sight, and leave. That's it. It's a short, goofy level with no enemies that can be completed in less than two minutes, and it's nestled between two much more difficult stages that involve finding multiple pairs of Asterite globes apiece.
  • Defender had "Obscure Ways to Terminus," which was almost insultingly simple after a series of difficult and confusing levels, and there were no enemies to speak of.
• Broken Base: A low-key disagreement regarding Defender. The absence of Ecco's usual mindfuckery had a mixed reaction from some old-timers, though its surprisingly dark themes and gloomy atmosphere still left an impression on younger players and thus added to Ecco's niche fanbase.
• Complete Monster: In Defender, in the "Dolphin's Nightmare" storyline, Mutaclone and his two Co-Dragons form the "Exalted Ones", the leaders of a dolphin-supremacist regime known as the Clan. Committing numerous atrocities, the Exalted Ones force whales to suffer as living generators, cut off the food supply to a disobedient village, and unleash sharks on it and allow their followers free rein to torment and torture as they please. Bigoted Social Darwinists, one refers to compassion itself as a weakness and Mutaclone himself refuses to let anything risk toppling the tyranny he lords over.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • Defender gets hit with this bad during Domain of the Enemy. The levels are barren, have puzzles that are obnoxious even by the game's Nintendo Hard standards, and feel overall rushed compared to the other level sets. While Man's Nightmare has a similarly barren aesthetic, at least there's the Movers, Circle, and Crimson to keep Ecco company and advance the plot.
  • Welcome To The Machine in the original game is infamous for taking a sharp left turn into rote memorization of an autoscrolling maze level that's unlike anything else in the game: it's the longer and more complex of the game's two autoscrollers, and while the rest of the game does have the air meter's time limit hovering over its labyrinths and some auto-kill obstacles, nothing in the rest of the game will prepare the player for the challenges of the Machine. To add insult to injury, a bug in the original release means that losing to the final boss means you have to go through the Machine again.
• Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory: The fact that the Vortex feed on sealife and Dolphins just so happen to be part of that could be interpreted as an unsubtle Green Aesop about overfishing, dolphins being caught in nets as a result from it as well as dolphin poaching.
• Goddamned Bats: Goddamned Crabs/Pufferfish/Trilobites: There are quite a few enemies in the Genesis games that make you see the positive side of driving things to extinction.
• Hype Backlash: The games were beloved in their initial release window for doing something outside the norm for the Genesis library, even if it was very difficult. The Angry Video Game Nerd's later review of the original game brought a lot of gamers out of the woodworks who can't fathom how they received any acclaim at all. He even touches on the phenomenon, mentioning how everyone with a Genesis seemed to own a copy, but nobody could ever discuss any good points about it.
• It Was His Sled: The Vortex aliens and time-traveling shenanigans were meant to be enormous twists in the first game that undoubtedly caught a lot of gamers by surprise. Nowadays, it's impossible to talk about the series without mentioning either.
• Narm: The death of the Asterite. What should be a pretty touching moment suffers from the limitations of the game engine, as it's depicted as the head of your foe just bouncing left and right for a long time, then its opponent crumbles into pieces.
• Nausea Fuel: As Horrifically Ugly as she is, ramming into and detaching the Vortex Queen's Eyes and Jaw is less than satisfying.
• Nightmare Retardant: Some of the enemies are just still pictures ramming into Ecco. It kind of takes the fear of getting swarmed by giant crabs out and ruins the immersion.
• Nintendo Hard: 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, Ed Annunziata admitted to making the game harder on purpose so that kids who rented it wouldn't beat it in a weekend.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • So you've just started Tides of Time. You're zooming around one of the first levels, enjoying the better controls, and suddenly you see a terrifying mass of blue chitin that kills you instantly. It was one of the alien enemies in the first game that you never saw till the last level. On the one fin you don't want to go that fast ever again in case more of them are floating around, but on the other...you have to. Eep.
  • In Defender, seeing another dolphin usually indicated an area that was relatively safe, and promised conversation with an ally (or at least someone who wasn't actively aggressive). Then the Dolphin's Nightmare stages come along, and any time you see a dolphin swimming in the distance it might be just another friend... or someone out for your blood.
• Polished Port: The Windows 95 version of Ecco the Dolphin ups the visual quality with its redrawn graphics, features the Sega CD version's soundtrack, the FMV sequences from Tides of Time, tightens up the controls, adds new difficulty system, and a save feature.
• Porting Disaster: The GameGear version of Tides. It is now thought it was based on a prototype of the Genesis/Mega Drive game. The Game Boy Advance port of the original Ecco isn't quite so atrocious, but removed almost the entire soundtrack, replacing it with a 30-second loop heard during the time travel sequences in the original game.
• Quirky Work: The plot of Defender is incredibly bizarre. It is set at the dawn of the 30th century, in a world where humans and dolphins have lived together as equals and ruled as the dominant species of Earth for the past 500 years. They have gone into space and encountered aliens who want to conquer Earth. Ecco the dolphin has to travel through time to collect the dolphin's lost noble traits to save the world. This all being said, the game is still pretty good.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The starfish you have to echolocate over to rocks so they can smash them. On the plus side, they wreck any enemies in the way, but it can be quite tricky to get into the proper position, and if you take too long between calls, they disappear and you have to start over.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Tides of Time is notably easier than its predecessor. Mind you, it's still Nintendo Hard, but it boasts better designed levels and a more gradual difficulty curve that makes the game a lot more fair, even in hard mode. On a related note, it also has an easy mode.
• Surprise Difficulty: You'd think a series starring a cute dolphin would be a pushover, and holy cow would you be wrong.
• That One Achievement: The Xbox 360 port of the first game has several hard to obtain achievements:
  • "Sonar Free" requires you to get to Dark Water without the death sonar. Trying to get that far into the game without the death sonar is already a harrowing challenge, but most don't even know the death sonar is optional.
  • "Game Win 3" requires you to beat the game without dying more than 3 times. Doing this without using savestates is a masochistic endeavour.
• That One Boss: Given the general difficulty almost all the bosses are well-hated, but the final boss of the first game deserves special mention. She actually isn't all that bad herself, but if you die you have to pick your way through Welcome to the Machine again. Worse, she has a move that will kill you instantly or even freeze the game forever if you have infinite life.
  • The Foe Queen in Defender deserves some elaboration. Five minutes before she kills you by leaking her own blood. Scary as fuck background music, as you get to hear the increasingly violent beating of her heart as you kill her. And the level is dark and cramped, because you're inside her body.
    • At the top of the list after the Foe Queen is probably the final Clan overlord, whose fight involves a substance that inverts your directional controls - and it's pretty much required that you inflict this upon yourself, as you have to lead the boss into the very same substance to confuse him.
  • The Asterite of the past in the first game is fought inside a tiny room with no oxygen pockets at all. To beat it you have to hit four globes of the same colour in a row, and hitting one of a different colour will reset the process. The Asterite, for those not in the know, is a 2.5D double-helix of globes that is constantly spinning, so requires absolute timing and precision. On top of this the Asterite will shoot lightning bolts directly into Ecco's face with no warning at all.
• That One Level: Every game has at least one. Inevitable given the general difficulty, really.
  • Ecco the Dolphin features Welcome to the Machine: Five minutes of twisting, turning, auto-scrolling Hell. And just to make things even better, if you lose to the final boss you get to go through again!
    • The Japanese release attempts to ease the frustration by adding a level called "The Stomach". This level is gotten to by being swallowed by the Queen; while you are still in danger, you don't have to go through the machine to get back to fighting her.
  • The Hanging Waters levels in Defender of the Future, and by proxy the Skyway in Tides, can vary depending on the player. They're insanely hard, but both are some of the most beautiful things to come out of their respective consoles.
  • The pre-history levels from the first game are all difficult, but special mention goes to 'Dark Water' and 'Trilobite Circle.' The former is difficult due to its twisting and cramped tunnels crawling with enemies, few oxygen pockets and a fight with The Asterite. The latter is this because of a strong current placed right before the end of the level that sends Ecco back to the very start!
  • From Defender there's "Perpetual Fluidity." This is around the point in the game where the hint crystals inexplicably started becoming more and more vague, so most of the ones in this level didn't give great advice, leading to a confusing and very dangerous level.
    • Immediately prior to "Perpetual Fluidity" came "Blades in Motion." Not quite as confusing, but came with a tricky boss fight followed by a very puzzling route to the exit, again with little in the way of hints as to what to do and, on top of it all, very limited oxygen stops.
    • And right at the end of the game, "Transfiguration." Dark, dangerous (especially in the Dreamcast version where enemies respawned), and ultimately amounts to doing the same task twice in a row ^note You had to grab a power of sonar to break a rock, inside of which was another power of sonar to break another rock that was too far away to get to while the first one was still active! , and once you'd managed to get to the final stretch, any hit from an enemy would reverse Ecco's transformation and you'd have to try again. Bear in mind there was at least one enemy in the area that couldn't be killed, and it had a projectile attack!
• That One Puzzle: 'Deep City' from the first game requires Ecco to leap over a massive pillar to access the level proper. The next level 'City of Forever' requires him (if the player doesn't know about the shortcut) to jump over a series of tall pillars. If the player hasn't mastered jumping out of the water by this point, they can be stuck at these points for a long time.
  • The infamous octopus in the Undercaves is an early game example, partially due to it being early enough that the player won't have a good feel for the controls yet. The puzzle is simple enough and even explained to you in-game by the line "swim slowly past eight arms", but pulling that off is finicky. Opposite the octopus are some spikes so you need to line yourself up precisely so that you won't get hurt by the spikes but also don't crash straight into the octopus. If you move too fast the octopus' attack can shred through a full health bar nearly instantly, not helped by him often knocking you into the spikes for even more damage. All the while you don't have much room for error since you need to pass the octopus twice before you can refill your oxygen meter and you only just have enough to make it in time, meaning you need to figure out that perfect swimming speed the game expects from you where you're fast enough that you don't drown but slow enough that you don't anger the octopus. Softened in the SEGA CD version where they place a checkpoint right before the octopus so it's not so unforgiving.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Defender looks damn good for its time, and remains appealing to look at today.
• The Woobie: Ecco himself is a Stoic Woobie, particularly in the first game, where he's kicked into a globe-spanning adventure when his family is suddenly stolen from him by terrible, powerful forces he can't begin to understand.
• Woobie Species: A few in Defender.
  • In the Dolphins' Nightmare section, a pair of enslaved humpback whales provide the power for the Hanging Waters, a process that shortens their lives each time it's initiated. They're so amazed to meet a dolphin that's not abusive towards them, they willingly go through with it to help Ecco out.
  • Also in Defender, the Outcast dolphins come across as Jerkass Woobies. Yeah, they're bastards to the other marine life, too, but they're still, well, outcasts, and the Clan likes to cut off their food supplies and sic sharks on them for giggles.
  • Pretty much all the dolphins from Man's Nightmare. They aren't as intelligent as dolphins in the true timeline, so mankind took advantage of them and enslaved them, and at some point turned the oceans into polluted, near-dead expanses of nothingness. Then humans wiped themselves out, or from the dolphins' perspective, disappeared. The Mover (hard-labor class) dolphins were happy about this since they no longer had to work endlessly, while the Circle (machine operators) dolphins refused to give up their tasks in case man showed up again, and the Crimson (lore-keepers) pined for the loss and wondered if man was testing them, and in the meantime they forgot where to stain their fins red, so this class has all but died out (though Ecco rediscovers it and stains his own fins, which makes the last Crimson very happy). So basically, all the dolphins are living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland they didn't create, don't have the intelligence to improve their situation, and have no clue where their masters got to - or whether life would get better or worse if they came back.

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