Ecco Jr.
Three completed games in the space of a week? I should play
old games more often…
I’m not sure I ever intended to play this, even when I
bought the Sega Megadrive Collection disk years ago for my PS2, as I would have
wanted to play the first two games (Ecco the Dolphin, and Ecco: The Tides of
Time) first. But as this is one of the three games that did not appear on the
Xbox 360 version of this compilation, I thought I’d better give it a go.
It’s strange; I have a kind of ‘love/hate’ relationship with
Ecco. As a concept, having the hero as a dolphin swimming around in the sea for
the entire game is a brilliant idea and not a risk you would see many triple-A
publishers taking these days! I was drawn in by the idea of puzzle-solving and
finding secrets; almost like you were treasure-hunting under the sea. What’s
not to like?
On the other hand, the games were very hard. I owned the
Tides of Time way back when I owned a Megadrive, and got stuck on the 10th
level. I had a list of codes that would take me to all the levels but I had no
idea what to do on each one. And this was a time before I could look at a wiki
to find out! Then there was the sullen
mood of the game, assisted by the beautiful but almost ambient soundtrack, plus
the fact that I don’t like fish very much and there found some of the enemies
very unpleasant and borderline frightening, meant that for me, Ecco was not
always an entirely enjoyable experience.
Ecco Jr. though…
This game was geared towards younger players, and it shows.
For a start, you can’t die. At all. There’s no health bar or oxygen bar that
was a staple of the previous games. You can’t drown, and the worst thing
enemies can do to you is block your path for a moment. You spend the game doing
what are essentially ‘fetch quests,’ as you swim around the levels trying to
reunite a lost seahorse with its mother, herding fish into a cave and finding a
seal’s ball. No, really. The end game is that Ecco and his friends (a young
Orca and a baby dolphin, all playable but as far as I could see the only
difference was the sound they make when they use the Sonar,) want to meet Big
Blue, the whale from the previous game, and if they do all the puzzles the
crystal glyphs will show them the way.
 |
| What's that? Objective markers so you actually know what you're supposed to be doing? |
It’s a kind of paradox that they took a lot, but at the same
time not very much, out of the game play. For example, Ecco can’t attack in
this game, but with no enemies there’s no real reason to do so. You can’t flip
in the air but this was only ever aesthetic anyway. One mechanic they actually
added to it, which I thought was absolutely brilliant, was that if you were
facing the right way and used your sonar, the sonar would bounce back to you
from the direction you were supposed to be going in order to meet your
objective. The previous Ecco games would have been a lot easier if they’d put
that in from the start! If you remember that Ecco is, at its heart, a puzzle
game, you realised that the developers for Ecco Jr.[1] put
their focus almost entirely on this – and therefore did not take much away from
the game at all.
Did I enjoy it? Well… there’s not a lot of challenge that’s
actually built into the game, and I’m not in to speed running so the game
didn’t have a lot going for me. I’m glad I played it through to the end but I
see no real need ever to do so again. I won’t spoil the ending but I suspect it
would be the same no matter which character you played, so unless the levels
are randomly generated (I didn’t check. It would be unusual but not unknown,)
there’s not a lot of replay value here. It took me about an hour to get through
the game and that was quite enough.
But again, this game was geared for younger players, and I
find myself wondering if I would have enjoyed it more if I was 4-5 years old.
And the answer is: I probably would, as there’s plenty of positive things about
the game that would appeal to younger children!
It’s worth mentioning that Ecco Jr, while not very
challenging, was a competently-made game. There are no bugs or glitches that I
can see. The levels are not very big and look more or less the same all the way
through, but you’re never swimming around looking confused for more than a few
minutes. There’s no fail state, nor are there any enemies to induce it. And the
game feels a lot more ‘happy-go-lucky’ than the previous games could ever
manage with their plots about vortex aliens and dark futures.
Contrast that with the previous games, where it was very
hard to work out what you had to do, it was possible to drown, and some of the
enemies were horrifying (I’m thinking mainly of Medusa from the second game)
and you realise the game would potentially put off a lot of the younger market.
The choice to make the previous games hard was entirely deliberate, but I’m
glad an easier version of the game exists. I remember playing games not unlike
this on my old Acorn Archimedes computer I had years and years ago, when I was
of the age you might expect to enjoy a game such as Ecco Jr. And I had a lot of
fun with them at the time, playing through them and later showing my younger
brother how to play them as well. It was nice to see a Megadrive game going the
same way.
To conclude, while I doubt I’d be impressed if I’d dropped
£30 on this game, (not likely since as far as I can see it was only ever
released in Australia
[1]
Appaloosa Interactive, if you want to know.
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