Ecco 2: The Tides Of Time

I recently played Ecco The Dolphin for the first time, and it was quite the experience. I wouldn't call it an especially fun game, but it was an incredibly engaging one carried by its haunting atmosphere, and it made me really excited to see how a potential sequel could improve on the formula. If The Tides Of Time is able to tone down the difficulty, bump up the level variety, and smooth out the pacing a bit, all the while maintaining the eerieness and beautiful audiovisual presentation of the original, we could have a legitimately great game on our hands. But let's be real, this is still an Ecco game. If there's anything I've been conditioned to expect from this series, it's the unexpected.

Getting Started

- The Tides Of Time starts you off in a cavern with three exits to swim to. In classic Ecco fashion, the game doesn't tell you that this is actually a difficulty select and each exit corresponds to a specific difficulty.

- Despite there being three exits, though, there really are only two difficulties, Easy and Hard. Normal fluctuates between the other two difficulties depending on how you do rather than being a set middle ground, and I'm honestly not a huge fan of this. I never liked adaptive difficulty personally. 

- Hard adds a few exclusive levels and both changes and extends the level design, but I think I'll be sticking with Easy for this one. I'm playing the Sega CD version once again, but it doesn't seem to have any exclusive levels of its own from what I can tell.

- In terms of gameplay, visuals, and sound, Tides Of Time doesn't change too much compared to the original. Ecco controls pretty much exactly the same, which isn't a problem because he always played quite well. The visuals are still stunning, though I'd say the more dramatic skyboxes are a big step-up this time. The early levels are lit by a gorgeous sunset, and the game just gets prettier as it goes on.

- As for the music, well, it's more of the blissful, calming, and somewhat eerie tones that made up the first game's soundtrack. Personally, I think Ecco 1 had the stronger overall soundtrack and more of its tracks ended up sticking with me by the end of the game, but Ecco 2 still has some stellar tracks like Fin And Feather and the 3D Stage theme showing Spencer Nielsen's still got it.

- Home Bay in Ecco 2 is a lot easier to figure out than it was in the first game. The instructions the dolphins give you are way clearer, and there's really only one way to go. It does introduce two of Ecco 2's big additions though. First off, it introduces these behind-the-back stages where you have to swim through rings to progress further. They're fine. They add a decent amount of variety, but do get a bit repetitive by the end of the game and figuring out the depth perception of getting the rings over the water can be a bit finicky.

- But also, if you look around Home Bay, you'll find a history glyph. These are exclusive to the CD version and basically serve as pieces of a full 3D animated retelling of the first game. There's seven of them to find and I'd definitely recommend checking them out because they're super charming. Ecco's 3D model in particular is absolutely adorable.

The Present: A Solid Start

- Crystal Springs is where the game starts proper, and it introduces yet another weird new mechanic. There are now specific glyphs that you can push around with your sonar, and you need to bring four of them together to unlock a new upgrade. Don't worry though, this is not like those early levels in the first game. This area is really small and open, and finding all those glyphs won't take you more than 1-2 minutes.

- The one problem I have with this mechanic is that working out the timing to actually push the Glyphs out of their holding place is a bit hard to parse. If you sing too fast, it won't move, but if you sing too slow, it'll just swing around. 

- Fault Rock is a more action-focused stage where Ecco... causes an earthquake and loses his ability to breath water? Look, I get they're trying to do a "Samus loses her upgrades" type deal, but it's kinda hard for me to figure out what even happened here.

- Otherwise, this is a pretty fun stage. The earthquake sequence where you're dodging falling rocks is quite exciting, though the crab enemies that home in on you are pretty annoying. In general, I think Ecco 2 gets off to a much stronger start than the first game and its stages have felt pretty varied so far.

- Two Tides is more of that classic Ecco design where you swim back and forth to open key/lock doors. It introduces these optional Pulsar upgrades that are hidden in some of the levels, which boost your sonar just for the duration of the level. It's a solid way to encourage the player to explore without frontloading the game with upgrade hunts.

- The stage ends with the player finally getting context on what the hell is happening. There's a possible dark future where the aliens you defeated in the first game take over, and Ecco has to go to the future to prevent it from happening. Cool, makes sense. I do like the simplicity of the first game's story, but it's nice to see Ecco further leaning on the time travel aspects.

The Future:

- The first future level had me pretty lost for a bit. In introduces these tubes that take you up into a sky, and these flying dolphins that you can use to glide between the tubes. I honestly don't know how I could've figured out to use them without the guide, but they are pretty fun mechanics once you know what you're doing. Skyway, the level after this, is weirdly a lot easier and simpler? I don't know, maybe they should've swapped these two stages.

- Sky Tides actually surprised me quite a bit. Ecco 1 only had two autoscrolling stages in the end, but Ecco 2 tosses one in super early on, and it's really fun too! You have to carefully balance inside these floating pockets of water, quickly hopping between them as the screen scrolls. It's a bit of a challenge, but a really satisfying one since it's purely based on your skill in moving Ecco around, and it's fairly short and brisk as well.

- Tube Of Medusa also takes place up in the sky, though it's not an autoscroller, just a standard maze. It's also not super long, but you have to deal with this aggressive medusa enemy that chases after you so you'd better know what you're doing. I found this stage pretty fun, but the guide I'm reading says it's brutal on Hard Mode. Good thing I'm playing Easy then, huh?

- Skylands introduces these air bubbles that launch you into the air almost like barrel cannons in a Donkey Kong Country game. Like most of the other mechanics in this part of the game, it's a bit finicky and tough to master at first, but feels incredibly joyful and satisfying once you can pull it off. Flinging yourself through the air feels really good, and has a sense of pure fun to it unlike anything in the first game.

- And then, there's Fin To Feather, the culmination of this entire world. This stage introduces the Metasphere which lets Ecco contextually transform into an animal for a brief period of time. These are pretty rare and are probably the game's best source of variety, and Fin To Feather fittingly lets you transform into a bird and fly. Not for very long and you have to deal with annoying eagles while you're at it, but it makes for one of the most memorable setpieces in the game, and it's immediately followed by a 3D segment to boot.

- Eagle's Bay further explores the bird mechanic by now having you dodge falling rocks in bird form. As you can probably tell, I'm enjoying these stages a ton, more than I ever enjoyed most of the first game's stages. They've been pretty short and breezy, and constantly tossed new, fun ideas at me.

- Sadly, all good things come to an end. Asterite's Cove is the last future level, and as such, it tests you on all the major mechanics like the air tubes, flying dolphins, and repairing glyphs. This probably was my favorite world in either Ecco game.

The Past: More Of The Same

- A good chunk of the game is spent back in the past, and it's more standard Ecco fare without all the crazy flying dolphins and floating water bubbles which is a bit of a shame. However, the strong design continues with its first stage which has you exploring a big area to find some lost Orcas. Once again, I was a bit nervous this level would drag, but most of the orcas are easy to get and you can bring multiple of them with you without needing to do a bunch of trips.

- Both this level and the next one, Four Islands, also introduce these sort of escort missions where you have to follow an orca or dolphin who guides you to the exit. They're once again fine, but it's annoying not being able to blast through the stage whenever I have to do them. The one in Four Islands is a bit more fun though since you have to hop across a bunch of patches of land while also keeping up with the dolphin you're following.

- Also, I just found out that if you mess up the escort mission in Four Islands ten times, they'll just straight up give you the key to the exit. Absolutely amazing.

- Sea Of Darkness is sadly the first real drop in quality after a stretch of really fun stages. It introduces one of my least favorite tropes in gaming, the blackout stage. And on top of that, it brings back one of my least favorite mechanics from the first game, a ring of stars that you need to push around to break rocks. Thankfully, this is the only time either mechanic shows up in Tides Of Time, but it ends up making this one of the less fun stages for me.

- Thankfully, Vents Of Medusa is a big step in the right direction, and quite possibly the funniest stage in the entire duology. The Metasphere is back, but this time it turns you into a useless jellyfish. You have to slowly float up a thin shaft filled with jellyfish, and need to dodge the sonar attacks of other dolphins. It's such a silly perspective shift, I love it.

- The next two levels don't really have too much going for them. Gateway is just another 3D stage, and Sea Of Green has a particularly brutal jump but that's really it, but I do want to mention that this part of the game is really introducing some brutal enemies that just love to home in on you. They're always so annoying to deal with, and I'd say they're probably the worst thing about Ecco 2.

- This part of the game ends with a surprise boss fight where you have to face off against a moray eel in a shell. It's certainly a more fun boss fight than anything in the first game, but the sheer amount of damage that eel does makes it absurdly punishing. And of course, it's long, so having to die and do it all again must suck.

The Asterite Arc

- Well, here we are. I spent all game dreading another big scavenger hunt, and we finally got it. This next batch of levels tasks you with gathering up all of the Asterite's orbs, two... by... two. Considering the Asterite's body is made up of upwards of about twenty pairs of orbs, yeah, it's a real pain.

- This is at its worst with the level, The Eye, which has you collect around ten-ish pairs of orbs? It's quite the repetitive stage and it easily ranks among the longest in the game.

- And yet... it still isn't as bad as the stuff from the first game! The Eye uses a hub and spokes system that makes it easy to navigate, and it even gives you a Pulsar so enemies aren't really a threat here. It's also nice that this quest is, at the very least, still broken up across a bunch of levels rather than all crammed into one.

- Thankfully, once the Asterite is repaired, you're rewarded with another fun Metasphere level which has you transform into a shark. It's quite similar to Vents Of Medusa in that you encounter other dolphins who try to use Ecco's abilities against you, but sharks are more powerful than jellyfish in this game so it feels more like a fun power trip.

- Lunar Bay is going to be the last stage to take place in the natural sea, and as such, it has an absolutely gorgeous nighttime skybox. In general, the color palettes in Ecco 2 are a lot more varied and striking than in the first game. Shame you won't be able to see it much though since most of this stage has you frantically swimming around underwater trying to dodge aliens that force you to restart the level if you get caught. It's not an awful stage, but it is quite annoying, and it sets the stage for Ecco 2's biggest difficulty spike...

The Dark Future: Ecco's Most Experimental Section

- The Dark Future levels take place pretty much entirely in the air, mostly composed of complex mazes with a ton of one-way doors and a lot of time spent flailing around out of the water. I'm a bit split on these stages.

- On one hand, they are kind of fun. They mess around with Ecco's movement in a way that the previous game didn't explore much outside of the ice stages. Ecco's physics outside of the water take a bit of getting used to, but there's some serious movement tech to it and pulling off large jumps feels great.

- On the other hand, they are absolute torture to navigate. As I said, there are constant one-way doors, antigravity fields flinging you all over the place, and everything looks the same. Gravitorbox gets the worst of this since it's filled to the brim with unpredictable antigrav fields that force you to just straight-up make blind jumps.

- After three levels of this, you reach the second boss fight and once again, it's kinda fun? It's this weird globe that holds the last of the Asterite's spheres, and bashing it into the wall with the sheer force of your sonar feels pretty good. It's also not nearly as punishing as the previous boss. Only the final phase can really risk insta-killing you, but it goes down in one hit anyway.

- The Dark Sea is really cool, until it isn't. It starts off as what's essentially an Ecco The Dolphin war sequence where the other dolphins help to fight off the aliens while you storm their spacecraft, which is such a fun sequence.

- However, when you hit the second half, you get surprised by... The Machine again?! Granted, it's not as bad this time around but it's still pretty miserable. And the worst part is that Hard Mode gets an exclusive second level called "New Machine". The developers are just taking the piss out of us at this point.

- The Vortex Queen fight is sadly kinda lame though, especially compared to the one in the first game. Getting eaten doesn't make you restart the entire previous level though, you just need to do a short alien stage like in the JP version, but it goes down really fast and the only real difficulty is even finding an opening.

The Epilogue:

- After defeating the Vortex Queen, you get a cute ending where you see Ecco and his friends doing tricks, you're back at Home Bay, and you get the credits. So that's it, right? The game is over, right?

- But then, Ecco 2... just kinda keeps going. Even after the credits, you still have control of Ecco, and that's because there's a postgame. Ecco needs to destroy the time machine to preventing anything else like this from happening again, so you gotta play through some new levels in Atlantis.

- The postgame levels aren't the best, sadly.The first Atlantis level is pretty puzzle-heavy and involves pushing around blocks, solving a sliding puzzle, and pushing around a fish. It's a solid test of everything you've learned up to this point, but it's not one of my favorite levels in the game and yet it's still the best one in the postgame.

- Fish City is the last metasphere level, but it's a shame it's kind of a stinker. The premise is that you're forcedly turned into a school of fish and you have to reach the end while dodging a swarm of dolphins trying to eat you. It's honestly really annoying because of how many dolphins you're trying to deal with while also trying to navigate this fairly open stage.

- And then the final stage of the postgame is... City Of Forever... Oh, no. Well, okay, thankfully, it's an entirely different stage than the one in the first game. However, it's not very fun either, being a pretty dull stealth level that's very easy to get lost in.

- The postgame ends on a surprise cliffhanger. The Vortex Queen managed to use the time machine but only ends up recreating Earth as we know it, and Ecco uses the time machine as well only to get lost in time. Sadly, this cliffhanger would never be addressed. Honestly, with how weak the postgame stages are and the unaddressed cliffhanger, I kinda think Ecco 2 should've just ended at the credits.

Conclusion

Well, to my absolute surprise, Ecco 2: The Tides Of Time was actually pretty good. It still suffers from a lot of the issues the first game had like brutal difficulty and a refusal to tutorialize its mechanics properly, but it does genuinely improve on its predecessor in terms of pacing, level design, and variety. It has more levels and side content than 1, especially if you count the hard-exclusive stages and the epilogue, and yet it feels like it went by a lot faster. The aerial stages, the animal transformations, the more streamlined scavenger hunts, the smoother difficulty curve, and the 3D stages all make for a more fun and unpredictable game that never felt as soul-crushingly repetitive as the original could. It's 100% a better game than its predecessor.

And yet, I think Ecco 1 was a better experience. Ecco 2 still has a great audiovisual presentation, don't get me wrong, but the story isn't as gripping, the atmosphere isn't as haunting, and the music isn't as powerful. I got a lot more enjoyment out of Ecco 2, but years down the line, the game that's going to stick with me more is gonna be the simple but effective story of a little dolphin saving his entire species while the odds are stacked against him. 

Does this mean I like Ecco 1 better? Hell, no, gameplay first any day of the week. If I had to replay either of these games, I'd pick Ecco 2 in a heartbeat. But I do think both games have their own merits and, as the epilogue shows, they balance each other out quite well. Ecco 1 establishes a strong base for this weird aquatic world, and Ecco 2 expands on it mechanically. On their own, these might be pretty flawed experiences, but together... well, they're still pretty flawed, but they form one hell of a duology.

3.5/5 Stars