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Why Everyone Hates Them: By popular opinion, every game in the Ecco the Dolphin series is some sort of new age hippy edutainment thing designed for small children, wherein the player takes control of a dolphin to swim around aimlessly through happy colorful environments. As such, most seem to give up fairly early on.
Legitimate Issues With the Games: The above is honestly a perfectly accurate description of Ecco Jr. as well as the first level or so of the rest of the games in the series. Towards the end, they tend to get rather profoundly difficult.
Why I Like Them Anyway: Despite appearances, it's actually quite possible to classify the original Ecco the Dolphin as the first survival horror game ever made. Every game starts out with some pleasant ocean scenery to splash through as a happy little dolphin, but as the games wear on (with the aforementioned exception of Ecco Jr.) an increasing amount of time is spent rushing through narrow corridors, with an extreme awareness of your resources (air, specifically), solving puzzles, while freaky monsters jump out from around corners and kill you before you can blink. To anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration, please direct your attention to the upcoming image to your left.
There is a similar progression to all three games. Initially, we're grounded in nice safe reality, at least for the most part. Then it's time to start venturing out into open shark filled waters, and down into nasty little twisty tunnels. Usually around this point, the difficulty starts creeping up, and misperceptions begin to form. Press on, and things start getting a bit odd.
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Time travel factors into every game. Either you're going back in time, dealing with pterodactyls and various types of extinct shellfish on a fetch quest for a giant immortal sentient strand of DNA, or you're traveling to the future, and swimming from one ocean to the other through membranous water tendrils created by the oceans becoming self-aware, plagued by a freaky giant flying jellyfish... or an alternate future where the horrifying alien monsters have harvested most life on earth for food. Things actually get even more complex than that by the end of things.
Of course, in addition to being weird and creepy, the Ecco games are also savagely difficult across the board. Death comes frequently, often, and often in ways that are simply unfair. Most famously, the second to last level of the original game is a nice long auto-scrolling bit of hell, with the added sadism of the scroll direction constantly changing without warning, often two or three times in a row, tricking the player into rushing the wrong way and being crushed. The actual final level being the obligatory boss battle with the giant alien, dying to it sending you back to the start of the previous level. The second game does something similar.
Really, the majority of what's been said here applies equally well to the original game, and the two legitimate sequels (Tides of Time and Defender of the Future). Really, the only significant differences between them is that Tides of Time goes above and beyond in providing the bizarre plot twists (sentient ocean for instance), and Defender of the Future is in 3D.
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It's something of a shame how largely the game was overlooked, as the third Ecco game in many ways seems to be the game the Dreamcast was designed for. Fans of the system may recall its graphical bias towards using a relatively small number of "rounded polygons" which work better for smooth, streamlined objects than anything else. For instance, a dolphin. The control scheme used by the entire series is based around relatively wide angle turns and building forward momentum also has the benefit of working much much better in analog controlled 3D than in the earlier side view games.
Then of course there's the black sheep of the family, Ecco Jr. While built on the same engine, it offers real gameplay at all, except for a series of risk-free scavenger hunts, with clear indications of each object's position. The stranger elements of the plot are likewise abandoned.
So, there you have it. Three games of a highly challenging, horrific nature, one or two of which you may in fact own already, disguised as child-friendly new age love fests... and one child-friendly new age love fest disguised as one of them. Of course, it should be noted that all four games are deeply steeped in the same dolphins-and-crystals-and-great-earth-spirit vibe, which can be unnerving for all the wrong reasons.
