Sega had a bit of a problem with Ecco the Dolphin – dolphins are popular across all ages and demographics, but they’d a game that was far too difficult for most of them to enjoy. To rectify this, they created Ecco Jr., a game aimed explicitly at young children (and their parents to play along with them). The first Ecco Jr. game was released for the Sega Pico in 1994, with this Genesis follow-up coming out the following year as part of their “Sega Club” kids label..
The packaging shows a cartoonish version of young Ecco, but the in-game graphics are almost identical to the previous two games. Young Ecco looks slightly smaller, plus he’s joined by two companions you can switch between at any time – Kitnee, also a dolphin, and Tara, an orca whale. Despite their visual differences, they all have the same abilities.
The life and oxygen meters are gone, so effectively you cannot die. Instead, the emphasis is solely on exploration and light puzzle solving. In each stage, you have a specific goal – find certain animals, look for a specific object, collect a certain number of rings, and so forth. The upper-left corner of the screen shows your current goals, with completed goals shown in the upper-right. The sonar no longer brings up an area map, but instead you must pay attention to the direction the echoes return from, which reveals the next goal’s location. However, it doesn’t always work, so you need to keep swimming around and changing directions to use it effectively.
There’s also a hidden “Parent’s Menu” (activated by holding down A, B, and C, and pressing Start on the title screen) which includes a few options, including a screen filled with dolphin effects, a stage select, and the ability to change between three difficulty levels. These determine the number of stages you’ll play, with 11 included on the Easy mode, 17 on Normal, and 27 on Hard.
It’s a little hard to judge Ecco Jr. Sega’s goal was to make a kid-friendly Ecco game, and that’s what this is. Anyone older will likely find the experience trivial, because it’s just a little too simple and it lacks the terrifying atmosphere and crazy story that made the originals so compelling. That being said, it shouldn’t be written off completely, as it still looks and plays like a real Ecco title. The biggest complaint you can lob against it is that it reuses so many assets that it feels like it could’ve been an additional mode on one of the other games, rather than its own standalone title.
