Ah, Ecco 2 GG. Godawful black sheep of the Ecco family. Let’s see if we can figure out just what went wrong during your development, and the secrets you’re hiding.

Let’s start with a smaller detail, but nonetheless a significant one. Ecco I CD added turtles to the game, which could be used to block currents and get into new areas. Ecco II for Genesis/MD incorporated these. Ecco I for Gen/MD and Game Gear didn’t have turtles. Ecco 2 GG adds turtles, but they don’t do anything since there are currents to block. If they were intended to have some purpose or if they were just added for decoration, remains a mystery.

Either way, Ecco II’s “Home Bay” has no turtles. However, early in development, e.g. the “E2A” and “X11″ builds, there were lots of turtles in there. Ecco II GG’s “Home Bay”– surprise surprise– has a bunch of turtles still in it.

The Floating Medusa is implemented, which makes sense, since it was mostly complete even in the earliest-known Ecco II Gen/MD prototype, “E2A”. By comparison, most of the “Good Future” levels are a shambles– they play like a large, free-scrolling version of “Sky Tides” or “Tube of Medusa” that you can explore, with a tiny flying section thrown in. Nothing at all like the final version. However, in early prototype versions of Ecco II for Gen/MD, the “Good Future” stages were still a mess, so perhaps the GG team had very little to use as reference.

The water tubes are blue outlines on a backdrop of mountains and the oceans, a resized copy from the Gen/MD version of this stage. The tubes themselves are terribly nondescript and look like the outlines on the Gen/MD version’s sonar map. The shot on the right is from the final version, though very similar silhouettes exist in the prototype version (in shades of green.)

In Ecco 2 GG, a baby orca leads you to where Trellia is. Nothing at all like the final version, where she teleports in from the Good Future at the end of “Two Tides”. The presence of the baby orca in E2GG seems even stranger given that there is no mother anywhere in sight. There’s only one occasion in the Gen/MD version where you follow a baby orca anywhere. But you do follow around baby orcas, with no corresponding mother, in the “E2A” prototype of Ecco II. The plot thickens.

The background for the globe holder is a simple pattern of what appears to be a single tile repeating over and over, like in Ecco II “E2A”– except that it’s a different pattern. The Globe Holder is also very cubic and its tiles break up as it moves– if you closely observe the edges of the Globe Holder in E2A (right) you can see a similar effect there, as well. In the E2GG version, there’s nothing anchoring the Globe Holder to the walls (probably because the math involved was just too much for the Game Gear’s CPU to effectively handle, but this stage still appears thrown together.)

As you can clearly see here, the sprites used in the walls in Atlantis are sprites that were prevalent in “E2A” (Ecco I dolphin sprites and a new unique 3D Stage dolphin sprite.) These sprites were also reused in the character-select screen of Ecco Jr.

You never do visit the Asterite in the future, and the game never tells you who your ‘OLD FRIEND’ is. The future Asterite was not completed in “E2A”, but there was an orca that showed you the video of the Vortex Queen attacking him. So it stands to reason that here in the Good Future, we find an Orca who relates to you everything the Asterite should have told you. There’s orcas all over this game, entirely too many, usually in little caves with a key glyph and a short message for you like in Ecco I. The only Asterite is the one you rebuild in the present. Ridiculous.

As you jump through the rings in the 3D Stages (called “DDD Swimming”), the scenery does not get closer, and Ecco doesn’t appear to really be going anywhere. Just like in “E2A”. The fact that “DDD Swimming” stages replace time travel sequences seems to indicate they were not meant for travelling across large distances, and instead, between different time periods. If this was ever in the intention in the Gen/MD versions is presently unknown.

In “Moray Abyss”, the eels are all red, none are green. Also, just like the Prototype. You can also swim up and down the
abyss at will all the way back up to the top like in the prototype– in the final version you are prevented from doing this.

The main chamber with the glyphs is laid out in an pattern not unlike the shape of a glyph– a rough hexagonal shape. In the final version of Ecco II Gen/MD, there’s a rounder area here, resembling the shape of.. well, an eye– with veins extending outward. The way it’s laid out here more resembles how it was in “E2A” (see right). Bear in mind that not all the glyphs that are present in “E2A”’s version of this stage show up on the sonar map at the same time, so some are missing from the image.

The Vortex Queen level starts with a black background, just like “E2A”. (X11 had a placeholder background of odd red patterned tiles.) Not the cool one with all the pipes from the Final version.

The energy beam is a burst of lightning instead. The beam was already completed in “E2A”, so this is unexpected. It seems the GG version of “Vortex Queen” is in an even earlier stage– or they just weren’t keen on making that beam, for some reason.

The Vortex Queen was invincible in “E2A”. Here, Ecco is invincible instead, and to deafeat her all you need to do is swim down and sonar at her a bunch of times. She can’t hurt you– but she still shoots projectiles at you. She has no prehensile tongue like in the final Ecco II Gen/MD version– but check this out. The projectiles the Vortex Queen spits at you in E2GG are the tongue segments from “E2A”!

Clearly the complex math used for the tongue was too much for the Game Gear’s CPU to handle– it’s already struggling most of the time just to run. This is probably due to a combination of that a 3.58 MHz 8-bit Z80 is extremely weak compared to a 7.67 MHz 16-bit 68000, and the rushed nature of the game resulting in a lot of slow and unoptimized code. So it makes sense that they would opt to replace the fancy tongue algorithms in favor of simple projectiles. But using these indicates the E2GG team was most likely referencing early builds of the Gen/MD version– so this stage was probably built early and never finished.

Summary

This appears to be an open-and-shut case. Ecco II for Game Gear appears to have been developed alongside its Genesis/MD counterpart in the early stages, only to be abandoned for whatever reason partway through development with most elements left unfinished. The game is just barely playable, extremely rushed, has very little music, and lots of bugs. So what happened during development to ruin E2GG so thoroughly? I’m currently in the process of researching this– when I know you will. Stay tuned to DARK SEA for more info.