2026-08-26 · blog
Ecco: The Tides of Time (1994) — “easier than the first game” and “much harder than the first game,” written at the same time
Episode 39 of “Today Is Release Day”: Ecco: The Tides of Time, released by SEGA for the Mega Drive in Japan on August 26, 1994, at 6,800 yen, product code G-4123, on a 16-megabit cartridge. The first Ecco the Dolphin had arrived on July 30, 1993, about a year and a month earlier. You still swim Ecco through the sea and read your surroundings with sonar, but the sequel adds the Pulsar, a charged multi-directional blast, and the Metasphere, which turns Ecco into a seagull, a jellyfish, a shark, a school of fish or an enemy drone. New pseudo-3D stages send you swimming through rings into the distance. It was developed by Novotrade International in Hungary, with box art by Boris Vallejo. Reviewers split over difficulty: Electronic Gaming Monthly scored the Mega Drive version 7.25 out of 10, with two of its four reviewers calling it much harder than the original, while GamePro found it more approachable. Next Generation gave 3 out of 5, the Game Gear version scored 6.5 and the Sega CD version 7.6. Thirty-two years later, Japanese references still carry both halves of that argument.
