Completion Time: 8h:51m:00s
Rating: 3/10

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Frogger's Birthday Bash

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I may have messed up a bit here? I wanted to pick another game that would be relatively simple, and having played Zapper already as the first entry of this blog series, I felt that returning to the familiar well that was Frogger could be a good idea. I only actually own one in my collection currently, so I went with that. Issues with the actual game aside (I'll go into details on all of THAT later), I think this is meant to be a direct sequel to another game, "". Now, this was only on PC and PS2, so it wouldn't be for this blog collection anyways, but they kept referring to events of the prior game that made me a little frustrated that I was playing one with a plot of just "celebrating a birthday party by torturing you so you can prove yourself" sort of thing. Oh well, not something to really be changed, and I can't possibly be missing all that much anyways.

Hey, I'm trying to make sense of the timeline too, Frogger!

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One Good Hop Deserves Another

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I'm just gonna jump straight into the negatives first here. The controls are awful, full stop. Another instance of I know it wasn't my controller because I tried multiple different instances, and I haven't seen this behavior on other games, but the kind of fast-paced hopping and jumping the game requires from you does not pair well with a control scheme that doesn't always respond. The number of times I hit the A button to jump over an oncoming enemy, only for nothing to happen, was infuriatingly staggering. And I completely understand the desire to want to handle a Frogger-like with D-pad functionality only, but I don't think the GameCube control as is works well enough for that. Sometimes you hit left or right and end up going up and down due to leaning on the button too far in the wrong direction. And that can be curbed by taking your time, but this game has sections that demand you to be as fast and on-the-ball as possible. Good luck outrunning that piston when you accidentally go down instead of right! And the minecart. My Lord, the minecart section. I still don't know fully how it works, some obstacles you try to tilt past and you end up colliding even though an object earlier of the same width can easily by bypassed. And the arrows don't help either, they just make it more confusing when I try to use the D-pad to pick a path and the frog don't go! In the final world, there's a small minecart riding portion and I was immensely upset, believing we had left that all behind in the ice world. Thankfully, it was 20 seconds of the level tops, and I never looked back.

Seriously, what does this arrow even mean? There's only one path here!

Finally, back to our roo... wait, not dodging buses, but RIDING THEM?!

While I wouldn't dare to call any of the worlds you visit particularly inspired, there is a level of fun in how everything is structured. Platforms and conveyor belts that lead to cozy corners full of secrets, with specific pinpoints on the grid being the only spot you can rest without being assaulted by all the enemies and their preplanned paths. I can see in my mind's eye someone sitting at a drafting table and fleshing out what tile should go where while building up the world, and that's a huge plus that keeps me from outright hating this game. There's care there that I don't often see. But the environments, yeah, you've got swamp world, ice world, fire world, future tech world, they all hit the same time-old beats. The most amusing was a funhouse-esque world with weird little bots that kind of looked like clowns puttering around. It's funny, because it's referred to as the "Magic" world, which just gives it an excuse to be slightly more whimsical I suppose. But hey, I liked the look of it. Almost made me forget I was playing something that only occasionally worked the way I wanted it to.

Frog Merlin getting ready to spirit me away to the land of whimsical nonsense

The story of the game is a bit confusing to me as well. So Frogger is becoming of a certain age, since it's his birthday and all. To welcome him into... society, I guess... the elders whisk him away to worlds to beat up guys. I'm not sure whether or not this was set up by the elders and these entities he's fighting were plants, or if this was planned just because they had some nuisances they had to get rid of. Are these actual places, or simulations? I mean, one of these guys sends Frogger seemingly to the future. Why are we going to the future? What is there to gain from changing the future? Wouldn't we want to destroy this thing in the past before it gets to that point, or again, is this all simulated and doesn't matter? I shouldn't care so much about those kind of details, but I think the fact that they're constantly referencing his previous adventure (which I assume DID have stakes), I can't help but think about what we're doing here and if any of this even has a point. We've come so far from just jumping across a road.

Almost forgot about this guy. No joke, spent an hour and a half on this boss cause I wasn't understanding his patterns

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Completing the Game

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Beat the game. That's it. You know, I'm coming across this being the case way more frequently than I thought I might when I started. Even the lowest of the low in license games usually had collectibles or unlockable mini-movies or something when I was growing up, or maybe those are just the games that I played more frequently. The only things in the game that could even align with the concept of a collectable would be the items that you purchase by collecting coins as you hop about in each of the levels. But they're consumables, you use them as you progress as I mentioned earlier. And there isn't a "coin counter" in the stages to determine if you collected them all or something. There's literally nothing that you need to do other than go through each level of the 8 worlds and celebrate with that ending cutscene, not even an ending boss stage or anything!

Given that this bat is the final thing you see in the final world, I can only surmise that he's the final boss

Maybe this is just me ruminating on past experiences with Zapper on the GameCube, but I do feel there is a germ of something here. Hell, there was a Frogger game from this series that I played constantly on GameBoy Advance and loved, and it wasn't all that different from this one sans the fact that the handheld game had consistently working controls. I hesitate to say anything along the lines of "oh, I'm so excited to jump back into the series on GameCube and hope that they have improvements or changes to what I disliked" but that is entirely unrealistic. Just as a natural part of this series, I'll eventually get to the other ones, but I'm not rushing into it by any means.

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 37/652