Frogger’s Adventures: Temple of the Frog (GBA)

While Konami seems to be in a perpetual state of trying to make Frogger a major franchise beyond the legacy of the frog’s first arcade outing, 2001 saw perhaps their most drastic turn away from the early beginnings. While Frogger was originally a realistic frog who hopped around dodging traffic, Frogger: The Great Quest on PS2 and PC introduced a new design where he was given a tall humanoid stature, explorer’s clothes, and even the ability to talk. However, this game featured a full range of 3D movement as they tried to push him towards platforming adventures, but over on the Game Boy Advance, this new look for the old frog was paired with a play style closer to the original arcade hit. Frogger’s Adventures: Temple of the Frog had him hopping one space at a time but still heading off on a new adventure befitting his new wardrobe, and it seems this mix of the old and the new resonated more strongly as it sold well beyond one million copies.

 

The story of this surprisingly successful GBA game is an odd mix of stakes. A mysterious villain named Mr. D has stolen the magical elements of earth, wind, fire, and water that apparently held together Frogger’s home Firefly Swamp. Scattering them around the world and taking refuge in the Temple of the Frog, Mr. D believes he has won only for Frogger to step into action. While he meets a few characters in each new area he visits, the actual conversations with them are rather short and often seem more devoted to reiterating important details about making progress. It is likely the developers anticipated younger players perhaps having some issues with understanding the element collection that is required for beating levels and the coin collection necessary for reaching the final world so dialogue reminding them of it was put in, but it also feels repetitive and makes most of Frogger’s friends feel more like information kiosks rather than people who are really becoming close allies on this short journey.

There are 15 levels in Frogger’s Adventures: Temple of the Frog, each of the 5 worlds having 3 each. The first level in a world requires the player to find three pieces of the relevant element before they can finish it, the second level ups this number to five, and the final stage in a world is a boss fight. While the low level count might be discouraging at first, stages are often a decent size and involve the player timing their jumps to avoid dangers so the stages aren’t over too quickly. Perhaps more important is this constant forward motion to new locations also means the game rarely settles into one set of enemies and hazards for too long. It’s not like the underwater life that accosts Frogger could be recycled for the city floating in the sky, and while the Temple of the Frog itself sees some enemy reuse it also breaks away from the typical design of many other stages while introducing some new concepts as well. In most of your element hunts they’ll often crop up naturally as part of the level navigation. Sometimes you still need to put in some extra effort to get to them but you’ll spot them well enough and be able to finish the level without issue. The Temple of the Frog though has many branching paths that aren’t necessary for getting deeper into the level but can contain those vital elements you need to clear the stage, thus giving the level a greater sense of discovery. Normal levels can also do this by hiding extra lives or the coins you need to collect to enter the temple at the end of the game, but coins are also not too rare on the beaten path and despite the one hit kills, losing all your lives only impacts current level progress so it’s not too damaging to run out of them.

 

Frogger’s movement is naturally an important part of this adventure, the now-humanoid hero still getting down on all fours to hop around one space at a time. While you can press B to catch butterflies with your tongue for an extra life, you actually have no direct means of hurting any enemies in your path, Frogger instead needing to hop around carefully and find windows of opportunity to survive. He does thankfully have one extra skill in the form of his A button jump. A usual hop sends you one space forward in the direction you press, but pressing A will leap forward two spaces, this useful not only for clearing gaps but also sometimes hopping over pesky enemies who patrol a space without giving you any opening. While you will sometimes need to use L and R to rotate Frogger in place so he’s facing the right way before jumping, this extra jump gives the game a good deal more flexibility in the way it can design its level spaces and enemies. Starting out in the swamp you’ll find simple dangers like goblins patrolling routes you need to find the gap in and drifting logs you need to time your jumps across correctly, but over time the game will ask for greater recognition of danger and quicker movement during it. Floors with spikes jutting out of them in a set rhythm keep you active as you need to move in order to avoid a death, creatures fly between moving platforms so you need to find the exact right moment so you can hop on without plummeting to your death or hitting a foe, and reactive tiles flip if you linger on them too long.

The different level types do a good job of introducing new ideas to the action. Maintaining your position on a train made of crabs as eels jut out across it, battling to beat the influence of conveyor belts over bottomless pits, and outrunning an incoming flood in a maze-like space give a greater degree of variation than what specific kind of critter might be walking a patrol route, but the rising difficulty also ensures that new foes are usually able to make exploration suitably challenging. Sometimes this devotion to finding new ideas isn’t the best, a flying carpet section in the sky city completely changes the gameplay briefly and hazards appear rather quickly so reacting to them can be a bit rough, but it’s not too much of a disruption. Boss battles straddle this line a bit as well, although it’s more a case of the quality of the idea being higher in some cases while others are rather plain. The underwater shark boss is about hopping between teleporters until you eventually find the right path to free the ship in the center before your work is undone and there’s not too much danger to the process to make it exciting. The confrontation with Mr. D though is an excellent test of fast movement and reactive use of your A jump and your battle with the Sultan in the sky even shifts the battle design into a challenge to collect more gems than the boss. While the shark ended up coming up short, the willingness to experiment probably benefits the game more, because even though the two remaining bosses are more typical battles, the goblin king Ijnek and giant Rattlesnake still fight you differently and keep up the game’s good balance of new experiences.

THE VERDICT: While its protagonist has a surprisingly simple skill set, Frogger’s Adventures: Temple of the Frog maintains a creative approach to challenging the player that makes its small set of levels surprisingly diverse. A few dangers are clearly just area appropriate versions of old dangers, but more often you’ll encounter some new test of your simple hopping abilities, the player needing to be careful in the timing of their jumps at some points but also act quickly in the face of danger at others. Bosses and unique level set pieces like areas being flooded gives bursts of dangerous excitement while other stages give you time to scope out the danger and plot your course, some ideas for what’s ahead a little simple but the overall adventure doing well at varying up how you must push forward.

 

And so, I give Frogger’s Adventures: Temple of the Frog for Game Boy Advance…

A GOOD rating. Magical carpet segments notwithstanding, Frogger’s Adventures: Temple of the Frog manages a good balance of content that makes its small length feel packed with quality ways to test your tile-based movement. What’s more, it feels like it manages a good balance of being accessible for younger players but still developing into a more difficult journey over time, although the sometimes brutal death animations like bloodlessly being sliced in half seem to contradict the story’s weird child-friendly devotion to reiterating the rules of the making progress. In the levels though Frogger’s simple movement style is tested in a surprisingly strong range of different scenarios, and by mixing in hazards that require constant movement and others that necessitate picking your moments it never settles into one style for so long it becomes mundane. Keeping the action moving through multiple locations likely sparked the creativity of the development team as it couldn’t lean on any ideas for too long, and even when you can spot that something is a reworked idea it usually has some new context or twist to it. A goblin can only patrol the land but flying foes can sweep over open spaces as well, electric barriers require you to hop between activations but the anemones under the sea alternate which stinging tentacles are out so you have to weave between them in time. The little tweaks to simpler dangers on top of the new mechanics like the conveyor belts keep Frogger’s adventure varied, entertaining, and even a bit challenging without pushing so hard that Frogger’s two different types of movement are ever strained.

 

It is a bit funny that Frogger’s Adventures: Temple of the Frog’s successful elements are almost in spite of the efforts to redesign the character. His supporting cast are barely memorable and his humanoid appearance has been ignored in favor of keeping him hopping around a space at a time like he used to, but a good mix of creativity in the level design does show that new ideas did benefit him in terms of how his game plays. Future games like Frogger 3D would get a little carried away in providing new dangers for the simple hopping action, but the obstacles faced here are well contained and require in-the-moment reactions and planning rather than anything so deep that it could overstay its welcome or feel an ill-fit for your limited input options. Sometimes all it really takes to make something old feel new again is quality level design with the right mix of imagination and familiarity, and Frogger’s Adventures: Temple of the Frog ends up enjoyable because it managed that blend well despite its small number of stages.