Frogger's Journey: The Forgotten Relic starts with a shot of Frogger's giant, detailed feet while he lounges in a chair on his lawn. Then a plane crashes into his house and he has to go find his missing archeologist grandpa. His grandpa's anthropomorphic fox lady assistant kinda helps guide you along the way, but most of the time she just tells you to go talk to the random, unnamed NPCs around town until a new level opens up. This game is kind of like Zelda in that it gives you different items after every level and then you use them in the next level, but some of them are nearly worthless while some are actually fun and useful. After doing a bunch of stuff like fighting the Sphinx, going to Atlantis, and infiltrating the ninja squirrel hideout three times, it turns out your giant dog mechanic was actually working for Eric the evil weasel the whole time and you have to beat up their robots and fight Eric in a volcano or something. The difficult curve of the game looks kind of like this: ___/\\_. It's very long, and moving around as a Frogger is always a treat, but if you wanna play this be warned that the last few levels made me want to tear my hair out and jump into a pool like Frogger (he cannot swim).

L2AGO #7

I played Swampy's Revenge last year and loved it so I decided to give Forgotten Relic a go this time. Little did I know that this game's developer decided to wish upon the monkey's paw...

So you're Frogger sitting in the swamp, and kinda bored, and you get a letter from your grandpa, telling you to go visit him because he thinks he's found something interesting in his dig and he knows you love adventure. The gameplay loop consists as follows; you arrive in town, you talk to some people and pay people some money, then you go out adventuring to a dangerous place and get a relic/beat a boss and go back to town to talk to more people. The talk to people part is required by the way; you have to talk to specific people in the town as a mission trigger to progress the story by figuring out where to go/giving Leona enough time to decode a message/etc. And the people you have to talk to change every time with no indication upon who you have to talk to and could just be random people walking around in town for all you know. This was such a time waster inbetween the action sections, and I honestly don't think talking to random people contributed much to the story or atmosphere since I don't remember most of the dialogue.

The action sequences are for the most part, standard Frogger; you hop around the level, dodging more obstacles than a Crash Bandicoot crash course while hopping over a few gaps here and there, and make it to the end to fight a boss or collect a relic. The relics are more or less Legend of Zelda items, that have specific uses for puzzles; there's an item that pushes blocks, an item that destroys stone walls, a grappling hook that can be used to draw blocks closer to you, and so on so forth. From what I've seen prior, Frogger is a combination of balancing pattern recognition, patience, and careful execution to ensure you don't get clipped by obstacles or fall into no hop zones. But here's what really bothers me; Forgotten Relic focuses too heavily on execution tests. There are a lot of difficult manuevers you'll have to make as you progress through the levels, such as constantly turning around to shield then hopping over gaps, or hopping onto a collapsing platform and then needing to immediately turn and grapple a platform over and hop on over before the platform collapses. And these maneuvers tend to be pretty frame tight, otherwise you will probably end up taking damage or falling into the void. This is further worsened because many of the later levels outright remove checkpoints; if you fall into the void, you'll fall into some basement filled with enemies that you'll have to avoid to make it back to the main floor to reset that room's progress and have another go. And this happens every time you fall, so you better get used to navigating those basements! Oh, and did I mention that the game's inputs are buffered if you mash so there's a pretty good possibility of overshooting with jumps and falling in anyways?

There are a lot of other minor complaints here and there. The Time Stop relic is super useful but takes an eternity and a half to recharge to its full meter; even while dash dancing to make this recharge accelerate (which is not always advisable since this is Frogger and you're often stuck in confined spaces surrounded by hazards) it took me a solid half minute every time. The 2nd main boss felt super RNG dependent and would just refuse to linger in the proper hitbox for my attacks for most of my attempts. You need money to pay for upgrades after finding relics and for transportation to some stages; you'll usually have enough money if you collect enough in the stages, but if you don't, you have to grind money in the first cave level, which gets pretty tedious. Oh, and the merchant sells furniture that you can use to decorate your grandpa's house, but as far as I know he doesn't actually seem to acknowledge it, so I don't really consider it a reward? It's expensive too and can interfere with the money you need for the mandatory expenditures. I think there are sidequests too, but I never went on any of them because I was kind of sick of this game by the end.

Anyways, that's Forgotten Relic. The classic kiddy charm of Frogger's there fortunately and the soundtrack's alright, but I can't actually see any kid playing this because it gets dastardly difficult in those last few levels (minus the somewhat easy but boring block pushing puzzles in the 2nd to last level) with its super precise execution, punishing you every time you fail to execute its frame tight inputs. There are definitely better Frogger games out there in my mind, and I'd recommend starting with Swampy's Revenge over this if you want a jumping off point. Hopefully Zapper's more palatable than this, I'm pretty bummed because it was a cool idea but played out rather sloppily and I just wanted it to be over as soon as possible.