In this review, we collect the coins and gems in the Game Boy Advance game Frogger Advance: The Great Quest. We find out how well this adventure game plays.
This game was released in 2002.
At this point, we know a fair bit about this franchise. We first played Frogger for the Atari 2600. That game wound up being pretty solid overall. Next up, we tried the Atari 5200 version of Frogger. That game also got a pretty solid score. From there, we tried Frogger II – ThreeeDeep! for the Atari 5200. That game wound up getting a great score all around.
After that, we tried Frogger for the Sega Genesis. That game wound up being a pretty brutal bomb for us. After that, we tried Frogger for the Game Boy Color. That game wound up being passable, but nothing spectacular. After that, we tried Frogger 2 for the Game Boy Advance. That game got a solid score. Finally, we played Frogger Adventure: Temple of the Frog. That game got an OK score, but nothing huge. So, we thought we’d give this game a try to see how well it plays.
The story is that Frogger overhears two boys fishing in the pond. They talk about how if a princess kisses a frog, then that frog will turn into a prince. So, naturally, Frogger decides to head out on a quest to find a princess for him to kiss.
If you are familiar with the Frogger franchise, then you might be familiar with the top down action as you time jumps to avoid dangers. This game is a completely different side scrolling adventure game.
There are two main items you collect: gems and coins. Coins are not only collectible, but they also offer players information of what is ahead. Gold coins lead players towards the end of the game. Blue coins lead players to a gem. Finally, red goings lead players to less important items such as health bugs and free lives. Good to find them, but not mandatory.
An important thing to note is that if you collect 100 coins, you’ll earn a free life.
Meanwhile, gems are simply there to be collected. They don’t really have any special abilities or grant anything extra initially, but you’ll ideally want to collect them. For every part of a level, there are three total. There are three parts to every chapter, so you’ll need to collect 9 altogether.
Once you beat a chapter, you’ll be assessed a grade. Collect close to 400 coins (there’s usually more than that per level), and you’ll be given an A+ for coin collecting. Collect all 9 gems and you’ll get an A+ for your efforts as well. Finally, if you are able to beat a chapter without losing lives, you’ll also get an A+. In order to get the good ending in the game, you need to get an A+ in all four chapters.
Frogger has two attacks: the tongue attack and the rock throw attack. Tongue is your main form of attack and will defeat enemies. Sometimes, you’ll need to hit enemies multiple times to defeat them. Meanwhile, the rock throw is there to stun enemies. This can be useful for taking enemies out, though you’ll likely not even use it that often in the beginning of the game.
Along the way, you’ll be given special abilities. This includes super tongue (breaks obstacles) and freeze throw (freezes enemies so you can jump on them for added height). These are granted after beating a chapter.
There are a number of enemies to avoid. A number of enemies are on ground and will generally walk back and forth as they patrol the area. Other enemies are found lurking under the waters. Either way, you either need to take them out with your tongue attack or evade them altogether. The choice is yours.
As you venture further into the level, you’ll encounter two different signs. The first sign shows a picture of Froggers face. This denotes a checkpoint. If you die, you’ll be transported back to this checkpoint. The other sign is the crown. Touch this sign and you’ll beat the level section.
At the end of every chapter, you’ll have a boss fight. Some boss fights require evasion while others require carefully timed attacks. Regardless, you’ll have the fairy frog mother basically telling you how to defeat each boss.
Believe it or not, that’s basically all there is to the game. Fans of the Frogger series might be a bit disappointed in this game does play more like a Donkey Kong Country game for the SNES more than a standard Frogger game. For me, this game franchise does need to branch out into other styles of play in order to help stay relevant. There’s only so many ways you can sell the original format before players will just think of this as a dated game. So, I find it refreshing that things have been changed up here.
On the other hand, this game barely even breaks any new ground. You collect coins and gems, then make your way to the exit. This is very standard fare for a lot of adventure games. Donkey Kong Country, Crash Bandicoot: Cortex Strikes Back, Spyro the Dragon, and even the original Super Mario Bros comes to mind here. Since adventure games are quite abundant by this point in time, there needs to be something compelling to separate this game apart from other games.
Unfortunately, this game simply doesn’t do that. Instead, this is one of those games that plays it safe and hopes to skate by on basic features. The most this game features is world information taken from coins. Really, colour coding has been around for a long time and is much more complex in, say, Uniracers. So, at the end of the day, this game is pretty much surviving off of name recognition alone to sell the game. That really isn’t enough to get me motivated to like a game by any means.
What I will say is that I’m almost never lost in this game. The levels are reasonably complex, but not overly hard. So, navigation is pretty respectable here, all things considered.
The game might veer a little into the easy side with a good amount of hand-holding along the way. This is thanks to the tips such as avoiding the death flowers or how to defeat bosses.
Controls can be somewhat finicky. It can take a few attempts to climb down ladders. Sometimes, you’ll get hung up on the corners of platforms where the game confuses itself as to whether or not you barely suck the landing or are permanently falling. Some of the spring-like objects don’t work all that well (though this, at least, doesn’t happen all that much). So, not the greatest controls and there are bugs to be had in this game.
Additionally, I find the story to be quite wafer thin. It’s almost there as something to string levels together.
Generally speaking, this is one of those games that does little to impress and hopes that name recognition will be enough. It does the absolute basics to fulfill the mandate of being an adventure game. What I do like is the fact that it steps outside of a very small box and tries something new. Unfortunately, this effort wound up falling flat on its face. The buggy elements and clunky controls don’t do much for this game. There is also a wafer thin plot along with a fair bit of handholding along the way. So, while this game did at least do something right by breaking new ground for the franchise, this game just didn’t cut it in the end.
Graphically speaking, there are some positives and negatives. What is good is that it uses some pre-rendered 3D art along with a lot of 2D graphics. The backgrounds and overall art throughout the levels wind up working quite well. Unfortunately, this has the negative consequence of slowing down gameplay. Whenever there is a fair bit going on in the screen, the device really starts chugging as it struggles to handle all the art. Consequently, the controls can be a bit sluggish with these slowdowns. So, there are good points, but things do get bogged down.
Audio is OK. The music is decent and the speech samples are nicely done. I also found that the sound effects are decent. So, a decent all around effort there.
Overall, this game does break out of the timed jumps concept and gets into something completely new. Unfortunately, in doing so, it breaks so little ground, that the game winds up falling on its face. Controls and bugs along with handholding and wafer thin plot does hold this game back. I give a thumbs up to whoever said, “We need to do something different with the franchise”, but the execution after just doesn’t cut it. Graphics are decent, but slowdowns do hamper play. Audio is decent all around. So, a fairly average game in my view.
Overall
Furthest point in game: Beat the game with just “A”s all across the board. Didn’t bother going back and getting higher grades.
General gameplay: 16/25
Replay value: 6/10
Graphics: 7/10
Audio: 3/5
Overall rating: 64%
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
