Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru

Although often inaccurately compared to Link’s Awakening,¹ Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru (officially translatd as The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls), resembles something more like Freshly Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland, where cartoony dust-cloud autobattles replace the hack-and-slash and the adventure elements lampoon the genre. It’s less built around “setup-punchline” humor or anything truly absurd, and instead it leans into a light-hearted atmosphere where no one seems to take anything of consequence particularly seriously. You and your rival’s army of soldiers turn into frogs, guards for the evil empire chit-chat about anything mundane that comes to mind, and an entire town of miners loafs about drunk for lack of work. In the funniest segment, the Prince of Sablé, your avatar, sails to the headquarters of “Nantendo” to visit their R&D department. To gain access, you have to curry favor with the lead scientist by ordering the same sushi meal as him in the cafeteria; if you do so and then say that it’s tasty when he asks, he’ll berate you for your undistinguished palate. If you think this seems a little weak for a “best joke,” I’ll level with you and admit that I didn’t find the game game so much “funny” as “mildly amusing,” which begins ringing some alarm bells with how slight the rest of the game is.

Within less than 10 minutes, the player will stumble upon the evil Lord Delarin’s castle and infiltrate it, kicking off a number of revisits throughout the game. Here they’ll get their first taste of the basic split in the gameplay: top-down exploration and 2D platformer dungeon traversal. The latter gets little bits of the usual spice – cycle-based obstacles and block-pushing challenges – but the former is left with only the autobattle system to lean on. There are no inputs available once you touch an enemy and begin alternating attacks (other than canceling or using items, which is only necessary twice). Everything relies on your stats, upgraded not through grinding but rather finding items throughout the world. Although many fights can be bypassed, specific chokepoint enemies will mandate collection of all nearby upgrade items to win; you’ll often make it through these fights with only a single heart left even after picking each area clean. There’s a minor dynamic in some exploration zones around minimizing enemy contact to get a particular destination in one piece, but unlike the chokepoints there’s more wiggle room here and rarely much consternation required to figure out how to navigate correctly, especially if you bum-rush all the upgrades you can and start steamrolling standard enemies in the process.

This particular boss fight throws a curveball at you by making only the tail segment of this bug monster vulnerable. The complexity doesn’t even reach usual Nintendo three-hit levels, however, as all you have to do is poke the tail once to kill it via autobattle. [src]

These primarily apply when you’re in your human form, while many of the “puzzles” in the game revolve around switching to frog and snake forms. Whenever the Prince touches water, he’ll instantly turn into a frog, and whenever he ingests an egg item, he’ll turn into a snake (eating a particular kind of fruit turns him back human). The asymmetric activation sets up some puzzles around seeing a frog-only section and then finding how to get there from the nearest water source, but with the snake and human forms being activated at-will, there’s little they can do to make those moments interesting. At best they make the snake sections optional forks in the road to bypass proper platforming segments, but this is defeatist, especially since they often give you eggs in chests near transformation points. In terms of combat, the frog also has the upper-hand in terms of puzzle potential given that it dies to basically anything other than bugs, which it can eat for health. Stealthing through areas that would get the frog killed in order to eat dangerous bugs that would kill the human at least makes recognizing such instances more than the aforementioned steamrolls, while the snake’s combat ability (turning enemies into blocks) has potential but virtually never gets used.

Still, given that it’s Nintendo, they make sure to try to form the meager ingredients here into something edible. Two open-ended areas late in the game give the player more room to explore and decide how they want to get around based on their available items and transformation points, that being the top-down portion near the mine (which leans the heaviest into the frog/human switching mentioned above) and the final return to the main castle, where the frog’s additional ability to jump extremely high comes into play to explore the clouds above the roof. Unfortunately, these are bookended by much less interesting portions: an extended jaunt through a glacier that prohibits transformations entirely, and a mine-digging segment where you have to pay your employees an escalating amount between each area; funny in theory, but again defeated by the oodles of money laying around in each interstitial cavern. The polish and frequent switch-ups had me churning through at a comfortable pace, but a few days after rolling credits, I find myself seriously struggling to mention any standout portions in the game, mechanically or otherwise. And in a game lauded for its humor, shouldn’t I be able to remember more than one joke?