Thread by @toruzz

DYKG's latest video mentioned, as many other big channels before it, that The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls shares code with Link's Awakening.
But what's the source of this information?

At first glance this seems very likely, right? Very similar games with similar looking sections are likely to share code. But in reality, they are two completely independent projects.
I'll show you some evidence to, hopefully, rest my case.

#1. No evidence that this is true exists. The oldest reference to this I can find is in IGN's 2006 walkthrough, which mentions "One thing (…) is that the gameplay mechanics were used to some degree in Link's Awakening." This comment was made by the user who made the walkthrough.

#1b. If you search about this topic in Japanese, you won't find anything. Nada. The fact that this topic is discussed exclusively in the west is rather suspicious, but perhaps it lets you hint that the source might be a western media outlet. If so, which one?

#1c. By the way, that there was a mention in the Wikipedia article but it was removed due to lack of sources.

#2. There are no assets, leftovers, mentions or absolutely nothing linking the games in the 2021 Nintendo Gigaleak. Not even in the early prototypes. There are no leftovers inside the ROM either. This is pretty definitive for me, but let's move on.

#3. An Iwata Asks tells the story of how LA's development began - as Kazuaki Morita's side-project. Now, LA was developed by Nintendo EAD while TFfWtBT was developed by R&D1 and Intelligent Systems, with the main programmer working for the latter.

#3b. So how is it possible that Morita asked a different team for their code to use it on a secret side project? It seems to me that, if this was the case, this wouldn't really be a secret side-project.

#4. Internally, the way the two games work is very different. I won't go too deep into the technical aspects, but I'll give you an example: LA's sprites uses the 8x16 pixel mode while Kaeru uses 8x8.

#4b. The way graphics are stored and the data is set in the OAM is also radically different. There are too fundamental differences for it to be the same code in origin.

In conclusion: Link's Awakening and The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls are two independent projects that never shared code.

Shoutouts to @SarahSSowertty, I used some info from their website: gaminghell.co.uk/KaeruNoTameNiK…