Frogless
Frogless is a technique that can be used to scale the Inside Top-Hat Tower level without capturing a frog. The most prominent part of the skip is a vertical trickjump used to climb a very tall ledge near the bottom of the level.
Uses
Minimum Captures
The most prominent use case of Frogless is in Minimum Captures runs, since it bypasses the need for any captures in the tower.
Speedrunning
In two-player speedruns, Frogless is the fastest known way to scale the interior of the tower. Scaling the vertical ledges without a frog capture is much more efficient than in single-player mode due to the ability to cap bounce instantly without throwing Cappy, which makes the skip save enough time due to circumventing the need to skip the cutscene that normally plays when first capturing a frog, as well as enabling faster horizontal movement.
Variants
Upfrog
Upfrog refers to using the trickjump to skip the first set of frogs, but then capturing one of the frogs partway up the tower to complete the second half. This is viable as a speedrun strategy since the frogs in the second group do not trigger the cutscene, eliminating the time needed to skip it.
a theorized speedrun strategy within the Top-Hat Tower in the Cap Kingdom. It involves using the Frogless jump to skip the frog capture near the base of the tower, and instead climbing up to and capturing one of the frogs halfway up the tower. Unlike the frogs at the bottom of the tower, the frogs on the upper level do not have an associated cutscene, eliminating the need to input the cutscene skip sequence.
The name "Upfrog" is based on the word updog, which is famously used as a practical joke.
Explanation
The Upfrog strategy involves skipping the first set of frog captures at the base of the Top-Hat Tower interior using movement similar to that used in Minimum Captures runs, and instead capturing one of the frogs among the second set, halfway up the tower. The key advantage to this is that the frogs in the second group do not trigger the cutscene that normally plays when Mario captures a frog for the first time. Although this cutscene can be skipped, doing so takes approximately a second.
While it is possible to clear the entire tower without capturing any frogs, the movement for doing so becomes too slow in the second half to consider skipping the second set of frogs in mainstream speedruns.
It is important to note that Upfrog has not actually been proven to be faster than the original strategy of capturing the frog at the bottom of the tower. However, some speedrunners have created spliced videos to show how fast Upfrog could potentially be, and it comes within mere frames of the fastest clips for the original movement. It is often theorized that Upfrog is ultimately the faster strategy, and may make an appearance in tool-assisted speedruns.