Happy Friday, everyone! Today I will be looking at another Famicom game since that’s what 75% of my import set consists of. My choice for this week is A Week of Garfield. Developed by Mars Corp. and published by Towa Chiki, A Week of Garfield was based on the beloved comic strip of the same name.
The comic, which revolves around a pudgy orange cat, has been around since 1978 and is still being published daily to this day. I also grew up with the comic strip and loved it. Sure, it went downhill every decade, but from 1978 to the late 90’s, it was still fun, whether it be due to genuine charm or stupidity.
Naturally, there was a lot of Garfield merchandise to be found following its inception, including video games. One of the video games was A Week of Garfield, released only in Japan. It was intended for a worldwide release, but due to licensing issues, it never happened.
I was not looking forward to talking about this game, because the people who made it, Towa Chiki, previously created the abysmal adventure game Sherlock Holmes: Hakushaku Reijou Yuukai Jiken. But did they improve?
The visuals in A Week of Garfield are pretty bad overall. While the comic strip barely had backgrounds behind the characters, the game has more fleshed-out environments. The backgrounds have no depth, are very primitively designed, and look like they were drawn by a kid attending their first art class. As for the sprites, they honestly look worse. They maintain the likeness of the characters to an extent, but they’re stiff, disproportionate, and choppily animated. The music tracks range from forgettable to unforgettably bad. The first level’s music is an annoying earworm that will never leave your head long after you turn off the game, and the boss battle music is obnoxious 8-bit chaos that had me shaking in agitation.
The object of A Week of Garfield is to make it to the end of each level as Garfield while avoiding enemies such as bugs and mice. These levels are basically comic strips divided into one week. As you move to the right, you can kick, but the kick has an extremely short range. You’ll only kill an enemy if you do it right next to them; you have to press that button at the right time or you could get hurt. You can also kick in midair, but you’ll never know if it’s working because the midair kick animation doesn’t exist. Even worse, because enemies are constantly moving back and forth, you sometimes have to chase them, and since the kick has such a short-range, you could end up not hitting them at all until the fourth or fifth time. But even worse, sometimes if you’re right next to the enemy, the kick won’t register, requiring persistence to kill them. This is the most unpredictable basic attack I’ve ever experienced in a game.
Also, can we appreciate the fact that an obese orange cat can jump like he’s on the moon? Garfield can also crawl on all fours, which mainly serves as ducking. Why though? He barely crouches at all when he does, so it doesn’t make avoiding the enemies any easier.
Garfield’s health is indicated by a life bar at the top of the screen, and each time he is hit it will drain. There is little indication that he takes damage when he is hit by an enemy, so you may not notice you even got hit. If you lose all of your health, it’s back to the beginning of the stage. Each stage is pretty long, so this game will really test your patience.
Garfield has weapons that he can acquire throughout the game. He has a bone that he can throw, some sort of bomb that will kill most enemies on screen (just go with it), food that can restore his life bar, and lasagna that will grant him invincibility (even though it looks like sushi). I haven’t read every single strip of Garfield since 1978, so I don’t know if he ever used a bomb in any situation. Even if he did, it sucks in the game. It goes in four directions when it explodes, but the force is indicated by tiny dots that move further away from each other as they travel. Since many of the enemies move haphazardly in midair, hitting them is pretty much luck-based.
Sometimes you have to find a key to progress through different parts of the level, but it’s not in plain sight. You can spend the entire level jumping around aimlessly until the key finally appears, or you’ll quickly discover it’s in the same area as the door. This makes the challenge of finding the key pointless and more of a nuisance than anything.
At the end of each stage, Jon will appear, looking stiff and lifeless. He always asks if he can do anything for you or says he will help you find Odie, but he doesn’t actually do anything other than show up and say that. He’s literally there for fan service and nothing else.
Occasionally, you’ll come up against a boss. Each time it’s a member of the gang that kidnapped Odie, but there’s zero strategy when fighting them. All you can do is run around the screen and try to hit him with your weapons while avoiding his, hoping he dies before you do.
In terms of faithfulness to the Garfield license, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Garfield, Odie, and Jon look like their respective selves, the food Garfield collects is what he usually ate in the comics, and some (but definitely not all) of the sprite animations look like the art style of the comics. However, the enemies are very cookie-cutter, references to the strip are few and far between, and there are no other important characters to be found—no Lyman, no Squeak, no Doc Boy, no Nermal… and no Pooky! They seriously made a Garfield game with no reference to Pooky, his best friend, anywhere? Jeez… Overall, it’s the bare minimum of faithfulness in a licensed game.
A Week of Garfield is not a good game at all. It looks like garbage, it sounds awful, its gameplay is boring and frustrating, its boss battles have no thought put into them, and it barely resembles the comics. It’s a bit more functional than Sherlock Holmes: Hakushaku Reijou Yuukai Jiken, but that’s a low bar to clear. It was critically panned and sold horribly, which is about what it deserved. My verdict is simple: read the comics, skip the game.
Rating: 2/10