This Seems Like The Place To Talk About The Forgotten Garfield JRPG Based On The Second Bill Murray Movie

Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (i.e., J2ME), The Forgotten Titan Of Mobile Games Pre-iOS And Android

This is an actual video game and this truly is the first thing you see after the developer's logo.

Giant Bomb once was a bastion for everything Garfield, and if I can play a tiny role in rekindling that culture, then I know I made the most of the final weeks of 2024. Why would I be in a position to do so when there are bigger and better 2024 topics to address? Well, here's the backstory. For the past two years, I have been doing a bi-yearly podcast with Cassidy of The Bad Game Hall of Fame and fellow Giant Bomb user Arbitrary Water. These podcasts look at role-playing games that warrant the "kusoge" label. Most recently, we discussed Interplay's Descent to Undermountain; before that, we tackled the granddaddy of kusoge, Hoshi wo Miru Hito. As you can hopefully tell, I don't think kusoge games are limited to Japanese-made video games and are, instead, an all-encompassing label that applies to games that are shitty, unfun, and poorly made. Kusoge games are wild and wacky in how they are bad; they make mistakes so grand and immediately obvious that it's magical to watch them in action. Additionally, they try things and ideas you can conceptually respect even if you want the final product burned in a pit of lava. I also don't use the kusoge or kuso label to admonish a game, nor do I want to bring hostile attention to a specific developer. I generally rejoice in finding cursed or wretched media.

So, when Cassidy initially disclosed to Arbitrary Water and me that they wanted to force us to play a JRPG based on the second Bill Murray Garfield film, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, I was locked in. I was even more entranced when I discovered the game in question was a mobile game from a Czech studio that had no credited game development experience before making this game. There was no way Garfield 2: Royal Adventure would be something resembling media fit for everyday consumption, and I was willing to get to the bottom of how weird this rodeo was bound to get. And HOT DAMN is this game "SOMETHING!" It is a pre-smartphone mobile game that makes bold attempts to graft the film it is based on to a cheaply-made JRPG. Scans of the film's movie poster grace you when you boot it up, which is an awkward juxtaposition to what initially looks like a Garfield-led JRPG made using RPG Maker. There are dungeon sequences that play miserably, and even though I conquered the game in around two hours, it felt like I had spent triple that. Being a tie-in game, it had secret codes to redeem on a now-defunct website for wallpapers or computer icons related to Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties. As you will hopefully understand as we continue, you can feel the game's cheapness and ulterior motives at every corner. The game repeats the same five to six enemy types while oscillating between three freely available backgrounds its developer had in its wheelhouse. It's the complete kusoge package!

Oh no.................

Now, there's no dancing around that you cannot readily buy a copy of Garfield 2: Royal Adventure right now. That raises a significant question about how I played the game for the sake of this one-off blog. Ask most who have ever had skin in any mobile game what they think of the state of game preservation on the mobile scene, and they will inevitably paint a bleak picture. Gacha games come and go at the drop of a hat; phone games with novel ideas often become unplayable in a few years because keeping them kosher with mobile OS updates appears impossible. However, in the early 2000s, that was not an issue because Java 2 Micro Edition (i.e., J2ME) was the de facto cross-platform language for cellphone video games. I'll avoid getting into the weeds about why, but in short, J2ME was Java stripped down to the bare essentials and, as a result, could run on every mobile phone in the world. While not initially intended for game development, it was a free SDK without recurring licensing costs. The fact that it was a free SDK that was never fully married to any particular mobile OS or SKU is precisely why game preservation for J2ME-based mobile games is actually in a good spot. One of the best-known J2ME preservation efforts, Kahvibreak, is presented using the Flashpoint launcher, an Adobe Flash and Shockwave preservation project. If a mobile game in the past used J2ME, as long as you have the .jar file, something or someone out there on the internet will help you get that file running. So, rest assured, it's pretty easy to relive Doom RPG in the year of our Lord, 2024.

Doom II RPG is unsurprisingly a better game than Garfield 2: Royal Adventure.

However, years of gacha titles and Android ports of AAA games made me forget about this specific type of mobile game. I have already harped about Garfield 2: Royal Adventure being generously two hours long, and while that might sound like a terrible value proposition, because it is, that was the norm for most mobile games at the time. Games on phones were a novelty at best and meant to be aberrant time sinks when you didn't have a handheld option. Likewise, as you look at the screenshots of the game, you might develop the conclusion I joked about earlier, that the game was made using a mobile-compatible version of RPG Maker. Cassidy did some folder and file sleuthing and found that the game instead uses some proprietary or free art assets unique for J2ME. Apparently, J2ME had pieces of furniture, wall textures, backgrounds, and free sprites like a venerable mobile version of the Unity Asset Store, and everything at the time was completely FREE! This revelation might explain why there are four distinct locations and the game only allows you to have a maximum of two party members at any time. It's possible that this game is a cobbled-together amalgam of free and open-source parts. I have a sneaking suspicion that buying the rights to make the game may have been the most considerable non-wage-based cost incurred during its development. However, that's just a hunch, and as we will explore next, getting details about this game's development is next to impossible.

The Unsurprising Lack Of Documentation About Garfield 2: Royal Adventure

Every single dungeon in the game looks like this and the enemies are the same as well.

I like to call myself a storyteller on this site. Whenever I publish a blog, I try to send you to the studios that did the work I'm exploring as an empathy-building exercise. Unfortunately, I will struggle to do that here because the documentation for mobile games and the studios that work on them has always been spotty. The records are even more fraught during the pre-smartphone era. The developer for Garfield 2: Royal Adventure was Nostromo ICT s.r.o. It is safe to say they were a Czech developer, given their company's name and also since their now-defunct company website redirected to a .cz domain. Presently, only two games are linked to Nostromo ICT: this game and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ninja Tribunal, another J2ME JRPG. With that in mind, I'm left with one of two conclusions. Either this was a tiny outfit that contracted most of its programming and designing to temp workers with only a handful of full-time staff sticking around between contracts, OR Nostromo has a more in-depth development history, but none of their non-licensed works made it out of the Czech Republic.

There's another possibility, but it stems from Garfield 2: Royal Adventure's publisher, uclick, LLC. After booting up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Shredder Rebornand noticing how it's virtually the same game as Garfield 2: Royal Adventure, I struggled to see how it would take Nostromo three whole years to make, given that it was a simple glow-up of their last work. This point leads me to uclick, previously one of the biggest names in the newspaper comic strip industry and a purveyor of puzzle games and web applications for mobile phones and businesses trying to develop a digital presence during the early days of the 2000s. If you played a crossword puzzle, sudoku, or jigsaw puzzle on any website, there's a good chance you played something made by uclick. They also made a name for themselves by making interactables on websites before Amazon and Google became the monoliths they are today. Remember when you could mess around with an animating person or animal while checking out an FAQ? That was uclick, but their real bread and butter were in comic strips, comic books, and even manga, and they were well-known for being one of the first in the traditional press circuit to develop their own digital reader. In fact, when they released and sold their GoComics Books cellphone service, an application that allowed you to read comics and manga on your Symbian-based phones, it was the first of its kind in the United States.

The game does try to follow the film it is based off of, but I say that as someone who has regrettably never seen Garfield: A Tail Of Two Kitties.

With Nostromo connected to two of uclick's published titles, they could have worked on non-gaming projects between the only two games in their name, or they may have been ghostwriting for uclick on some of their other gaming projects. Back in the day, uclick was a significant mobile game publisher when Nokia was still king. Uclick's portfolio of daily puzzle games, crosswords, and other newspaper-like applications still enjoys considerable support on modern mobile platforms in their current incarnation, Andrews McMeel Syndication. When there were no projects for Nostromo to support, it's possible that they nabbed the Garfield license for a single mobile game and then got permission to work on TMNT during their next contract lull. This theorizing and lore-building makes sense to me, but I can't say anything definitively. Gaming credits during the J2ME and Symbian days of mobile gaming were dicey, and short of getting ahold of any of the people who worked on Garfield 2: Royal Adventure, anything and everything is still on the table. It's also worth noting that other video games sought to tie into this specific film, especially on traditional handhelds like the DS, which further complicated my investigative efforts. So, let's move on despite the major gaps in the fossil record and get into the nitty-gritty about what makes this game genuinely kusoge!

What Makes This Game Kusoge?

Yup, there is indeed shameless product placement in this game!

As you can likely see, the game's production values are fraught at best. The rudimentary art is complimented by a score and sound design that practically made my ears bleed. I understand it is likely a limitation of the hardware it was working with, but the game has music that plays at the start and end of battles. However, it is entirely mute during the battles themselves, and instead, it opts for comically bad sound effects when attacks are being performed. The game is Final Fantasy-like as it devolves into you hanging out in a safe zone before dragging Garfield into dungeons, which are only one screen long and require you to pick up quest items to complete recipes or deal with the game's antagonist, Dargis. The worst part about the dungeons is that there are only about five, and upon entering one, you can't exit to rest and restore your character's HP. Therefore, if you forgot to bring healing items upon starting a dungeon, you're basically screwed unless you completely memorized the best moves for all of the required encounters. Dying isn't the worst outcome, as the game simply spawns you back at the game's lone usable bed and directs you to try the dungeon a second or third time. The game uses real-world enemy sprites you bump into to initiate battles. Rather annoyingly, you need to defeat every enemy in any given dungeon you are in, and the game refuses to let you exit when you try to cut corners. That's likely by design, as once you exit a dungeon with its quest item in tow, you can't return to it to grind and level up your characters. That's not a huge deal, considering the level cap is ten, and the number of unlockable moves with each character isn't exactly "in-depth."

The combat is your tried and true menu-based turn-based JRPG combat. The only difference is that everything is terrible. The first issue is that the game only ever provides you with a maximum of two playable characters to command, but you often need to defeat up to five enemies, which means even the most asinine battles take forever. Likewise, the game has a rock-paper-scissors system wherein every enemy type has a weakness to at least one attack with every character in your party. The problem is that none of that is communicated to you, and there's no symbology to make you connect attacks to their intended targets, so you end up engaging in a ton of trial and error. When you make the correct matches, every attack one-shots the enemy you target, which makes this a weird RPG puzzle game more than anything else. Still, only five enemies are in the game, so it's not a particularly rewarding or challenging puzzle. Attacks that aren't taking advantage of enemy weaknesses do outright nothing. It's almost as if someone working on this game thought that all RPGs needed the elemental weakness system in Pokémon but didn't think they needed to explain anything to their audience. Speaking of drawing comparisons to Pokémon, the combat is also weird to watch because characters don't have a ton of moves, but the moves they do have evolve into more substantial forms with every level up. However, the animations are still the same, which means you see the same basic-ass animations and hear the same shitty sound effects ad infinitum. The same goes for the enemies. Rather than swap out the same bug, spider, or rat enemy sprite for something different, they rename them to "Rat Level 5," "Spider Level 4", or "Bug Level 6" in the late-game dungeons. There's no variety whatsoever to speak of, and the game feels rotten within its opening ten to fifteen minutes.

There's a sequence in which Garfield pummels a bunch of dogs while wearing a suit of armor. It's a lot less exciting than it sounds like on paper.

To highlight how the bones of this game are utterly rancid to the core, let me discuss one of the funniest design foibles I noticed. You return to three specific castle sections repeatedly throughout the story. Those areas would be the royal bedroom, where you can restore Garfield's HP; the kitchen, which is where you cash in two of the game's quests; and the outside garden. About a half dozen ancillary rooms have treasure chests with items that either do area-of-effect damage or contain healing items that take the shape of food. Presentationally, these treasure chests are no different than the ones you'd see in classic JRPGs. The difference in Garfield 2: Royal Adventure is that upon exiting a room, the developer forgot to set treasure chests to stay set to a value of 0 when you exit, and instead, when you return to a room, the treasure respawns with all of its contents restored. So, when you find a chest that provides a firecracker that can one-shot the enemies in an upcoming dungeon OR find a chest with a critical healing item, you can simply stock up on those items by entering and exiting the room that chest is in until you hit that item's specific inventory cap. This design mistake is less busted than you think, as certain items max out at a dozen or so, but it is one of the few ways you can completely break the game in its starting act. The gauntlet-like nature of every dungeon? Yeah, you can completely break those by stocking up on every mid and high-tier item before initiating your spelunking efforts.

Then there are the times when the game attempts to emulate scenes from the film it is based on, and these are all the worst things ever. One of the first involves Garfield and a few of the castle's animal assistants occupying a suit of armor. As you pilot this suit of armor, you perform a single selectable move to waste enemies in one to two moves. The entire sequence is a complete waste of your time because the armor has 1,000 HP, and none of the enemies that stand before you are capable of getting you even to half health. The second sequence involves Garfield handing his party status over to the king cat he looks like, and you have to complete an entire dungeon with just them, and they start at level one. That sequence was one of the most painful things I have played this year, and if the combat was slow with two characters, you can only imagine how much slower it is with just a single character. The final notable sequence relates to your battle against Dargis. After you cause him to get bit in the ass by his own dogs by smearing lasagna all over his pants, he pulls out a shotgun, holds Doctor "Liz" Wilson at gunpoint, and then shoots Garfield in the face using his shotgun. This scene is completely bonkers, and it comes out of nowhere. This battle ends up being one of the few gimmick battles in the game in that you need to stun lock Dargis with the king cat's status effect inflicting ability and then have Garfield unleash damage-dealing attacks. Otherwise, Dargis one-shots everyone with his shotgun. When you beat Dargis, the game hard cuts to one of the worst compressed images I have ever seen, which I can only assume is a still image from the film, but I honestly couldn't tell you. The compression is that bad.

wut.

And that's it. The game ends with a static image and implores you to check out its terrible Arena mode, which is just a set of fixed battles against all of the possible enemy types, which, again, is maybe five to six enemies, or to replay the same campaign but this time with its "Tough" difficulty setting. Likewise, it directs you to redeem codes you can collect by opening optional treasure chests on a website that, like the developer's domain, is expired and wasn't preserved on the Wayback Machine. If some of you don't think this qualifies as kusoge; relay your claims or ideas now or forever hold your peace because I'm resolute in wanting to stamp the royal kusoge seal on Garfield 2: Royal Adventure.

What Did I Learn?

There is no valor in playing this game.

There was something initially refreshing about playing this game. First, its short playtime speaks to the long-forgotten era of mobile games when things didn't hammer you over the head with microtransactions, and everything was meant to be played during a long commute to a summer home or grandma's house for Thanksgiving dinner. It's thoroughly a kid's game and is immediately beatable and reflective of the transient and impermanent nature of pre-Fortnite or pre-Gacha games for kids. Second, there are ideas in the game, and the fact its developer had every genre under the sun at its disposal to graft onto the riveting story of Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties and opted to go with a JRPG is endlessly hilarious to me. They could have and probably should have made a shitty 2D platformer, but they didn't, and HOT DAMN, does that put a smile on my face. Just think about this scenario for a minute. There are a non-zero number of people on this planet right now whose first exposure to the core mechanics of JRPGs came from a terrible Garfield-led mobile game. Man, sometimes you gotta give it to capitalism! No other system would ever allow that to happen, and likely for good reason.

Nonetheless, do not play this game. In publishing this blog, I hope you derive more joy from reading about it than when I tried to play it. The game is butt ugly, miserable to listen to, contrived at every corner, and immediately speaks to the bottom-of-the-barrel worst type of movie tie-in game from two to three generations ago. It sounds mean saying this game feels incompetently made, but every problem or issue with this game either speaks to gross incompetence or a studio saddled with a platform that never was intended to run games as even a fourth priority. It's a disaster of a game where you can feel it fraying at the seams. The combat's lone manner of adding strategy to the mix involves a soul-crushing amount of trial and error. There are no shocking twists and turns to the story other than finding out side quests only provide codes for PC screensavers on a defunct website. Again, the game is a goddamn disaster.

If anything, go out there and check to see if you can relive some of the gems from the J2ME era of mobile games! Not everything made to work on Nokia phones or Symbian were trash, and I think you can think of at least one or two titles worth a second try.