From Number1Son:While I was on spring break, I spent a couple of days playing a game called Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. It . . . was a strange experience. I enjoyed playing the game immensely, but for the wrong reasons.
I'll be frank, this is a very bad game. It's got basically nothing going for it. Its unoriginal (being very loosely based on the events of the movies), and what is original is horribly done, but I'll get to that later. The gameplay is actually very good, and its battle system is one of the best role-playing game ("RPG") systems I have ever played. However, I read on Wikipedia that this gameplay is virtually identical to a much more popular RPG, which came out a couple years earlier, so . . . more points off for unoriginality! As for the animation . . . its one of the worst jobs of animation I have ever seen in my life. Seriously, I saw a YouTube video of a cartoon which used the uncolored rough sketches on the storyboards in place of actual animation from time to time, and it was still better than this game. I seem to remember fighting with Grima Wormtongue, whose face was so badly animated I began screaming in horror, and then laughing. Furthermore, during the fight there was a little icon of his face which looked like a badly drawn Emperor Palpatine. Basically, the only good thing about this game is that it is Lord of the Rings, which means that you get the awesome music out of the movie, and that Gandalf and Aragorn will show up at some point (they do, and manage to be better in both combat and in sheer awesomeness than all of the game's other characters combined).
The story is laughably bad. In addition to being unoriginal, it is badly done. You follow a group of characters which are some of the most two-dimensional characters I have ever seen form an adventuring party. Only three of the characters have any sort of development (and it's awkwardly done), and the remaining characters are mostly there to give you more diversity in combat. So, the main character is a Gondorian soldier named Berethor, who apparently deserted Osgiliath and began just wandering everywhere. He spends the entire game as a mental battlefield for more important characters like Gandalf and Saruman, who as far as I can tell are both trying to mind control him. As a result, he has absolutely no idea what is going on, (along with the player) and never gets an explanation. Then there is Idrial, an elf who has some plan, or orders, or something, but never tells anybody anything. This becomes especially annoying as she knows just about everything, but only tells me trivia (which I already know, but to be fair I am a LOTR geek) in cutscenes that randomly pop up while I am walking around. Her attitude is really random, and she spontaneously develops a romantic attraction to Berethor after about three or four hours of absolutely no indication that this was the case. Then there are other characters, Elegost, a ranger (who, like all video game rangers, is awesome), Hadhod, a dwarf, and Eaoden, a Rohan cavalry man who fights on foot (?). There is also Morwen, a Rohan/Gondor woman who I think was Berethor's fiancee before he deserted, and is just about the most useless party member when it comes to combat (her only potentially useful use is to steal items, which are not very good and are replaced by better items within about 30 seconds). The importance which I gave to the characters just now is just about the same importance the game gives to them, so use that as a guide.
The story itself is completely unoriginal. It would be one thing if you wandered around and only came across the Fellowship every now and then, but you basically follow the Fellowship (in fact, at one point that is what you are supposed to be doing), and deal with their leftovers. Sometimes you actually fight with the Fellowship. The first time is against the Balrog (hmm, I don't remember that from either the books or movies), and also at the Battle of Helm's Deep (where I attacked people by throwing a gigantic water horse at them, something I also don't remember from the books or movies). And for any fans who don't think that that is that bad, the final boss is the Eye of Sauron (which can apparently be defeated by hitting it with swords, something which I remember both the books and movies explicitly stating would not work).
The story is also horribly done. Part of this is that the story has no sense of timing or transition. You literally go from fighting the Balrog in Moria to the plains of Rohan with no cutscene or even a text box explaining how you got there. Things also come at you out of nowhere. I already mentioned Idrial's romance with Berethor, but there are other examples. I remember one point where I was walking along in Rohan when Gandalf randomly teleported (can he do that?) in front of me to tell me that I was about to get a random encounter (and didn't even stick around to chat afterwards). You are hit with romances, plot twists, cutscenes, and other random stuff like Charlie Brown by a line drive. You know how I mentioned that Berethor is getting mind controlled? This major plot twist is hinted at in a cutscene, then you fight some Uruk-hai and trolls, then there is another cutscene which sort of (not really) explains what happened, and then Gandalf telepathically tells you that Saruman is no longer mind controlling you. This major plot twist is introduced, resolved, and forgotten within about 15 minutes. Actually, the only things that don't hit you like a line drive are random encounters (a meter tells you when you will probably have one), the one thing you expect to come out of nowhere in an RPG.
I'm not going to talk too much about the gameplay, just some oddities. Unlike most RPGs, there is no "trick" to combat in this game. In most RPG's once you get all of your character's decently leveled there is a trick you can do to basically ensure that only bosses will ever do any damage to your people (for instance, in one game I gave one person an item that meant that she always went first, she boosted everyone's strength, and I ended the combat before anyone could do anything). In this game, however, while you can effectively disable all of the enemies, it takes a couple of turns, and doesn't always work. Damage is not all that threatening, however, because anytime you save or level up, you fully heal, so no one goes more than half an hour without fully healing at least once. So, the game is not too hard. That is, as long as you have Idrial. See, you can only use three party members at once, and Idrial will always be one of those three, since she is your only healer (while we are on the topic, Berethor will also be one of those three since he can make your party more powerful and then do more damage than the other two combined). There is a part in the game, however, where Idrial is taken away from you. She has to fight a couple of orcs, who pose no threat to her offensive magic. The rest of your party has to fight a Ringwraith. And about 30 seconds after you get through that fight, you have to fight another one.
So, the question still remains, why do I enjoy this game? I mean, this game is truly horrible. By all rights, this post should have been an angry rant about how much I hate this game. However, this game is one of those rare instances of something that is so bad that it's good. The game is horrible, but it is so completely and laughably horrible that I can't help but laugh at it.
If only Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II had been like that . . .
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