Have you ever been sitting at home playing any of the Final Fantasy games or perhaps one of their followers and found yourself thinking thoughts such as: Giant slimes are great, but where are all the orcs? I wonder what Dragon Warrior would be like if Smaug were in it. Maybe you even spend your free time wondering how Cloud or Tidus might fare against the hordes of Mordor.
If so, I first suggest telling nobody. Ever. Next I suggest that you immediately seek out The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age as you are what can only be described as the most ideal “target audience” to ever have existed.
Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (a.k.a fanboy dream come true) is indeed a fusion of Final Fantasy and Lord of the Rings. The interface is copied from the standard Japanese-style RPG and fleshed out with bits and pieces of Middle Earth. In fact, it is so much a copy that at times I found myself looking to use some phoenix down to revive a fallen comrade and searched my inventory for some time before I remembered that what I really wanted was elf medicine. Of course the verbatim copy brings with it all the good as well as the bad.
Remember the countless hours spent in Japanese RPGs fighting through random encounters on your way to something important? Well even though the number of random encounters is cut down significantly, the same feeling persists here, as wave after wave of fodder must be dealt with. Sure it is technically accurate in that they are the hordes of Mordor, but even hordes—especially hordes—get repetitive. Fortunately, The Third Age does a couple clever things to liven things up.
The first smart thing is to have leveling up progress at rates faster than most MMO beta tests. Towards the end of the game, if my characters weren’t leveling up after two or three fights, it was a real disappointment particularly since leveling up so quickly really made the game much more interesting. Of course to upgrade skills, they must be used repeatedly in combat, which takes considerably longer, but even so, having a character with a rating of at least 100 in every stat has a certain appeal. But all of this would be moot if the story didn’t also play well which is the second smart thing in the game.
What the designers did was to create a story that very closely parallels the Aragorn story arc in Lord of the Rings, but uses a cast of unknown characters to fill all the parts. While many will probably be upset that they can’t play as their favorite hobbits, elves or dwarves, the unknown characters afforded the designers a chance to develop a unique albeit somewhat generic story.
Of course, at times their efforts to mimic the events of the book/movie are so contrived that true comedy is the result. One time in particular will remain as a landmark in unintentional game comedy for me. A character, attempting to mirror Aragorn’s tracking of the hobbits into Fangorn, does his best impression as he miraculously spots some virtually invisible tracks that he immediately—and to the awe of his companions—identifies as those of two people fleeing danger. The camera then pans to reveal the two dead people about an inch from where our intrepid ranger spotted the tracks. To quote many an RPG: “…” Despite such hilarity, it is interesting to see how The Third Age manages to weave in and out of the main story arcs of Lord of the Rings.
For instance, as one can tell from the cover of the game, the players will confront the Balrog at some point. Although it does step on the toes of “actual events” to accomplish this, it can be forgiven as the devices used to get there are actually pretty well done. It doesn’t hurt that moments in the game such as this one really bring the “Middle Earth” element to life, something the designers clearly focused on.
Both the graphics and sound, while nothing spectacular, do a very good job of evoking the atmosphere of the world. The aforementioned Balrog is wonderfully rendered and animated so as to perfectly capture Peter Jackson’s vision of the Lord of the Rings. This may, of course, be a turn off to some (particularly since many cut scenes in the game exist as film footage with new voice-overs), but it is generally successful.
While the sound also does a great job of recreating the world, the music, which is great to hear, does get old after awhile, especially during some climactic battles that stretch on and on due to the turn based combat system. A piece of music that was intended for a five minute scene is instead looped over a four hour struggle, which does a pretty good job of taking out the sense of any climax. Perhaps the most surprising thing to see is that this cookie-cutter license game actually attempts to innovate.
The most impressive feature included is a co-operative play mode. While the nature of the game means one player will be the “driver” for the other player, the fact that the six player characters are associated with one player for the duration of the game gives each player a sense of identity with their three characters while the other three characters are most definitely the property of the other player. I really look forward to seeing how other games might develop this further in the future as it was the real highlight of this game for me.
The other, less successful play mode is “Evil Mode.” Essentially, Evil Mode lets players fight as the forces of evil in a variety of battles. Unfortunately the battles take place in fixed sequences and offer no narrative elements. Sure you can unlock items for your normal game, but it frequently just isn’t worth it.
For such a derivative game, if you have any fondness for Japanese RPGs or Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Third Age is actually quite a bit of fun. For others, this will probably just be one more license game they will never bother to play and although I enjoyed it, I can definitely understand that side of things.
