The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age

THE BAD:
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SUMMARY:
Story/Concept
EA Games really slacked off in this department. Rather than start another game that simply followed the quest of the Fellowship, EA came up with a new idea: Lord of the Rings JV Squad. This game features six characters including Berethor the Gondorian, Idrial the Elf, Elegost the Ranger, Hadhod the Dwarf, and others. The latter two, Elegost and Hadhod, bear strange likeness to the household favorite ranger, Aragorn, and the dwarf of the fellowship, Gimli, respectively. Gandalf steers you through the entire plot of the game. Players see much of the movies through cut-scenes called "Epic Scenes." There are 109 of these available, but if you've seen the movie plenty of times these become quite old after a while.

So the first question one should ask himself when playing this game is why didn't Gandalf introduce his apparently not-so-cool friends in the movie? This JV Squad (as I like to call them) will follow the fellowship for a good portion of the game, as the Gondorian Berethor hopes to reunite with his commander Boromir. After learning of his death, your company joins the major battles of Helm's Deep and lastly the Pellenor Fields.

The character development is incredibly weak. The characters themselves have no basis within the movie or story of Lord of the Rings, and because they have no bearing on the actual story it seemed kind of pointless for them to even exist in the first place. Also, EA took certain liberties with the story that many would not approve of. For instance the fact that your party joins Gandalf in his fight against the Balrog. In the real story of Lord of the Rings, if any mere human, elf, or dwarf tried to contend with a Balrog he or she would be dead within minutes.

Also, EA advertises the "play on the side of Light or Dark" very fervently. They do not let you in on the secret, however, that "playing on the side of dark" really only includes about 4 or 5 battles per chapter in the game. It's not like Knights of the Old Republic or Fable when your character literally joins the side of dark, and thus in this game you'd become an Uruk-Hai or Orc for instance. Every time you get 100% of a chapter completed, that chapter's "Evil Mode" becomes available. In Evil mode you fight each of the major battles of the chapter as the bad guys versus your party, and upon successfuly completion of an Evil Mode chapter you get a special item.

Overall, the story is weak and repetitive. It's still the same old Lord of the Rings story, which I love and am fine with. If EA wanted to do something different they could have put this game back in the 2nd age for instance in the original fight against Sauron. That's what I don't understand. If they wanted to avoid doing the same quest over again, why not just move it to a different time period? In this game, you are still playing the same quest, you are just doing it with the bench warmers. Honestly, I would rather just play with the Fellowship, because Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas are a lot cooler than the characters they give you, but alas, that was EA's decision not mine.

Visuals/Sound:
The graphics are nothing to go crazy over but they surely are not bad. There are no really impressive graphics, which was kind of disappointing. Instead, EA relied on the cut-scenes of the movie to provide backup, which also was kind of boring given that none of the characters in the game were a part of the film.

The battle effects were fairly weak as well. Some of the spells were done nicely, but overall, most of the attacks had little variety, and generally just featured someone running up and doing some kind of slash. It seems as though EA could have spent more time on battle animation. Although, the backgrounds are done quite nicely and depict the same kind of scenery in the movie accurately.

The voiceovers are pretty well done. The voice acting is surprisingly decent. Again, the battle effects are not great. Most slashes, for instance, feature only a "schwing" sound and not much else. However, the fact that the game is completely done with voices is a nice feature.

Gameplay:
Not bad in this department. Overall, you can obtain 6 characters in this game, although the last 2 become somewhat useless as your other characters are so developed by the time you get them that you would have to do a lot of catch-up work, which really is not worth your time.

Essentially, in battle you can use up to three characters at a time. Much like in Final Fantasy X, you can switch out characters so that each member of your party can receive experience for the battle. Unlike in Final Fantasy X, however, it is not really the experience points that matter in this game. It is more the SP, or skill points. Each character has 4 sets of skills. A primary and seconday set of battle commands (Berethor, for instance, has Leadership and Sword Craft), passive skills, and Perfect Mode skills. Passive skills give the character extra abilities. For instance, Hadhod has a passive skill that makes him get a critical hit every attack whenever the party is in Perfect Mode.

A character learns new skills by performing skills. So, if Berethor uses the move Guardian Strike (which is party of the Sword Craft skill set), he will gain 1 SP for Sword Craft. And after a certain amount of SP is gained (the amount of which is dependent on how advanced the skill is) the character will learn that move. This system allows for a lot of customization, as you have a certain amount of control over which skills your character learns. The flaw with this system, however, is that it takes way too long. After you knock out the first 5 or so skills of a set, suddenly you must perform 40-100 moves of that particular skill set to learn one move. This fact is true for your last 5 or 6 skills of each set. That means you will be doing 400 or so attacks with swordcraft before you have learned the last 6 or so skills. This becomes a tad ridiculous, as you can tell. Especially to maintain two types of skills at a time. Eventually, unless you're hardcore, you'll probably give up like I did and just focus on one set (for instance I bagged Leadership for Berethor). This system is also the reason why your latter two characters are no good really. Even when you get Morwen (the 5th character to join your party), she is so far behind in terms of skill development, there's almost no point in even bothering. Also, most characters don't offer anything too different. Essentially, Idrial is your healer, Berethor, Hadhod, and Elegost are attackers. Morwen also adds the dimension of being a thief, but as stated above, not really worth it.

The other interesting thing EA tried to throw in was "perfect mode," which was also used in the Action/Adventure games (The Two Towers and The Return of the King). Perfect Mode allows your characters to have increased stats in battle, and also allows them to use special moves which do incredible amounts of damage. This feature was pretty nice, but nothing too special or out of the ordinary.

Also, in terms of finding items/equipment, there are no shops like in most RPGs. Instead all equipment and items are won either from battles or from finding them in treasure chests (or via Evil Mode as mentioned). This aspect is kind of nice given that you do not have to worry about money, but at the same point it almost seems like half the time they are just giving you really good stuff. For instance, Hadhod gets axes early in the game that make his damage incredible throughout.

Lastly, the way one encounters random enemies is a bit odd. A Palantir of Sauron shows up when enemies are nearby, and several seemingly "random" encounters actually are not random at all. There are several of these planned "random encounters" throughout the game at certain spots. In many ways, the frequency of which one encounters enemies seems a bit high, but it allows for tons of development in terms of leveling up and learning new skills.

The Bottom Line:
I would not recommend picking this title up. The game is not very challenging, and gets very repetitive throughout the game. I finished this title simply for lack of better things to do. The story is a letdown, and the characters do not represent those of the actual story very well.

Given that this plot is completely made up and thus cannot have a real bearing on the story, I had a lack of confidence in my party from the beginning. I've referred to them several times as the "JV Squad," because simply, that's what they are. They are the friends of Gandalf that are not cool enough to mention in the movies.

Who wants to play a game starring the bench-warmers? Not I.