Since The Fellowship of the Ring opened in theaters in 2001, several games based on The Lord of the Rings have been released. Lord of the Rings: The Third Age is the most recent of these, and it is quite different from the others. The others are, for the most part, firmly in the hack-and-slash action genre; Third Age is a traditional console role-playing game (CRPG), the kind you would normally expect to find a Square/Enix or Atlus label on.
I must admit to some hesitation when I heard that Electronic Arts was making a traditional RPG based on Middle Earth. There are, after all, many ways in which such an effort could have gone horribly, horribly wrong. Despite my reservations I preordered it anyway, and have now played through it in its entirety. My overall reaction is positive, but there were some disappointments.
The designers of Third Age were under a constraint that most CRPG developers are not: they had to work around a well-known and essentially immutable preexisting story. Somehow, players had to be connected to the core Lord of the Rings narrative, but without taking too many liberties with its presentation. The end result is a set of previously unheard-of characters who spend the first half of the game following the Fellowship for reasons that do not seem particularly important yet. After Helm’s Deep, they start to flesh out a bit more and the result is a story that, while not particularly compelling, manages to make sense in its own right.
Throughout the game, your characters’ story intersects with the core narrative at key points, and you end up fighting side-by-side with well-known characters. This occasionally seems a bit contrived, but it is a lot of fun nonetheless. The first and best example comes at the end of Moria, when you face the Balrog alongside Gandalf. If you can ignore the fact that the story never mentions Gandalf having help, this may well be the coolest set-piece boss battle in CRPG history. After all, for many of us, that classic face-off of Gandalf versus Balrog probably defined the concept of “boss monster” before we even had a name for it.
A bit later, at Helm’s Deep, you fight alongside Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn. I was impressed with how the battles here seemed to be perfectly timed to convey the desperation of that part of the story — enemy reinforcements always seemed to stop arriving just after the point when I started to wonder if it would ever end, and just before I ripped the disc out of the Xbox and broke it in two out of frustration. Unfortunately I can’t really say the same for the latter parts of the game, especially the last chapter; the battles there simply seemed punishingly long, although that might have been because I was in a hurry to finish.
One of the consequences of this story design is that it doesn’t leave a lot of room for exploration, and that is reflected in Third Age by a lack of many of the amenities that we have come to expect from a CRPG. There is no world map; you proceed from one chapter to the next in totally linear fashion. There are no sidequests; you can go back to previous chapters, but there is no reason to do so unless you missed something the first time through. Stores and money are also nonexistent; everything you can use, you have to pick up along the way. The sole diversion from the story is “Evil Mode”, a mini-game in which you fight key battles from the enemy side.
Other aspects of the game system may also disappoint CRPG veterans. The skill system is simple and straightforward, with very few choices to make, and essentially no tradeoffs. The characters’ roles are obvious from the beginning and there is little you can do to change that. Battle strategy usually is obvious and easy to repeat once you have observed the actions of the enemy; any difficulty is usually a simple matter of power differential and luck.
Technically, Third Age is excellent, as one would expect from Electronic Arts. Some reviewers have said the character models are stiff, and on that I would probably not disagree, but nearly everything else is top-notch. I am playing the XBox version, which may tip the scales a little, but in my opinion this is one of the best looking and sounding console RPGs I have ever seen. Incredibly detailed graphics combined with THX-certified Dolby Digital audio (only on XBox, probably), plus cut scenes taken directly from the films with narration by Ian McKellen, make for a presentation worthy of the Lord of the Rings name.
Ultimately, I think Third Age might be the perfect CRPG for people who aren’t yet deeply into CRPGs. Its accessible story, essentially foolproof character development, and lack of distractions mean that new CRPG players can’t get too far off track. For a CRPG addict like myself, it is fun but not particularly “filling”. Either way, EA has proven that they can make a high-quality CRPG, and I hope they don’t stop now.