It doesn't really stay true to the books or movies, but I couldn't care less! This is a great game!
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It's time for The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age review! For the Gamecube!
I love Lord of the Rings! I've never read any of the books, but I thought the movies were fantastic! Now some of you may know that I don't really like movie games, but The Lord of the Rings games are an exception, and actually, this Lord of the Rings game is a bit different than the others, which we'll see in a bit.
The story is about Berethor, the Captain of the Citadel Guard of Gondor, who after wandering through the woods on his way to Rivendell, is attacked by a group of Ringwraiths. He is almost killed but is saved by Idrial, an elf who joins up with him in his search for Boromir.
If you're a die-hard fan of The Lord of the Rings, you will have already figured out that these characters are not in the book. According to Wikipedia, because, you know, we all love Wikipedia, the main characters in this game were based on minor roles or extras from the films.
As you travel through, you'll meet up with other characters that will join your group. This game is a turn-based RPG, rather than the two previous Lord of the Rings games which were real-time RPGs.
There are two ways of playing. There's the adventure mode where you will explore the region around you, finding treasure chests which contain items and weapons, and getting to your main destination. And then of course, there's the fighting mode, where you will battle enemies of Middle Earth.
You can play single player or co-op in this game. If you play co-op, one of you will get to control two characters during the battles.
The fighting system was very well done. When you first start out, each character has very few skills that they can perform from the two different skill sets that they each have. Like Berethor has his melee combat set, which of course, is attacking with his weapons, and his leadership set, which holds a diversity of skills to give the party different combat bonuses. Or like with Idrial, she is based more on spell casting, instead of a melee combat, so there is a good diversity of character types.
Every time you use a skill, you'll gain one point that adds to that specific set of skills. Once you use enough skills of the same set, you will gain a new skill. It's pretty easy, but gaining each skill can take a very long time to do!
Each skill for every character is very helpful. Once you have a good selection of skills and combat bonuses acquired to your characters, it can become very easy to defeat your opponents. See? Watch this. How much damage is this goblin going to do? *Laugh!* 9HP of damage? You fail! Try this on for size! Oh yeah! *Sigh* Sorry, I had to do that. (Link at the top!) :)
In each battle, you can have up to three characters fighting at once. Since more characters will join up with you later on the in the game, you can switch out a character during a battle to give them some fighting experience.
Each time you win a battle, your characters will gain experience, even if some of your characters didn't fight. Once you have enough experience, your characters will level up which then you can increase their attributes.
Like I said before, you will find treasure chests that can hold items and weapons for each of your characters, and sometimes after you win a battle, you will be awarded with items and weapons too. Most armor sets and weapons will give your character attribute bonuses, so it's not just more armor you're gaining.
The graphics are very good. Now they aren't great, but as far as realistic graphics go for a Gamecube game, I think the developers did pretty well.
The controls were practically perfect, but then again, I'm not too sure how you could make the controls difficult to deal with since the majority of the game is just selecting options from a list.
This is a very long game to complete! But that is mostly due to the fact that you will be in a battle for the majority of the game. So much so, that it got to the point, for me at least, where there were too many battles! Sometimes I would just want to get to the destination ASAP, but I would have to battle constantly! But this can be a good thing if you are trying to achieve every single skill for your characters.
The boss fights were very fun, and can be VERY challenging! A lot of boss fights were actual epic battles from the movies, like fighting the Balrog with Gandalf. This is where die-hard Lord of the Rings fans would probably get a little upset, because if you've read the books or seen the movie, you will know that Gandalf is the only one who battles the Balrog. I really don't care that this game is not true to the books or movies, I thought it was still very fun. Plus, you get to play as Gandalf for a bit! How awesome is that!?
There are many extras like actual clips from the three movies, and there's even an Evil Mode you can play as the bad guy! It's actually nothing really special, but it is pretty cool when you get to play as the Witch-King of Angmar!
The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age is a great game! Very good graphics, nearly perfect controls, very fun and addictive gameplay, lots of upgrades, awesome looking attacks, and many extras!
The only downsides that I found were one, the game can become too linear. The vast majority of the game is basically one straight line, well, not a straight line, but you know what I mean. The game will kind of edge you on in basically one direction. And two, sometimes there were just too many battles in one spot. Seriously, in some areas, it was like every 10-20 steps you took you had to battle some enemies.
But overall, it's still a great game, and I'd recommend it to anyone who loves RPG's, especially turn-based ones. In my opinion, this is one of the best, if not the best turn-based RPG I've ever played!
This game gets a 4.25/5 with the title of Awesome!
Ratings:
0-1.5=Total Crap!
1.75-2.5=Bad
2.75-3.5=Good
3.75-4.25=Awesome!
4.5-5=EPIC!!!