Final Fantasy skinned for LOTR fans
User Rating: 5 | The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age PS2
There's really not that much to say about LOTR: The Third Age. Take the combat mechanics from Final Fantasy (or similar turn-based Japanese RPG) and slap them into a sub-standard 3rd person adventure game and viola, you get Lord of the Rings, The Third Age. There's the review. Everything that follows is just nit-picking. LOTR:T3A really should have been named LOTR: The Understudy Saga. Your party is basically the 2nd string heroes who were late for the forming the Fellowship of the Ring and are now tagging along right behind just in case, you know, one of 'em gets sick or something. Not content with just letting you tag along, Gandalf constantly reminds you that you just missed the REAL action with a never-ending stream of re-edited movie clips from the Peter Jackson trilogy. It's enough to give a guy an inferiority complex. The really sad part is, these clips and the audio (music and SFX also mostly from the movies) are far and away the best part of the game. The audio is so good, it almost makes you forget how bland and tasteless the rest of the game is. Graphically, the game was obviously optimized for the PS2 and then hurriedly ported for the Xbox and Gamecube. This means that it definitely falls prey to all the aliasing problems and low-res, simplistic texturing that the PS2 has become infamous for (not always justly, but infamous all the same) and spreads the joy around to all consoles everywhere. The character models are stiff and rather dull, the environments are simplistic, and the sky seems to take a vacation every time you go into combat, leaving its close friend black gaping void to take care of things for the duration. The spells and combat effects are definitely the graphical highlights, but aren't nearly impressive enough to cover up the game's overall bland texturing and modeling. The actual gameplay is... well, I've really already covered that, but if you're really that interested in details, then here you go. For most of the game, you run around in 3rd person (we're talking Tomb Raider style 3rd person, not FF1-3 style 3rd person) along a very linear path in a very bland environment until you hit either a pre-determined combat point or you get a random encounter (the ratio on these is about 2 random encounters for each scripted combat event), then it zooms in (again, Final Fantasy style) and you see your 3 members of your party versus a varying number of baddies. With all the FF references I've made, you can probably figure out how combat goes, but I'll explain anyway. Based on your character stats and the baddies stats you get a set order of turns (i.e. baddie goes, then you go, then you go, then baddie goes, etc or some variation on that) and you battle it out 'til one side is dead. Attacks, spells, items, etc. are accessed via a series of menus. You can also swap out your characters, one at a time, for one of your party who isn't on screen at the moment. So if you're fightin' flying monkies and you've got a guy who's strong on melee but weak on ranged, you can swap him out if you've got a char who's stronger on ranged in your party. A lot of explanation for a very simple mechanic, but there you go. And there's no flying monkies in The Third Age, which is just too bad. So, you do the combat thingy a couple of times and POOF, it's time to level up one or more of your characters. Leveling in Third Age really isn't all that interesting or important. Combat isn't usually that hard, and you're rarely in any danger of a single character dying, let alone the entire party being wiped out. On top of that, if you've spent any time playing almost any RPG, it should be fairly obvious what to improve on each character, and if you haven't, just improve the stuff they're already good at at throw a few points into the other categories now and then and you'll probably be fine. You might also take this time to equip your characters with some of the items you've picked up along the way. Wow! Look! You can see the item on your character, even in-game and during the cutscenes! Hooray, but again, still pretty blah. And that's really far too many words in this review. The Third Age is basically just a way to sell games to people who were fans of the Peter Jackson LOTR movies. If you liked the movies an insane amount and want to see them from a strange 2nd hand perspective, give LOTR:T3A a rental. If you're looking for a good, fun RPG though, you might want to look elsewhere. 
