Bored of the Rings

I finished The Lord Of The Rings: The Third Age late last night after work. It was one of the most odd gaming experiences I've ever had. Never before has a game been so incredibly boring and yet so addictive.

I had high hopes for the game. It supposedly was going to be Final Fantasy X but set in the Lord of the Rings universe (the movie version, at least). I didn't even mind the fact that I was playing as a sort of shadow version of the Fellowship, traipsing around Middle Earth and following the real Fellowship. I can handle side stories.

And it did use lots of movie clips from all three movies with voice-overs by Gandalf to advance the story. That was neat... for a bit.

The big problem was that the characters and the story were both rather dull and flat, which is a BIG problem for an RPG. The story was serviceable, but I think the part that really made me realize how poorly presented it was happened when the main character was suddenly freed of the mind control of Sauruman. Unfortunately, nowhere prior to this grand event was it even hinted that he was doing Sauruman's bidding. The same happened with pretty much every romance in the game. It wasn't till someone said, 'I'm sorry, you'll have to love her, not me.' that you even get an inkling that either character had any passion towards each other.

It did have gorgeous graphics, and the combat was fun. Unfortunately you'd essentially run from battle to battle to battle for the whole 20 or so hours it took to finish the game. Yawn. And since you need hundreds of skill points to boost your various abilities, you have to do all sorts of over-the-top spells and attacks rather than just doing the faster, yet weaker, straight-forward attacks. It's cool for the first hour, but 19 hours of seeing the same flashing attacks over and over again start to make your retinas bleed.

In the end, I was pretty much just playing it to a) see where the story might go and if it would get better and b) to play dress-up with my characters as every piece of armour and weaponry was shown in real-time on the character when you equipped it, which was pretty cool.

It was a nice little break from Grand Theft Auto but I'd have a really hard time recommending it to anyone aside from a hard-core LOTR fan, who'd probably not like it anyway due to the liberties it takes with the story. If they'd spent more time actually fleshing out the characters and story so that you actually cared about them, it would have been an excellent game. Oh well. Hello EB trade-in credit.