J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: Volume 1 (1994)

J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: Volume One, for SNES

Rating: 3.2/10; Bad

This abomination of a game follows the first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy from Frodo inheriting the Ring up to the escape from the Mines of Moria. The game made me roll my eyes even harder than the book for the sheer amount of unnecessary nonsense that happens, but is made far worse by the many abysmal game design choices. The game is an action rpg with a top down isometric view and plays somewhat like the Ys games, if the protagonist was a paraplegic with down syndrome. You get a clumsy thrust attack that locks the character in place while also having significant wind up time. You can't just go up to an enemy and hit the enemy; you have to anticipate their movements and pretty much make them move into your thrust. The "block" is even worse, lasting only about a second and only reducing the damage you take. It is very difficult to time the block to actually be effective and I never bothered to try and use it in combat. I get that Frodo is supposed to be a complete noob with zero combat training. Doesn't make the combat any more fun though.

For some ungodly reason the developers decided to make this a party based action rpg where you eventually get the entire Fellowship, with the others controlled by AI. A turn based Jrpg would have worked better. So the other 3 hobbits join the party, complete with garbage gear and being level 1 noobs just like Frodo at the beginning, only they won't have the luxury of benefiting from your grinding. You can hold down a button to control them collectively but given how tedious it is to grind Frodo, why would you want to do it 3 more times? The AI does not know how to deal with the hit and run charging attacks of bats and wolves, which make up the majority of the early game. Good luck keeping them alive, especially when they wander off to fight things on their own. Thankfully they are optional and honesty, not worth trying to keep alive. Healing can only be found within dungeons and is infinite; some are items that respawn every time you leave the area and are automatically used if you already have 1 in your inventory. I fail to understand why you can't recover in town like a normal rpg. There is money and a single shop that sells equipment, but the entire equipment system is automated to the point where you have almost no control. The game decides what equipment to keep or throw away, and who to give things to. If you have 2 out of the 4 hobbits and find something that would be useful for the ones not in your party... nope "we don't need this right now". And if one dies their equipment is lost. Even worse, the ultimate weapons in the game are utterly broken to the point of making the game MORE difficult if you pick them up. This is due to a failure at basic math in the programming. I can only assume they store the attack and defense values as a 2 digit integer, and when it tries to go above 99 it wraps back around to 0. Thus when you equip the best weapons in the game your attack drops into the toilet. How such a simple mistake that fundamentally ruins one of the most important parts of an rpg made it past quality assurance is a travesty of game development. Of course that is assuming this game had ANY QA, which I highly doubt. Especially given that the game reached an unplayable state when Aragorn joined and took over as the lead. The game failed to transition control with neither character able to be moved. I had to bypass it by writing down multiple lines of text to use the awful password save system. From then on, Frodo never moved again, staying in place at each zone entrance. That's ok though, guard the escape route like a champ.

The worst part of the game is the level design and navigation. I'm not talking about the dumb fetch and collection quests you have to complete but rather how the world is made up of copy pasted assets without defining landmarks that make the game mind numbingly tedious to navigate. The dungeons are the worst, being sprawling labyrinths of the same small number of rooms with no map to help. The game's idea of a map system is leaving a few notes scattered around that say "entrance X". Thanks game, real helpful. Feels more like something a level designer would use to help keep track of what transitions to where rather than something for the player. The dungeons are too complex to navigate without a map, and forcing a player to make their own is a failure of game design. Unfortunately there are no maps online and for that reason alone this game is not fit to play. If you somehow manage to endure to the end of the game you will find that the developers did not feel the need to code any attack for Legolas, so he just stands around with his bow stuck up his ass. Probably for balance reasons instead of lazy/incompetent developers, since a ranged attack in this game would be OP. Gandalf actually has a mid ranged magic attack with animation that is used for the final boss, but will probably die, forcing Aragorn to solo the Balrog with his leet sword skills. Just like in the book! Also for some stupid reason, the hp display and item use are turned off during the boss fight. You know, the part of the game where it is MOST important to see your health and use all those healing items.

Tolkien should be rolling in his grave over this sorry excuse of a game. It feels like an alpha version that was slapped together in a week and then kicked out the door with a "eh, good enough" sentiment. Broken, poorly designed, and too tedious to play. Do not play this game.