Review noplotr 3/5 · Jun 20, 2026
You Can Go There, But You Can't Go Back Again
It was just a dream! Just a dream. But what an adventure!
You know that scene in The Two Towers movie where Gandalf is leading the charge down the hill at Saruman's army and we get that slowmo shot of Shadowfax leaping into the fray? Well, it turns out my first thought when watching that for the first time in …
It was just a dream! Just a dream. But what an adventure!
You know that scene in The Two Towers movie where Gandalf is leading the charge down the hill at Saruman's army and we get that slowmo shot of Shadowfax leaping into the fray? Well, it turns out my first thought when watching that for the first time in over a decade is, "That's where the movie footage transitions to game footage in the first level of the Return of the King GameCube game."
And that just kept happening. For the rest of my recent rewatch I couldn't turn it off. And naturally that made me want to replay the Return of the King GameCube game. But because I have to make everything a project I decided I should replay all three of my Tolkien GameCube games, starting with 2003's The Hobbit.
I'd tried replaying this game with my roommate several years ago, and I think we'd gotten as far as "Flies & Spiders," and I'd maybe played it in college but I don't think I'd finished it then either. So I think the last time I'd rolled credits on this game was as a child. The thing is, I had this memory of the penultimate level, where you're in The Lonely Mountain, and it's sunrise, and you can climb up the rubble at the entrance and look out over the valley and even in 2003 GameCube graphics it's beautiful. And I really wanted to see that again.
But first I had to get through the rest of the game. I decided to go all in on a 100% run, and then immediately abandoned that plan when I couldn't even find all the silver pennies in the first level. And by the time I got to "Barrels Out of Bond" I basically wasn't picking up anything that wasn't directly in my path (which made that 4th key really annoying; all the other ones are just on the way to other things before you even know what you need them for!) I wouldn't say I ever got completely fed up with the game, it was always at least a little bit fun, but the jank is strong from jump, and it only gets worse.
First there are the controls, which are typical of the era in that they suck. The camera is that most annoying type of camera that seems endemic to 90s and early 00s games, where it's not fully independent so it always wants to drift back to its preferred position. The movement often feels tedious and awkward, and jumps are hard to time (and to aim). Enemy hitboxes are vague (rocks can basically hit anything with a foot but your jump attack that supposedly has an AoE better spot on or you're hitting air), and they move way too fast and aggressively for how slow your attacks are, but trying to be mobile during combat is made almost impossible by the aforementioned terrible camera—there's no lock-on, so you can't back away from enemies and as soon as you turn around the camera turns with you.
Then there are the (also era-typical) glitches: wonky physics, poor collision detection, taking damage for seemingly no reason, not taking damage for seemingly no reason, getting stuck on random bits of the environment, and characters and objects occasionally just teleporting around. The speedruns for this game are broken as hell.
But what I really noticed this time was how rushed the game clearly was. I remember reading an article about the troubled development at some point, how the studio had one vision of the game, the publisher had another vision, the Tolkien estate had yet another vision, and somehow the devs tried to roll all of those into one thing. And supposedly were still making changes right up to the day it shipped.
And you can see that as you play. How the game is trying to do platforming and action and puzzles and isn't particularly good at any of them. How some of the cutscenes are fully-rendered but most are somewhat hasty-looking illustrations with narration, sometimes switching between the two within the same sequence. How there was clearly a lack of communication between departments:
It also feels like some content was cut at the less second and you can still see the holes. Right before the last section of "Over Hill and Under Hill" we get a cutscene of Gandalf talking to Thorin where he says something about the old Dwarven mines having all manner of vile creatures in them, implying that you're going to face, you know, some heretofore unbeknownst vile creatures. And then you go through a series of platforming gear collecting sections with no combat, followed by a room that just has a bunch of those little gremlins with pickaxes that you can take out 5 at a time with your walking stick (and that you’ve already seen several times).
At the end of that room is troll key like the one you found in the previous level, except in this case the lock it goes to is like two feet away. When you meet back up with the dwarves Kili's like, “Oh by the way there are trolls living in these hills, hope you didn’t meet any.”
This is just speculation, but what all of this suggests to me is that how that last room was supposed to go was you approach the lock, Bilbo says “Hmm but where’s the key” and then a troll jumps out and you have a boss fight for which the key is the reward. (I guess the troll could just be there but this version feels right for this game.) Maybe the troll was even going to summon the little gremlin dudes during the fight. And then they ran out of time and were like “screw it, just throw all the gremlins in there and drop the key by the door.”
Also it's just not an entirely faithful adaptation, and while I'm willing to give some leeway there were a few things that were particularly irksome, like Bilbo just telling everyone about The Ring and Gandalf referring to The Lonely Mountain as simply "Lonely Mountain," and I realize those are very different magnitudes of difference from the source text but those are the two things that annoyed me the most.
All of that is not to say that it's just a slapdash cash grab. I mean, it is, a little bit, probably, but clearly some care went into the game. The voice acting is generally pretty good (Clive Revill as Thorin! Jim Ward as Gandalf! Brian George...is in there somewhere, apparently!), there's some interesting level design, and the background environments are occasionally quite nice:
Which brings us back to the start, which is to say the end (or almost the end, anyway.) I finally got to The Lonely Mountain. I stood before the wall of stone. I jumped up to the top. And...did you know hobbits are pretty short?
Where was my vista? My beautiful 2003 GameCube graphics landscape? I tried jumping up the wall and different places, tried craning the camera around, but could not get a clear view. Frustrated and disappointed, I started sprinting through the rest of the level, wanting the game to just be over already. And then, after jumping down from cart onto a raised walkway, I turned around, and there it was.
It is beautiful, in a way. More like the rolling dunes of a vast desert than the valley I was picturing, the valley I thought I remembered but perhaps only dreamed. I've been having to come to terms, lately, with these kinds of things. The imagined perfection of the past. But here...I'm not disappointed, actually. It's true the game is not as fun as I remembered, not as well-made, not as pretty. But honestly, it's nice to know that despite what it actually is, it was what I wanted it to be back then, somehow. I'm glad there's a version of my childhood in which that version of the game exists, even if neither of those are really real. They might be just a dream. Just a dream. But what an adventure.
p.s. This is basically the exact opposite sentiment of my Spirited Away review that I wrote yesterday. What can I say, I contain multitudes.
