J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Volume 1 (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
948A playthrough of Interplay's 1994 action-RPG game for the SNES, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Volume 1.
The Lord of the Rings on the SNES was an interesting attempt to adapt The Fellowship of the Ring, but one that unfortunately was hamstrung by a number of issues. That's not to say, however, that it's totally without merit. It's not as hyperbolically terrible as YouTube-land might make it out to be after watching it for five minutes. It's an action-RPG that takes the multiplayer idea behind The Secret of Mana and runs with it. Since you end up with the majority of the fellowship in your party over the course of the game, you can have characters assigned to different players. Whereas in Secret of Mana it was a cool feature, albeit not really that necessary, I imagine that it could be a real boon here. I've never played this as a multiplayer title, but the AI for the NPC-party members can be a real headache sometimes. They love to insist on going every way that you aren't, and while you can wrangle them in sometimes (tapping R will "gather" them, holding R gives you control of the whole mob), they'll usually just ignore the command and make a beeline for whatever has their attention (that's usually not in your view). It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's workable enough after awhile. Four players, however, could nicely alleviate the issue.
The game also supports the SNES Mouse, for those that would prefer a more traditional-feeling PC game experience. It's not necessary, but it is neat. I prefer the controller, though.
The graphics are certainly nice - though the small size of the characters means they lack detail, they're quite well animated, and all move nice and quickly without any slowdown. Well, that is until the very end when you have the entire fellowship (sans Boromir) getting ready to battle the Balrog. Then the game starts to chug from too many on-screen sprites and it slows waaaay down, but thankfully that's only the last few minutes of the game or so. The main problem with the graphics is that they are SO REPETITIVE. No matter where you are, you're going to see only a couple of tilesets used, sometimes colored slightly differently: you get "town", "marsh", "forest", "hedges", "cave", and "dungeon". Compounding the repetition are the layouts for all of the areas. Many of the larger areas outright repeat sections as you go along, changing only small things like item location. It's enough to drive someone crazy without meticulous mapping - you will easily get lost without any real recognizable landmarks if you're trying to go through three different major areas that are laid out the same, linked together by near-identical transition areas. Don't bother without a notebook. You will be banging your head into a wall during the first dungeon if you don't carefully track where you're going, I promise. And the backtracking... don't even get me started. Just about every task is a fetch quest. It's really unfortunate that such lazy level design really undermines what the game could've been. The loading times don't help matters much either.
At the very least, the combat works fairly well and is quite easy. Don't be surprised if you can get through the whole thing without dying so long as you are sensible with your experience levels and equipment.
The soundtrack is easily the high point of the game - the music is fantastic, and the sample quality is unbelievable for SNES. The sound effects also do their job well, except for that weirdly loud, distorted door noise that is contextually inappropriate 95% of the times it is used.
I really liked the idea behind LOTR SNES, but it falls pretty hard on its face in execution. The gameplay systems work well, the graphics are attractive, the sound is spot on, and then it totally crashes and burns on what it does with those systems. It reminds me a lot of Young Merlin, except YM gives you a fantastic title for the first 1/3 and then collapses in on itself beyond that. LOTR never hits the heights of YM's first 1/3, but the entire thing is significantly better and more fun than YM's latter 2/3. This isn't a great game, but it is fun if you can get into it. LOTR is just FAR, FAR harder to get into than it should be, which is probably why, just like RapJam, we never saw a Volume 2.
And it's hard to imagine any other circumstances under which "RapJam" could reasonably appear in the same sentence as Lord of the Rings. Just thought I should mention that.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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