Original Publication Date: 19/05/2024

The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (PS2)

Everyone has those white whales growing up. Movies you haven’t seen, books you never read, games you’ve never played. And if you’ve read anything I’ve written the past few years, obviously, the latter topic is where my white whales lay. Personally, Lord of the Rings was my life for a good year or so, an obsession that dominated me from morning to night, and that of course extended to the realm of video games. I played a lot of them - at least, the ones I could, which mostly consisted of the PS2 and GBA entries in the extended franchise. But there was always one that eluded me - even if I technically played its GBA version (and I reviewed it here!) - The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. Warts and all, I’m glad I finally got to play it; a unique, interesting way to further explore the reaches of Middle-Earth, all tucked within a near carbon copy of Final Fantasy X’s battle system that works fine - even if it’s not particularly interested in being revolutionary at all throughout.

When I started my new era of playing all the PS1-PS2 era games I missed out on, The Third Age was near the top of my list. I always wanted to play, especially as I frequently heard it described as the most immersive, most detailed depiction of Middle-Earth yet - and even better than The Two Towers, which I’d played to absolute death at that point. Let alone actually playing it, I have no memory of even seeing The Third Age in Australian stories, and I was a lad who visited EB Games *every* week, even if I’d never get a chance to buy too many games. The bottom line? I’m glad I played The Third Age. It’s the kind of game that very rarely feels outright bad to play, but I struggle to point to a particular element - outside of its outstanding visuals - that I can say is amazing and really sticks out in my mind.

The Third Age’s plot occurs parallel to all three Lord of the Rings films, following Gondorian Knight Berethor and his slowly growing party of companions as they are guided by Gandalf telepathically to assist in events that play out in the background and foreground of the film series. It’s an interesting premise - you see the cast taking place in moments only teased at, such as the Burning of the Westfold in Rohan, or the greater Battle of Osgiliath, but also just tosses them into iconic moments like battling the Balrog alongside Gandalf in Moria, and the masterful Battle of Helm’s Deep. Even if I’m not really sold on the narrative of this game at all, getting to play through the very best moments of the film trilogy I adore on a more ‘street-level’ viewpoint just works for me so well it overrides any reasoning for why it’s going on. Getting to battle in Helm’s Deep or try and hold back the tide at Osgiliath had me practically giddy. But even if the events themselves are engaging, I never really found myself caring about its cast, the central fulcrum every RPG finds itself spinning upon. They’re all fairly static creatures, by and by, and whilst the odd one-off moments might’ve drawn a smile out of my face, and there are developments here and there… there really isn’t a whole lot going on in the Third Age, character-wise. And, in a way, this kind of sets the tone of The Third Age - rarely outright bad, always acceptable, but perpetually always missing something.

As soon as I entered a battle in The Third Age, the very first thought that entered my brain was the fact that this game is an extremely shameless clone of Final Fantasy X’s battle system, right down to the layout of the UI and the turn order on the right side of the screen. The way the camera cuts during attacks, just everything screams Final Fantasy X, and I ain’t gonna blame them for that. Final Fantasy X is arguably the best RPG of that console generation, and for a licensed title to want to copy it? Can’t argue with that logic. Beyond the skill acquisition system, which I’ll get into in a bit, The Third Age does little to innovate. You’ve got basic attacks, special skills, buffs, debuffs - all basic fare. Hell, they’ve even pulled the Limit Break system from Final Fantasy. It’s a pure turn-based order affair, though the frequency of your turns - and your foes - can vary dramatically based on the skills. Seriously, in one case, I had a squad of Uruk-hai hit me with over a *dozen* hits because they just kept slapping me with stun-based skills. Which leads me to my biggest frustrations with sections of this game; enemy attacks are seemingly random, with no cooldown between casts. For most mooks, it’s not a problem that frequently rears its head, but some bosses and particular variants of foes can't just slap you silly if you’re unlucky enough to get struck with an unlucky combination.

Joyfully, the game has a really nice curve of feeling like a group of heroes slowly powering up; armour grows more grandiose and ‘heroic’, your damage numbers rise sharpy - starting in the two digits, and skyrocketing into five digit territory by the final moments - and the skills you’re throwing out grow more and more complex and overpowering. The Third Age does fantastic at fulfilling the power fantasy I craved as a child as you reach the endgame stages and you start unlocking the highest tiers of abilities, but it’s almost to the game’s detriment; Idrila, for an example, has the ability to cast twice in one turn, but also gains a spell that allows her to fully revive someone upon death, after which it’ll instantly move to their next turn. Assuming you don’t screw up in your AP management, this will essentially make Idrial - and whoever else she casts the spell on - immortal, pretty much removing any real threat of defeat unless you get really unlucky. If this is a bad thing will depend on each individual, but whilst it’s satisfying to hit five-digit damage numbers with Elegost and Berethor’s endgame moves, I don’t think it’s particularly engaging to just lose any threat of defeat for the last 20% of the game, regardless of the difficulty you’re playing on - and no, I don’t think ‘just don’t use it!’ is a valid excuse, considering how the game seems balanced around it towards the end.

The Third Age’s main form of progression - besides the stock standard leveling up endemic to the genre - is rather interesting. Rather than just getting skills upon leveling up, or buying them with SP or anything like that, skills are earned by repetition. By that, I mean that each character’s earnable skills lay in two distinct categories which vary from character to character. Some are offensive, or supportive in nature, but leveling them up is always the same - just using them. Using any skill will raise the Skill Points of that category, and upon using a skill a certain amount of times, as seen in the Skills menu, you’ll unlock the next move in the tree. It’s not a totally linear skill tree, either - each time you unlock a skill, you’ll unlock the ability to learn the next skills below it, giving you a little bit of freedom in what you want to focus on. See a skill that hits multiple times? Go for it. Need more healing? Start slinging those spells. It’s not the most in-depth system in the world, but it does enough to set it apart from its contemporaries. It adds a nice bit of diegetic flavor to the game; as our heroes are getting better and better through old-fashioned practice, it makes sense they’d get better and better at using their weapons. Simple.

I played the game on Hard Mode, which seems to mostly just bloat the health and attack values of foes, but with how easy the game is from the jump on Normal difficulty, and the game’s reliance on grinding to get the higher tiers of your character’s abilities, it’s not a massive detriment to your enjoyment. Honestly, without Hard Mode, I think my views on the game would be a lot harsher, as at the best of times it turns the game into a much more strategic affair, having to utilize a much larger percentage of your abilities to eke out a win, especially in the early to mid game. Debuffs, buffs, proactive heals, mitigation - this will all come into play, and I can’t imagine playing on lower difficulties. At moments in Hard Mode, such as in the gauntlet that is Helm’s Deep, the challenge pendulum swings too far to the right, but it makes every major encounter feel earned, and I’ll take over easy-won victories at any time. I do wish you could heal out in the field, but it’s no dealbreaker.

Equipment-wise, progression in The Third Age is fairly linear - as you complete quests and locate treasure around each of the game's myriad of zones, you’ll find gear and weapons to outfit your crew. Pretty much all gear is pretty binary - it’s either better or worse than whatever you’ve got, as outside of a few weapons, pretty much everything comes down to it’s defense/attack rating. Only a rare few weapons - like the Morgul Blade dropped by the Nazgul - have special properties, like healing on hit, but otherwise, if it’s got better stats, just throw it on for better results. One thing I adore, and I wish (but understand why it’s not the case) more games utilized is the fact that every piece of gear has unique visuals attached to them, which helps really evolve the look and vibe of your characters as the game wears on. It just adds another wrinkle to the whole ‘powering up’ element that’s so intrinsic to RPGs, a wrinkle I feel that is overlooked far too often. But, in another way, it’s a drawback; what if you find a set of gear that just looks *perfect* on your characters? Either you nerf yourself, or you suck it up and put on the better armour. I’m just saying, some kind of transmog system would’ve gone a long way (and have taken Hadholf out of that stupid helmet I had him for most of the game).

But I’ve talked enough of *how* the game plays - *who* are our heroes? Well… they ain’t the Fellowship of the Ring, I’ll tell ‘ya that. Across your adventure you’ll unlock six characters who each fill a specific niche, like Berethor being a knight who hits hard, and buffs his companions, or Idrial, an Elf who is more tailored to a healing role that can still dish out some damage. Whilst each character brings something unique to the table, some don’t quite bring enough to give everyone a scenario where they have a time to shine, chiefly with the game’s last two characters. Weaker character arcs - seriously Eaoden barely has a character -, movesets that feel like less interesting versions of previous characters, and coming in late enough that they’re significantly weaker, and have to grind out more skills, there’s just no reason to use them, and that sucks. In a game like Final Fantasy X, it’s easy to find a way to incorporate and just *want* to use everyone, but here? I never had a moment and felt ‘Hell yeah, time for Morwen!’.

Somehow, these class-based archetypes bleed into the characters themselves, with all of them feeling fairly tropey at best, and utterly bland at worst. Seriously, by the end of the game, I didn’t know a single thing about Eaoden, the sixth party member, and I don’t think Hadhod had a single line that wasn’t second rate Gimli impressions. I don’t hate them, but I don’t really feel for any of them sans Elegost, who’s the perfect off-brand Aragorn stand-in. He isn’t any deeper than the rest, but I’m just biased. I just wish the cast had more to work with. Elegost and Hadhod’s bromance is good fun, through and through, and the slow reveal of who Berethor is doesn't quite have the gravitas the game wants it to have. At least this is better then Idrial and Morwen’s subplot, which is both being Women and having a Love Triangle about the Big Strong Man in the party. It… it sucks. It really sucks. Maybe we could have less time spent Gandalf spouting lines from the movie and more fleshing out the cast? Just maybe?

Bizarrely, much of The Third Age’s story isn’t told in direct cutscenes, but rather in Epic Scenes you’ll unlock whilst wandering each zone. It’s befuddling - at first, after watching a couple of them, I came to the conclusion that hey were just scenes from the movie, providing context for the things going on in the game’s plot, but as I neared Moria, the game’s second zone, Idrial started referencing their mission to follow Gandalf, making me realize that the majority of the plot’s context and narrative is delivered in these Epic Scenes. Personally, I felt this is a baffling decision, one born, perhaps, out of a lack of time to actually finish the game. Rather than have a ton of voice acted, choreographed cutscenes featuring the game’s cast, developer EA Redword Shore (later known as Visceral Studios, behind the Dead Space franchise) could just reuse a *ton* of FMV cutscenes with new Gandalf dialogue to deliver 85% of the game’s narrative. There are a handful of in-engine cutscenes featuring our motley crew - with guest appearances from Lord of the Ring’s principal cast - but they genuinely wouldn’t make a ton of sense without the Epic Scenes to provide the needed context. It’s just a sort of baffling decision, honestly, one that I’d love to hear the reasoning for. The game already struggles with making us care about the cast, the Epic Scenes do little to remedy this.

A small, almost forgettable addition to the game is that of Evil Mode; whilst it implies the existence of some kind of alternate campaign, featuring the villains and creatures you battle throughout the game. And whilst that isn’t accurate, it’s not exactly… inaccurate, either. Evil Mode is a set of gauntlet fights, one for each zone you complete in the main game. In each, you’ll fight a number of battles against our heroes, utilizing both mooks and bosses alike to take them down, having full access to the abilities they used against *you* in your battles against them. In theory, it’s fantastic in concept, but in practice, it’s anything but. At the best of times, Evil Mode is a breeze, as the Evil characters you’ll be playing as are so overpowering and have skills stacked to high heaven that the heroes have almost no recourse. At worst, it devolves into annoying slugfests that, whilst victory is all but a certainty, the AI will do everything in its power to drag it out as long as it can. I really wonder why this was included as a whole, as the whole section can be finished in less than half an hour - was it maybe because The Third Age on the GBA had a completely different set of missions for the evil factions of Middle-Earth? Either way, I think less time could’ve been put into Evil Mode and more focus put into giving this game more actual cutscenes, beyond the baffling Epic Scenes. Sure ,you get a handful of decent weapons and armour for completing each section, but beyond that? Seriously, what the hell?

But one thing I cannot heap anything but praise upon is the audio-visual experience of this game. Without a doubt, The Third Age is one of the best looking games of the entire console generation. Barring some artistic masterpieces like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, The Third Age blows much of its competition out of the water, occasionally feeling more like an early PS3/Xbox 360 than belonging to its own generation. It has visuals that look occasionally as if they’ve been pulled directly from the films, and utilizing the film’s universally incredible soundtrack is a free pass in my book. The models, like many RPGs of the time, are still stuck in that transitory state where changing emotions are a little more apparent, but they frequently look a bit more awkward then they should - and with a total lack of pre-rendered cutscenes, we never really get a chance to get a look at how the cast will look in the most dramatic scenes. The FMVs are fairly high quality for the time, and with the game frequently throwing scenes from the movies as bridging devices between ‘gauntlet’ style battles, they don’t break up the game’s paradigm of visuals too badly.

Like I said, The Third Age is… fine. Rarely outright bad, rarely fantastic, incredible visuals do little to really make this game stick out. Die-hard Lord of the Rings fans will find a lot to engage them, and I don’t regret the time I spent with it - especially in regards to playing new viewpoints in the series’ great moments - but I can’t really imagine playing through it again. It’s certainly of its time, with little aspirations in regards to kickstarting a new RPG revolution… but it probably doesn’t need to. Honestly, it’s somewhat lack of risk-taking decisions may have been in service for trying to appeal to non-gamers, and bring in the crowd who were obsessed with Lord of the Rings as a franchise. Maybe that’s why there’s so much Gandalf talking? I dunno. It’s a solid game, through and through, uplifted by its source material and held back by baffling story decisions and frustrating character gameplay choices. I love Lord of the Rings, and it probably makes me look back more fondly at The Third Age than I otherwise would… but that’s okay. That’s perfectly fine by me.