The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age: How Does This LOTR RPG Stand Up?

For the most part, Electronic Arts has made exceptional use of its license with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy, spawning numerous titles that have defied the history of shoddy movie-based games with their near perfect capturing of everything that made the films so wonderful. 

Unlike the score of other Lord of the Rings movie-based games, The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age is a standard console-style RPG that takes more than a few swipes from Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy X. Now that sounds like a good thing on paper, but unfortunately, despite some redeeming values, the game fails on most accounts to achieve the level of quality garnered by its counterparts due to a myriad of unforgivable story and design flaws.

Where The Third Age suffers the most is with its story. Not content with simply following the true fellowship, EA has introduced a new cast of six characters not seen in the books or movies: Berethor a Citadel Guard from Gondor, Idrial an elven servant of Lady Galadriel from Lothlorien, Elegost a Ranger of the Dunedain, Hadhod a dwarf of the Fundin Clan from Moria, Morwen a female warrior originally from Gondor but now calls Rohan home, and Eaoden an outrider for Rohan’s Royal Guard. 

The problem is that most of the characters are obvious attempts to imitate the real characters (Elegost is the Aragorn, Hadhod the Gimli, Berethor the Boromir, et cetera et cetera) and none of them are even close to as likeable or interesting thanks to practically no character development. And, though there are six characters, Berethor is the central focus for the plot, as at first he has been sent out in search of Boromir, but as the game progresses you learn that something else is driving him forward.