Lord of the Rings: A Different Shire

What? Already? I thought we had to go through the battle of Helm's Deep first!

Lord of the Rings (the game) recaps Lord of the Rings (the book) without any sense of urgency, and with lots of changes to the plot even in the opening area. Frodo understands the importance of destroying the Ring, knows the Black Riders are searching for him, and has been given specific instructions to get to Bree as fast as possible, but instead he lingers around the Shire for weeks, finding lost children, rescuing stray dogs, and otherwise running errands for his neighbors. 

In this, the game is no different from a host of other RPGs in which the hero temporarily but repeatedly ignores an apocalyptic threat to retrieve a family heirloom from a dungeon or collect 16 bushels of wildflowers for an alchemist. We've all been in this situation plenty of times. It's just odd to see it in an established plot. It's also odd to see Frodo joined by rangers, wizards, and dwarves that don't appear anywhere in the books.

As a game, I'm finding Lord of the Rings to be fun with a few flaws. As some of my commenters warned, the sheer size and sparseness of the maps recalls Faery Tale Adventure, which I described as "huge, boring, and empty" before quitting it. Fortunately, although LOTR has a lot of empty territory and structures that seem to serve no purpose, it's not quite as bad as Faery Tale Adventure. It might take 5-10 minutes between interesting encounters rather than 20-30.

A good 60% of the game consists of just this.

The opening map is big enough that I found it tough to explore systematically. The game starts in the upper left-hand corner, and normally in such situations I'd keep the western border visible as I moved methodically south to the bottom border, then move one screen east, then move to the top border, and so on, investigating any structures or people that I encountered on the way. LOTR makes this impossible by putting all kinds of rivers, walls, and hedgerows in the Shire, some of them long enough that you've become utterly lost by the time you get around them. I eventually resigned myself to following first the perimeter and then the road network, hoping that between the two, I encountered all the stuff in the middle.

An unfordable river.

Several interface issues significantly mar the game. The first is the inability to move diagonally, which extends the already-long journeys between points. The second is the music, which keeps playing unbidden. There's an option to tun it off, but it only silences it temporarily; it always returns later. Very annoying. The third issue is the horrible inventory and character selection system. Let's say I want to have Merry give Frodo some rations and have him eat them. This is the key sequence:

-SPACE to enter the command interface
-C to change characters
-4 to select Merry
-U to enter the "use" menu
-3 to enter the "trade" menu
-1 to trade to Frodo
-Then the number associated with the item I want to trade
-X to exit the trade menu
-X to exit the "use" menu
-C to switch characters
-1 to switch back to Frodo
-U to enter the "use" menu
-2 to enter the "equip/use" menu
-The number of the rations to eat them

Complicating this is an inability to quickly view a character's inventory, so in reality it often means repeating the first few steps multiple times until I find the character who actually has the rations.

Aside from those issues, it's a reasonably pleasant game with a lot of features that I like about RPGs, including lots of NPCs to interact with, lore to collect, side-quests to solve, and puzzles to unravel, usually using the game's skill system. It doesn't particularly excel in any of these areas, but together they make for a decent RPG experience.

This week, I explored the Shire, solved a variety of side quests, and assembled a party of companions bigger than the book's Fellowship. In doing so, I encountered areas, places, and characters that I generally recall from the films and what I read of the books--Hobbiton, Bucklebury Ferry, Buckland, the Green Dragon Tavern, the Brandywine Bridge, and so on. They seem to correspond imperfectly to maps of the Shire taken from the books, but otherwise they were familiar.

Some of the side-quests that I solved include:

• Anson Goodbody's dog had run away. I found it nearby and used the "charisma" skill (it took me a long time to figure this out) to get it to follow me back to him. He gave me a shovel for my troubles.

If only I'd paid attention to his warning.

• Two children missing in the "East Forest." It took me a long time to solve this one because the East Forest was one of the last areas I visited owing to my exploration pattern. The children were found in different places, surrounded by monsters. Returning them got me some rations from one family and a pony companion from the other.

Saving one of the children from a spider.

• A dwarf in the Green Dragon was looking for someone to find his ancestor's axe, lost in some ruins. I found it while solving the "missing children" quest above, gave it to him, and got him to join me.

Equipping Druin with the axe I retrieved for him.

• A songbird trapped in a spider web in a cave. I killed the spider and freed it, and it gave me some hints as to finding and dealing with some elves.

• The elves in the southwest regions of the map who told me the magic word ELBERETH, which has the power to drive away Nazgul. It took me a while to find them. The area where I encounter them seems to have a certain probability of producing a Nazgul (which kills me practically instantly) and a certain probability of triggering the elf encounter.

Notice he says "TIMES of need." Not just one time. More on that below.

• A ranger named Hawkeye who appeared in the southwest. He joined my party and I thought he'd be a permanent companion, but he only lasted a few seconds before we were attacked by Nazgul at the entrance of a cave, and he told me to run away while he held them off. I heard him die in the distance.

• In a building called Brandy Hall, I got a ghost to leave by giving him some pipeweed. He had been haunting the library, and once he left, I read the books and got a lot of hints for future map areas.

Happily, he accepted pipeweed instead of his pipe.

Solving each quest not only produced (occasionally) a tangible reward, but also made subtle adjustments to my characters' attributes: dexterity, strength, endurance, luck, life, and willpower. There is otherwise no experience or levels in the game.

The game's combat mechanism isn't very good so far, but it has the potential to get better. When attacked, you enter a special combat mode and do the fighting from the regular command interface, where you can move, attack, use a word of power, cast a spell, use an item, or use a skill. At these opening stages, most of my characters have no weapons except torches and fists, no armor, and no magic. I haven't experimented enough to figure out what skills, if any, really help in combat. I could see the mechanism supporting much more tactical combats later in the game.

Note this game's conception of orcs. It looks like something I remember from a cartoon but can't quite put my finger on.

Post-combat, the only way I've been able to find to heal characters is to eat rations, which restore a couple of hit points but only once per day. There's no "rest" mechanism. Apparently, I'll later find a spell called "Kingshand" and some "kingsfoil" herbs, but not yet.

One possible side-quest that I didn't solve had to do with a large, ugly mill, apparently owned by Lotho Sackville-Baggins, guarded by three humans. The humans kept throwing me out the moment I entered, and none of the skills I had helped me. The episode seems to refer to the book, where Lotho allies with Saruman to take over and industrialize the Shire. I suspect that in the book, the process didn't start while Frodo was still in the Shire, but perhaps I'm wrong. In any event, I couldn't figure out what to do with the place.

My refusal to give Lobelia the key to Bag End came to haunt me later in the game, when she suddenly appeared near Bucklebury Ferry and demanded it again. When I walked away a second time, the "Shirriff" arrested me and threw me in jail to await the inevitable arrival of the Nazgul.

When the game otherwise ends through combat death, it's accompanied by an image of Sauron putting on the Ring and using it to conquer the world.

Sauron looks a lot like popular conceptions of Satan.

As I finish my explorations of the opening area, my company consists of Frodo, Sam, Pippin, Merry, Druin the dwarf, a pony, and a female wizard named Athelwyn. Druin and Athelwyn are clearly non-canonical additions to the party; also non-canonical is the way they refer to my party as "The Fellowship," which hasn't actually been established yet.

(This would be a good place to mention that One Wiki to Rule Them All has been my constant companion, filling in details about minor characters and places, and helping me understand which characters are from the book and which are invented by the game.)

 

At this point, I'm a little stuck and could use a hint. The only way out of the Shire seems to be a path guarded by a Nazgul (they appear in scripted locations rather than randomly), and I can't defeat him because I used ELBERETH to get by a different Nazgul on the bridge leading into Buckland. The manual had warned, and I had forgotten, that each word of power can only be used once. I think what I needed to do was to cross the river via Bucklebury Ferry rather than the bridge, thus avoiding the first Nazgul and saving ELBERETH for the second one.

Using ELBERETH on the first Nazgul.

The Nazgul doesn't seem impossible to defeat, just really really hard. He basically kills my characters with one blow, but they are capable of wounding him, and I suppose with a lot of luck, I might be able to eventually defeat him with only three or four characters lost. Obviously, I'd rather get out of the Shire with almost everyone alive. Suggestions welcome.

If I end up having to start over, I'll change my exploration pattern and see if I find anything new. For those who have played the game, these are the items that I'm carrying right now. If I'm missing anything, I'll take a light hint about it: The Ring, a sword (which no one can use), something called a "bladepart," a signet ring, a "White Hand" (no idea what it actually is), a "ghost ruby," rations, pipeweed, a "star key," a shovel, torches, a prybar, a bow, mushrooms, and an axe.

None of the discontinuity between the book and the game bothers me terribly because I don't have any particular fondness for the book. I'm curious how true Tolkien fans have felt while playing this game. Do you hate Athelwyn the same way some fans hated Arwen in the films? Or do you just shrug and go with it?

If Gimli had known as much about the loss of Moria as Druin, the Fellowship would have been saved a lot of trouble.