Lord of the Rings: You Shall not Pass!

The party crosses a bridge deep beneath Moria.

Most of this session was taken up by the Mines of Moria, an extremely large, multi-leveled dungeon with numerous passages up and down, stairways, holes in ceilings and floors, teleporters, and other navigation tricks among its 13 levels (6 up, 6 down, plus the main floor). Since the main floor contained both the entrance and the exit, most of the rest of the dungeon was entirely optional, useful mostly for a side-quest to find Durin's Axe.

Outside Rivendell, I had a few places to explore before Moria. There were a handful of barrows full of restless undead who bowed to Aragorn (some reference to the dead men of Dunharrow?) and wanted our help to destroy a magic ring, which "wights of Sauron" were using to capture and hold the dead spirits. It wasn't a lot of effort, but then again it didn't give me any reward.

It's almost like people think I'm good for nothing but destroying rings..

There was also a second passage into the mountains, labeled "Redhorn Pass" which I understand is translated as "Caradhras" in Elvish and was the pass that the Fellowship tried to cross before nearly getting buried in snow. In the game, it seems more like a dungeon, but in any event after some time in a winding corridor, you come up against a snow drift and can't continue.

I guess this was predictable if you know the source material.

Arriving at Moria, there's a little cinematic where Gandalf tries to open the door with a variety of passwords before he realizes the "friend" riddle. The process is mimicked in the game by using the MELLON word of power. The gates open, there's a brief fight with some tentacles coming out of the water, and then the Fellowship is in the mines. Incidentally, Bill the pony gets killed by the tentacles in the animated film. I'm reliably assured this doesn't happen in the book. What was Ralph Bakshi's problem?

Both Moria and the pass, it must be said, are remarkably close to Rivendell. I realize the game was trying to economize on time and space, but it's odd to find these places just a quick walk down the road.

Exploring Moria took a long time. Corridors slope up and down, so sometimes it's not obvious when the party moves between levels (though Gimli usually makes a comment). Orcs, trolls, Uruk-hai, and Olog-hai frequently attack. Some of the ways up and down are in non-obvious places (e.g., you have to move around a room until you get a message that there's a hole going down), and there were an awful lot of encounters and puzzles to solve, almost all geared towards (ultimately) finding Durin's Axe. A player that doesn't care about all that could just run through the first level and be across the Bridge of Khazad-dum in a few minutes. I wanted to explore the whole thing and started out with a "right wall" pattern but gave it up for a "one level at a time" pattern when the former strategy put me in a (long) endless loop.

The dungeon featured a lot of pits and bridges that crossed chasms, some filled with lava. I learned early on that you really don't want to get too close.

There were a couple of scenes that mimicked events in the book (which, of course, I know only from the way they were translated to the Jackson films). The part where Gandalf says "I have no memory of this place" and Pippin makes a huge racket occur in the same room.

This is not, unlike the film, the same room where the Fellowship finds the book detailing Balin's ill-fated attempt to reclaim the mines. That takes place in the top level of the dungeon, where a cut scene from the film shows Gandalf reading the book and learning of Balin's death.

After the party reads the book, some orcs attack:

The game's version of the epic battle in Balin's tomb.

After the battle, the player is encouraged to hustle out the door. If he doesn't, the party gets overwhelmed by orcs, and the game ends. But the Fellowship only needs to leave the room; they don't need to keep running all the way to Khazad-dum. This is another place in which the game removes the book's sense of urgency.

Throughout the mines, I kept finding a brown bird that was screaming Gandalf's name and occasionally provided me with a bit of advice. I had encountered the same bird in the Shire and the Old Forest. I'm not sure if he exists in the books. During one journal entry, he was about to tell Gandalf his name but he got cut off. Does he have something to do with Radagast?

The power turned out to be the KHAZAD word of power.

Finally, there was a fun encounter where I ran into a vein of mithril ore and had the opportunity to mine it. If I only mined four or five pieces, everything was all right, but if I mined more, my party went crazy with lust for mithril, abandoned the quest, and kept mining until orcs came along and killed us.

Ha! Kind of how I feel in real life about heroin!

I met the balrog twice, once in a throne room and later on the bridge. In both cases, I just had to use Gandalf's staff to send him away.

As I said, much of the experience in the mines is finding Durin's Axe. I'm not going to recount every step, but in general, to find the weapon, I had to defeat an evil spirit on one level, find a treasure chest with various quest items on another, and find a word of power (SIGN OF THE SEVEN) on a third. I then had to navigate down to the bottom level, solve a maze, use "perception" in a very non-obvious place to find a hole in the ceiling, walk through a very non-obvious hidden door, use Durin's Pick on a statue, recite two pieces of lore learned elsewhere in the dungeon, give three items to three ghosts, and finally use the word of power. It took bloody forever. (Oddly, there was no place to explicitly use Galadriel's token or the golden wheel, even though I'd been assured that I needed both.) This axe had better be awesome.

There were, surprisingly, two exits from Moria. One was on a lower level. I'm not sure where it led ultimately, but I wanted to do the canonical thing and experience the balrog on the bridge. (Though it later occurred to me that I probably could have kept Gandalf if I'd gone out the other way.) Khazad-dum was anti-climactic. For one thing, the bridge itself was very short:

When I got to the other side, I got three paragraphs about the balrog chasing me, each concluding with the phrase "you are doomed." But I again used Gandalf's staff, and a clip from the film showed Gandalf defeating the balrog and falling to his own "death."

You can't really tell what's going on here, but it was the best shot I got.

I had to fight three Uruks at the exit, but after that I was on my way to Lothlorien.

In general, it was a pretty satisfying dungeon crawl. The enemies weren't so frequent as to be annoying, but they were frequent enough to pose a real danger. (There were a couple of healing places in the dungeon, but not many.) The inventory and skill puzzles were fair. I found some nice mithril/magic armor upgrades. And I liked the varied textures for caverns, hallways, water, lava, and so forth, making the whole dungeon very interesting and evocative.

Finding some quest items from behind Durin's throne.

I haven't talked about combat in a lot of detail in these posts, but there's not much to it. When enemies appear, the party enters combat mode. You still have access to the same commands, including all inventory commands, but each character has to act in turn.

Unless armed with a bow or casting a spell, characters must be in combat range to attack. Owing to the weird nature of the party formation, and how the party somewhat haphazardly follows the lead character, party members might be in a helpful or unhelpful arrangement when combat begins. It's particularly tough in narrow corridors when some characters might end up blocking others from engaging. Some characters have to waste their turn moving into a better position, and they may find they can't get close enough to attack at all until someone else moves. I really wish the game had allowed setting up a combat formation.

A combat with trolls and Nazgul. Note how the game has started the party in the same formation in which they were walking. It will take a while to  untangle them and get them all in melee range.

As far as attacking goes, there's usually only one "attack" option in which the character swings his chosen weapon. If the character has a skill in that weapon, there might be a more powerful second option, such as "aim" for bows and "swing" for axes. If there's more than one enemy in range, you choose which one you want to attack, but there's no easy way to correspond the list of enemies to the actual icons on the screen. If the blow connects--which it usually does--it might be deflected by the enemy's armor, or it might do a number of damage points dependent on the weapon and the character's strength. Wounded enemies are annotated with an *, and wounded enemies near death are annotated with a !. These annotations provide some help in deciding who to target.

Gandalf decides whether to target the Uruk, the Uruk, the Uruk, or the Uruk.

Enemies don't seem to exhibit much of a preference in their own targeting. They don't go for the weakest Fellowship member, or the closest. They just seem to attack anyone in range at random. As I noted previously, when a character drops below 6 hit points, he falls unconscious and dies within a few rounds if you can't wrap up combat before then.

You can try to flee from combat by simply moving off the active screen, but I find that if combat is dangerous enough that I feel compelled to flee, the enemy almost always kills a few characters before I can get everyone off the screen. If a character is so wounded that I need to remove him from danger, it's easy enough just to have him back away from the melee without fleeing entirely.

I thought the combat system might turn more tactical with the introduction of spells, but it didn't at all. There are only three offensive spells--"Winterchill," "Firefinger," and "Vincecrush." I only have the first two, and without exception they do less damage than an effective attack. Worse, they directly deplete the caster's life points. As far as I'm concerned, spells are only useful for solving puzzles, not for offensive combat. There are no defensive or buffing spells in the game. Now that I've lost Gandalf, I have no spells at all except "Countermagic."

My guess is that I'll finish the game in one or two more postings. I look forward to the last couple areas, but I'm also mostly ready for the game to be over.