Now THAT'S a bit over-the-top. Yeah, it's a really lousy game, but that's the kind of score you give a game that is _literally unplayable._ And 5/100 in every category would mean giving it a 5/100 for the soundtrack, and THAT'S just criminal because if nothing else the main theme and Shire theme are absolutely _phenomenal._
I used to love this game, as frustrating as it was. Fun fact: if you had a human player keep Gandalf well away from the Balrog as you defeat it at the end, you could break the game and have Gandalf alive and in your party during the ending sequence where the Fellowship is lamenting Gandalf's death. 12-year-old me laughed like crazy :)
The trick is to avoid letting him join the party until after you slay the Balrog(that for some reason stands in the supposedly DEEP pit under the bridge as a guard enemy which makes no effing sense) because the game basically won’t let you kill it as long as Gandalf is alive in your team. There’s an instructive video somewhere here in YT that shows you how to do it.
You made further than me. I had to stop when I hadn't found all the Simarils to open the gate of Moria (or whichever that gate was for, maybe getting into Rivendel?) and my party died backtracking
I was lucky to get a new game maybe twice a year on Christmas or my Birthday, so when this cartridge showed up at a consignment shop for $10 and I convinced my mom to buy it for me (I was a massive LOTR fan as a little kid too, watched the original 1970s animated movies when I was tiny, read the books before I could understand half of them) I was so excited. I got it home and loved it. Maybe it was desperation for entertainment, or maybe I had a vivid imagination and saw more in the game then appeared, but I played the absolute hell out of the game and enjoyed almost every minute. Memorized those convoluted dungeons you’re complaining about (I didn’t have the printed maps at all, that would have been super useful), figured out the tricks for keeping party members alive, slowly but surely I made progress and my little stupid butt I guess was too dumb to realize I was playing one of the worst games on the system. I had a blast anyways. Until I got to the Mines of Moria. I’m assuming that’s the last dungeon in the game as it’s the last part of the first book. I got to to the Mines over and over again and again only to get lost, lose all my health and die. I’d start new games and race there with as much health and healing stuff as possible, but then I’d lose my way in the mines only to wander aimlessly as enemies slowly whittled me down, eventually killing me off. This happened every single time, I must have tried to beat those Mines for months. But it never happened. I’m almost convinced it was impassible. Eventually I lost interest and gave up, Christmas came around and I got a new game so this one started collecting dust. But just goes to show even the crappiest games can connect with you.
The game ends after Moria. You fight the Balrog as a group in order to get over the bridge. Gimli was the only one who survived the fight lol.... I mean. I really got lucky in getting the whole group there, but then the Balrog killed them all lol.... Still. All you needed was one to survive. After the fight? It rolls the credits as the entire party walks alongside a river. I loved the game too, but man.... to end it after that killed me. Then I tried finding the other parts as a teenager only to find out they canceled the other two in the series due to lack of sales.
I WANTED to love this game so badly back in the day. I remember renting this game and spending an entire weekend trying to find the Gaffer's glasses and constantly seeing Pippin reduced to a pile of bones.
I adore the music in this, even though I'm not a fantasy guy myself, but that mixture of folk fantasy-style music with clean samples of 80's-like cheesy synth flutes and harpsichords sounds amazing, truly a relic of the past.
"It takes like 40 or 50 minutes just to get out of the shire". I tried reading the fellowship of the ring once. This sentiment seems accurate to the source material.
Frank and Brian Herbert did/do long-form writing well (Chapterhouse: Dune notwithstanding). Tolkien seemed to get too caught up in the little details at the expense of pacing. He could fill half a page talking about a freaking tree. The LOTR and Hobbit books were good, but they could have been 2/3 as long with mostly the same impact.
@@DoctorSess Oh, right. Because every book written before 1900 was at least 1,000 pages. Dickens knew how to get things going. Shakespeare did, too. Countless authors before and since managed to get to the point without wasting time describing things like the bark of trees that were never mentioned again. Tolkien seems to be one of very few authors that took "A picture is worth a thousand words" literally and his pacing was trash because of it. 2/3 of over 400 pages is still ~300 pages. That's still beyond the attention span of a golden retriever. Maybe when you're smarter than a golden retriever, you'll understand that.
Oh man. This was one of my first SNES games as a kid, and my mom had read me the books, so I played this game TO DEATH. I remember messing around with the 'Inventory Code' to get all kinds of gear where it wasn't meant to go. I managed to get the mythril coat (usually limited to Frodo, naturally) onto Aragorn, which made him basically immortal, and walked back and forth across the game meting out revenge on wolves and orcs. Good times. Well, no, they weren't. Making-the-best-of-the-bad times.
You just unlocked a memory for me, I played around with the inventory code a bunch too when I had it. I even started to figure out some of its pattern so that I could start with some bonuses and the early fetch stuff in the barrow downs found already. I genuinely had fun with the game, but a big imagination and limited options go a long way to making the best of it.
Man, this was a snes highlight for me and my brother. In fact, I believe we loved the game for all the reasons the reviewer disliked it: the scenarios were often dark, but this was appropriate for the melancholy mood of the game, at.least certain bits; it took a while to leave Hobbiton, which was kinda faithful to the books; the got lost throughout the tumulary caves and Moria, since the booklet didn't include all the maps, but my brother sketched very detailed maps of everything missing - this made the game feel all the more of a table-top RPG experience. A cool detail was that the profile pics of the fellowship seemed to be borrowed from the old animated movie, at that art was beautiful. So, I couldn't disagree more with the reviewer's overall judgement. That said, thanks for making a video about this game, and it most def isn't a fast paced game - you kinda have to go into it expecting the same sort of pace and tone of the book.
Yes, I used to put in random stuff until it worked. That "bik-BOOP" sound of a failed code happened over and over, then when one finally got through and the screen and music faded out, oh, it was magical. What would I see? Who would be in my party? Where would we be standing? I'm not just talking the inventory code. I'd find codes that gave my Aragorn 1000s of HP. I would sometimes find codes that started me with an invisible character that could attack (could hear the swing) but could not move. Like not enough of the character's data existed. Had to reset when I found one like that.
Man, this game... I still own my original copy, and I remember trying to convince my closest friends to play an actual 5-player game with me - I did own the multitap and three or so controllers, so my friends brought their own. However, I was the only real Tolkein fan in the group, and the game itself doesn't do a great job of advertising itself as a "fun" game, especially in the beginning. So, after playing the game alone for many hours and eventually getting lost in Moria, I only ever really turned the game on just to listen to the amazing title theme... And yes, the game really is 5 players, but it's weird: Player 1 controls Frodo until Aragorn joins, and then the hobbit is promptly bumped to Player 4. Samwise is Player 2, Pippin is Player 3, and Gimli is Player 5. I think Meriadoc takes the Player 5 slot until Gimli joins, but I can't exactly remember. The other unmentioned Fellowship characters are only controllable by Player 1 with the R button. One trick I learned with the AI (since I put so much time in it back in the day): just tap R to get them to their "default" state of following you, though sometimes you have to do it several times as their pathfinding might get snagged again. Holding R lets you control all of them, and if you hold the attack button and then hold R, you can get all of your characters to attack somewhat simultaneously, creating a somewhat defensive line against incoming enemies.
I feel like if someone were to make a ROMhack of this, they could solve many of the problems. They could rework the dungeons to be more memorable and easier to navigate (brighter, too!), fix combat to be less clunky and more fluid, remove permadeath and add a mechanic to revive fallen party members, remove the fetch quests, add an actual save mechanic, fix the party AI so that your companions aren't utterly useless, and tweak the story pacing, among other things. I wanted to love this game when I was a kid, seeing as I've been a life-long LOTR fan, but it has so many flaws that make it nearly unplayable. I never got further than the Barrow Downs before I got so frustrated that I had to call it quits. It's a shame, because this game could have been so much more, but fell so far short of that.
The fetch quests could certainly be streamlined to be more believable. Finding Gaffer's glasses shouldn't require a trek into a hazardous dungeon. Realistically, they should be within the Shire or maybe just outside it a little bit.
i guess (i didn't seem to be mentioned in the review beyond the dungeons being _too_ dark, but i think the aesthetic and sprite work is quite nice, too, albeit admittedly repetitive). there are definitely features in there to recommend it, but i'm sceptical that a romhack could save it. the critical flaw from where i'm sitting has to be the gameplay loop-seemingly little or no interaction with the environment beyond swinging your sword, but constantly having to walk back and forth around _very_ similar-looking arenas, and the occasional bout of extremely rudimentary melee combat. i can easily imagine the endless cycle of walk, stab, walk, walk, walk, stab, stab, walk, walk, stab, walk, etc. as being _extremely_ boring without some more interesting abilities, animations, etc.
When I was a kid this was the one game in my hand-me-down pile of cartridges that would never work, no matter what I did. I remember being a really frustrated 7-year old. Maybe that was for the best, in hindsight lol Ps. I think Michael Jordan’s Chaos in the Windy City deserves a closer look. That game is kinda awesome!
Metal Gear was that game for me. Had a copy of Metal Gear on the NES, it would pop up and the demo would run but when you started the game it would freeze up. Guess it might have been a good thing as Metal Gear on the NES wasn't great.
I remember playing this with my friends back when we were in elementary school. Really had a lot of fun. The maps were a big part of the fun, figuring out which dungeon we were in. We actually beat the Balrog. Left us wishing for a sequel.
Mt uncle had everything on Zsnes when I was growing up. I tried this game, it was around the time second LotR movie came out. I couldn't figure out how to play. The footage gives me some memories good and bad... RIP Uncle Dave.
@@ryanschwarz3024 sadly it stops at Lothlórien. I think they intended to make a sequel. There was a PC Two Towers game from Interplay but it was vastly different.
The music in this game is incredible and deserved a better Lord of the Rings game. The composer should get more credit and I'm sure he's done other amazing work. That being said I had this as a child and I found a way to love it as kids do. I actually thought it had atmosphere, but it felt unfinished and it had loads of bugs. You could reset your character by levelling up too much and I somehow got into Moria without collecting the necessary items. And why did Legolas have no attack. It did kinda suck.
Yeah, I also got into Moria without collecting the required stones or w/e it was. I think I also missed Gandalf, or maybe it was Legolas, entirely. I wasn't able to beat Moria though. I should probably try this game again at some point, against my better judgment.
0:34 I remembered Interplay also releasing Lost Vikings, Earthworm Jim, and the greatest SNES game of all time, Rock N Roll Racing. Check the wiki, they have a few more.
This game will forever hold a special place in my heart. I still have my cart. I know its a bad game but theres just something about it that vibes with me. The music is one of a kind amazing. And the graphics are pretty good. I somehow managed to finish this as a kid....for the most part. I believe I had to contact the local Nintendo hotline for some help near the end in Moria or something like that. There is a solid foundation that could have been something really great....but instead it got released in this half finished state... :\ If I remember correctly Legolas couldnt even attack at all so he was a useless party member... I dont remember the manual having maps :o ....now I have to check if my copy even has the manual... Pretty sure I drew my own maps
The drawing of maps for games is something I also remember doing as a kid lol It's amazing the dedication one can have as a child, but as a forty year old man I can't be bothered!!😆😆
@@spyder_33Sometimes it blows me away how much time and effort I put into video games as a kid. Like holy crap I actually beat some of these pretty difficult games?
To be fair..Frodo’s quest in LOTR books is one giant fetch quest. He fetches the ring and brings it to a predetermined spot. Why would the game be different.
I remember there being a HUGE feature in an issue of Nintendo Power showing off the motion capture process for the rotoscoped animation used in this game, does anyone else remember that? It had me SUPER excited about this game, I rented it as soon as it came out and bought it used later...I honestly still enjoy the game, though it's more fun if you can find some other people to play with.
Totally! It was a fun "behind the scenes" feature, with them showing how they got a guy to wear a bathrobe and fake Santa-Claus beard to appear as Gandalf. At the same time, that was the issue which made 9-year-old me realize that gaming magazines (which focused on one console only) might not be an unbiased source of reviews. :b
@@junibug6790 - To be fair though, it was a really big-budget production back in the day...a lot of work went into it even if it doesn't appeal to most and is almost universally reviled nowdays, I really LOVE games like this, Drakkhen, and Beast Wrestler and Heavy Nova for Genesis. They're really niche titles that are actually quite good in my opinion once you take the time to play them in-depth and get used to their quirks, most people just don't bother taking the time to approach them objectively now though...gamers these days are spoiled by instant gratification.
@@philbrook5655 - Well they used real actors, mocap, and rotoscoped animation...all of which the Nintendo Power article made to sound pretty high-budget and the same methods were used by Ralph Bakshi in the theatrical Lord of the Rings animated film which was also big budget for the time and by Filmation studios in the creation of the He-Man and She-Ra cartoons and drove them out-of-business in the late 80's despite having created two of the most successful syndicated animated series' of all-time, since then all of the animation is outsourced to sweatshops in Korea and other developing countries. Also I'm quite certain that they still had to purchase the rights to use the Lord of the Rings license from the Tolkien Estate. So this game likely cost a pretty penny to make, I'm not sure whether it paid off in sales at the time...I saw the game at most rental shops, so I'm sure that they bought it but I waited and bought it used from them when they stopped carrying SNES games. It was released rather late in the system's lifespan from what I remember...close to the same time as Ogre Battle and Earthbound.
I got this game for Christmas as a kid, because both of my parents loved the Lord of the Rings books, and I had started reading them by that point too. Fun fact, this game was expensive back when it was new. I remember it costing $70-80 at K-Mart. Yeah, I didn't love it, but I still have nostalgia for it. And I did manage to beat it too.
For some reason that was the average price back then. I can only assume due to cartridge costs. Maybe disc based games were cheaper. I know they were by time PS2 came out at least, $50.
@@timestamp3919 that's what nintendo power told me when I called their $2/min game counseling hotline lmao. yes, i seriously conviced my parents to let me call the pay by minute game tips number just to ask why games were so expensive lol. not necessarily a word of god authority, but the reason the guy on the phone gave was what you said, cartridge production costs.
@@Prodmullefc oh I remember thinking that GameBoy game prices were even outrageous in the early 90's. I wanted regular ol' "Pac-Man" for Game Boy, which was VERY difficult in the Midwest region I lived in, even in the major city game shops and when we finally did find a wal-mart in the middle of nowhere that HAPPPENED to have a 1 copy that was in the back storeroom from someone who special ordered it but never picked it up, they wanted $45, which is what 6 Golden Coins was going for new...for Pac Man......on Game Boy. ..... I guess we can all be glad that $50 has pretty much stayed the standard for new games and hasn't increased in price at the same rate that everything else has.
I grew up reading LOTR and was so excited to see this game when it came out. The character portrait animation was lifted straight from the 1978 Ralph Bakshi cartoon, hence the really bad haircuts (hey, it was the 70s!). If you've never seen it, it is worth a watch. Peter Jackson has even admitted to taking a lot of inspiration for certain scenes. And hey, you get to see Aragorn running around without pants on, voiced by the legendary Sir John Hurt! 😄 Sadly, this whole game felt like utter disappointment. My Dad and I managed to grind our way through to the end, where you technically have a boss fight in the Balrog. However, the only way to beat him is to get Gandalf to hold still long enough to snuff it before you can actually fight the Balrog and escape.
I think someone found an exploit that let them defeat the Balrog with Gandalf still alive, and then the ending had everyone mourning him while he was standing right there in front of them.
I assume that name was because they didn’t want people pissed off when they discovered the game didn’t cover the whole LOTR story, like what happened with the Bakshi film?
Definitely remember renting this one back in the mid 90's, not making any progress. When the first Peter Jackson LOTR film came out, the local used-game shop in my town jacked up the price of this game and I laughed at him, told him this game was not very good and utterly useless without the instruction booklet.
Even if this game only exists for the following reason, it's worth it; That music, coupled with the atmosphere the artwork creates in the first part of the game, man. First you have the Shire music, which is so unbelievably jovial medieval fantasy music it hurts. Coupled with the art style of the rich greens of the trees and grass. And then, the best part - getting outside and hearing that forlorn, lonley music with the wind in the background, and what is obviously overcast lighting, and the bushes blowing in the wind (they are extremely well animated). It creates such an atmosphere that it inspires me to this day, to think about making scenes in my games, of overcast, desolate but mystical landscapes that are vast and lonely but waiting to be explored, you might find a ruined castle, a secret cave... it actually did inspire quite a few pencil drawings when I was a teenager. Too bad the caves in the game are so unnecessarily lengthy and repetitive it's maddening. I still remember the frustration. Wanting to like the game so much, but just getting so lost in the sheer size and repetition of it. It's like they felt they had to cheaply bulk out the size to unreasonable levels to make it "epic" like the books. And given the space limitations of the time, the easiest way to do this is just repeat stuff. And finding out the game supported FIVE players with the multitap (I bet the mouse was added to allow you to make up the controller numbers) and hiring out some of that gear from the video store and getting far enough to get a handful of players active just to move around together and do some action-RPG stuff in the same game, was very briefly, quite awesome. Until one person died and the game was like, "too bad, you're dead". The promise of what this game could've been, that's why I'm glad it exists. There isn't anything else like it.
You describe the feeling this game inspires very well! I too had that same sense of wonder and high fantasy, the music and atmosphere were top notch, the cave sounds, all of it. So much potential. And being able to play with your best friend, it was maddening how close this was to a classic
@@BenWeeks1984 that's awesome, it's really good to hear about how it made as much of an impression on others as it did me. As a game developer I have the urge to take up the torch and do something along these lines, make something like what it could have been.
10 year old me thought you were supposed to run past all the ringwraiths - first ever game where i actually took a step back and said "yeah this is just bad"
Let me take you back to the early 2000s, when the lord of the rings movies where all the hype and my computer was nowhere near to play any of the current games, but by merely chance of destiny I found that exists a game based on the trilogy for the Snes that I had never heard before! And it's even called volume 1 so obviously it means that there's at least another!! Oh boy oh boy am I for a great afternoon playing in this game! Only for that great anticipation being soured by this maddeningly boring and confusing game 😞 The graphics are quite good for the time that the backgrounds are drawn in a very organic looking manner, and the characters animation is very fluid the only problem is how repetitive and dark everything looks. The music is indeed good but it's very monotone too and when you are lost during the same maze path without being able to find the exit on the frigging cave, the music sounds like it's only helping to drive you nuts. I didn't have access to the internet to look for any guides so I can see you made it a lot longer than I did because I never saw a single orc or goblin I only fought freaking bats. And in this case it's not clear that the game is bad because it was rushed, because I guess with a longer production time they could have fixed maybe the enemy AI or the companion AI and maybe other more creatures but the dark graphics and the nonsense mazes where clearly a choice so this game is very much hopeless
When I first played this game, I was also playing A Link to the Past, Illusion of Gaia, and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. I even chose Mystic Quest over this one!
I have such a love-hate relationship with Drakkhen. Now I only play to level up my characters but not complete any storyline. The nostalgia in the music is enough for me (especially the warp music!)
Ahhh, this takes me back. I've got memories of this game, to be sure. ("Fond ones, right?" *anakinface* "Fond ones... right?") Imagine the era where RPGs were studded with gems like Final Fantasy 6 (3) and Breath of Fire 2 (Chrono Trigger was a year off, yet), and action-RPGs like Illusion of Gaia and Secret of Mana... and then we get this. Don't get me wrong - Lord of the Rings, a great story. Iconic. But at the time it was "niche". The story was almost 40 years old, and the animated version was over 15, and video games really hadn't delved into it (except a few PC roguelikes, and the Mac game this video briefly mentions). It was not really in the spotlight. But enough about that, on to some of the things the video mentions: The dungeon design is exactly as portrayed. And while the manual does have maps, you often have to figure which map you need, as it is listing one map for each dungeon layout, several of which get reused. (They're not randomly picked, just a generic set of maps from which given dungeons and floors drew.) Not to mention the final third of the game, which is one entire dungeon with many floors - the Mines of Moria. And yeah, a character dead is gone forever. I've had to reload - yes, with those passwords - after runs of bad luck. But wait, there's more! First off, Frodo dying = game over. Which is pretty fine up until Rivendell, as you are controlling Frodo. Afterward, Aragorn joins and becomes the player-controlled character (assuming one-player mode). Now, game over is when EITHER Aragorn or Frodo die... and Frodo is now under AI control. Thanks to his mail shirt, he's slightly more durable than the other three hobbits, but still categorically inferior to Aragorn's capabilities. What this video doesn't show? The inventory screen. I remember it only vaguely, but I do recall feeling it was entirely inadequate to the task of serving the game properly. And the icing on the cake? Boromir doesn't exist. They straight up shafted the guy, worse than Jackson ever could. Only eight of you leave Rivendell and go through Moria (and only 7 are really party members; Gandalf is 100% guest-joiner material). As the box art says, this game is "The Lord of the Rings, Vol. 1".... they never made a 2, much less 3. The final boss is the Balrog (where "winning" means "survive until Gandalf does his thing" which still requires reaching a health threshold - unlike the canon where nobody bothered actually fighting the creature because none of them could), and you get an ending cutscene basically describing your visit to Lorien and looking into Galadriel's Mirror. I will agree on the game's one positive quality: the music is stunning. Does this make up for everything else? No, but if you want the best part of this game experience, just look up soundtrack videos and you're good. All the music, none of the gameplay.
Ah, this game, where if you have a party member die you just can't complete it at all. Goodness gracious, what I wouldn't do without Sam Gamgee saying "I think there's a door here" in my life...
I played this game with my best friend for so long, and had a love/hate relationship for years. I remember getting stuck in the barrow-downs for what felt like WEEKS! Getting to Bree felt like a real accomplishment - and then suddenly getting sent back to find more stuff I had missed, man. What a legendarily tough game. Great music, ridiculous gameplay.
You are right about everything. Anyway there is something about this game. I like the graphic presentation, the large open spaces and the music create a lot of atmosphere. I feel somehow transporter and I project what I know about middle-earth into the landscapes. There are few enemy types in this game and every new one that you meet for this reason is exciting. It's a bad game but it triggers my imagination.
I still use the soundtrack of this game for my DnD campaigns. Remember playing this with my father including secret of mana since there weren't many snes jrpgs in the UK. We know the game wasn't exactly exciting all the time but we got through it together and enjoyed our time on it. One moment I tend to laugh about alot is that my dad would always stick to Aragorn as soon as we got him, he was a bit selfishly strict about his choice. But we always joked about it back then even to recently when I was talking about some coop games I was playing with my friends and he would bring up LOFTRV1 among other games to.
My parents got me this and Rock and Roll Racing for my birthday once. Even though I loved R&R Racing my dad has on multiple occasions apologized for getting me this.
Sorry, but I disagree. Does this game have its flaws? Yes. Does that mean it's a bad game? NO! In fact, I loved this game as a kid and I still wish they finished the series (Vol. II and III). I don't really know anything about rom hacking or rom editing, but I would learn just to complete and improve this series. I would definitely add a map system, and improve game play mechanics and esthetics.
You had to be there and be a lord of the rings fan. It was my favorite for a while. Literally 4 friends 24 pack of soda and chips, maps sprawled out adventuring in the barrow downs and Moria. It was amazing for those who loved lotr, had friends, and were open minded.
I bought this when it was new. As a young teen with a measly paper route income at the time, it might have been my first slap in the face purchase. Total waste of what little money I had to spend and a huge disappointment as a young fan of the books. Watching this gameplay footage, I still want to like this game. But I can also feel my eyes getting sleepy...
The battle scenes would have been cool if it would have gone into a menu-based subscreen like Suikoden. The hobbits could have had a combo attack, whether it was Merry and Pippin together or Sam and Frodo together or all four, Aragorn and Legolas could have teamed up, Gimli and Legolas, etc.
I thought this was a fever dream! Back in the day my cousin had this emulated on his computer along with like 100 other snes games. This game creeped me the fuck out and I have no idea what to do and the wolves and snakes kept killing me 😂
This game is one I wish would be patched by some rom team to make it better. It has a lot of potential of being a classic if reworked. Maybe this will be the game that motivates me to learn how to code.
4:24 Whoa, Samwise has some AMAZING stats for level 4... Honest, non-judgemental question from an old man who played this game as a kid; is there a neat glitch to perform that gets those stats, or Game Genie? I really WANTED to like this game as a kid (It was my first introduction to Tom Bombadil!) but I could only beat it with Game Genie and never felt very satisfied with how it ended.
@@madspunky how do you even beat the balrog?! I made it to the end two or three times, both with and without gandalf and not once did I ever beat the thing lol.
I remember that the sections of the password were for each individual character, so you could use one characters segment for the others. I seem to recall having an entire party armed with Sting swords and pretty decent armor. Also with two players it's easy to level up characters by moving the screen to respawn enemies over and over. Then take the buffed out character's password and copy it over the others and boom instant level up for everyone.
Rented this one when I was a kid because I was a big fan of the books (read all three of them on my own when I was 7), and even then I could tell that the game was just not good. Combat is clunky, graphics are bland, gameplay is tedious and time-wasting and the AI is appalling. I never even made it across the river before I had to return it to the video shop and never bothered getting it out again. But seriously, the music is phenomenal, some of the best on the SNES, and that's VERY high praise. You didn't even play the amazing Shire theme in this video, which is a truly gorgeous piece that runs for almost 2 minutes straight before it starts to loop. I wouldn't say it's worth playing for the soundtrack alone, because UA-cam exists, but you really should go out of your way to look up the soundtrack and listen to it for a bit. It was composed by Charles Deenen, best known for Fallout 1 & 2, The Lost Vikings, Planescape: Torment, Another World and Descent 2.
03:48 Isn't the Balrog part kind of a boss fight? (Guess what, he has wings...) And yeah, remember that part of the book when the Balrog turns Gandalf in a pile of bones?
As a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s who read The Hobbit and LotR when I was 8, I was on the lookout for whatever LotR-style games I could find. My father was originally an Atari gamer who moved on to PCs in the late 80s, so I had experience with War in Middle Earth for the Atari ST (a weird but compelling Adventure/Strategy War Game hybrid) and then the PC RPG LotR mentioned; I didn't get a SNES until my 12th Birthday in 1994, and eventually found this, uh, game, which I had my parents get because I hoped it was a port of the PC version. And I was also disappointed by just how bad it was.
I remember renting this as a kid. I didn't know anything about LotR at the time so this was my first experience. The gameplay was dull and I never got out of the shire but most everything else about this game had a charming quality to it, from the music to the drawings of the characters. My guess is the development got rushed.
Having played through this game (with save states, of course), I actually feel you made it look better than it is. I would not say it does a nice job following the original story. It includes moments that were excluded from the movies (most notably Tom Bombadil), but it mostly makes up quests to fill the game.
Based on those character profile pics, this looks like it was adapted from the 70s LotR movie which is also kind of a mess and incomplete so... at least they're consistent.
@@KnivingDispodia - To be fair, LotR in general is a "weird gay little tale about some stuff", I thought that Bakshi's adaptation was quite excellent and in fact far truer to the books than Jackson's...I wish that he'd been able to finish it, but Rankin/Bass at least MOSTLY finished it (in the animation style of THUNDERCATS no less).
The fact that you came up with anything nice to say about this game is a testament in itself. I don't think anyone would have faulted you for going full negative lol. Was really awesome to watch this though. Even known bad games need love from time to time. Thank you for the videos!
I haven't looked it up but I have a feeling this game is worth a lot of money. I was a big Nintendo super Nintendo fan and I never even heard of this game, so I bet it's a rare find.
I remember during the era of renting games, I rented this one. I was in like 5th or 6th grade and you can only rent a game for 1 day for 3.50 dollars. So I always tried to stay up and beat a game. Always, I remember I rented this twice and was so upset with getting lost. It was one of the one games I never beat, because I literally didn't know what I was doing. LOL Oh memories.
I remember renting this back in the day. I also remember not being able to figure out how to get out of the first area surrounded by hedges or garden walls or some-such. And the rental didn’t come with the manual ☹️ Needless to say, it was not a pleasant gaming experience, though based on how the rest of the game is, maybe was lucky to get stuck 😅 On the plus side, i got to enjoy the awesome music for a good long time while repeatedly wandering from wall to wall in a vain attempt to escape 😄
Man, I remember finding this shortly after I discovered decent SNES emulation. I got so excited when I saw there was a Lord of the Rings game! Boy, was that a let down.
I'm still asking myself "why did I beat this game?" It was such a suffering. Btw, do you know that it also has bugs? If I remember correctly there was a point when you need to talk to a tree to do a quest. But I couldn't for some reason, so I had to start from the beginning. This game is a horror
The first time I got close to beating it, I grabbed the final weapon upgrades for Aragorn and Gimli. As it turns out, the programmers didn't anticipate an attack power greater than 99, so when I picked up those weapons, my attack power wrapped around back to 1.
I played up until the Mines of Moria a few years ago and did so with no maps, purely going off of memory and or maps I made myself while playing and exploring. So over many days I get to the mines, and go to save my game again, but just one problem. The 16 bit code the game predetermines for you at this point always includes an "O", which the game does not have, it only has a "Zero". So saving the game was impossible unless you wanted to do Moria in one go. 🙃 Also, the xp for leveling doesn't change -its a flat amount between each level, whether it's 1 or 90. Which means you can kill those Moss giant things before going to the council, then by walking their spawn point on and off screen, respawn them infinitely. I think I got the fellowship to 90+ each in levels, which equates to being unkillable since you'll have 4,000 HP on each member. I'd only recommend playing this game if you are a LotR fanatic and it's the dead of winter outside. The soundtrack is 10/10 though.
Watching the 4 Hobbits repeatedly dying and turn to bones was honestly kinda traumatizing back in the day. I remember putting up with the game all the way to Moria but that dungeon is hell and I gave up on it after being lost for absolute hours
I had this as a kid. One of my favorite things to do was play around with the password system. Mostly this was to get items that would let me skip straight to Bree or beyond. Although that depended on whether I lived past the Nazghul screen. Ah sequence breaking, a true joy of password systems.
I don't even think I knew about this game previously...I guess there is a reason for that! Too bad the amazing music is wasted on this game. It sounds _really_ good for an SNES game! It was developed by Interplay? I'm surprised none of the hobbits fart, belch, or hock a loogie as was like the standard for some of their 90s games! 😅
I remember there being a HUGE featured article in Nintendo Power back in the day showing off the motion capture process for the rotoscoped animation...
My friends and I played the crap out of this game. We loved it! We had a map person guide us, and we got everything in the dungeons and everything. But, we noticed at a certain point the weapons and armour did weird things to your stats, like an overflow, or something? We also got to the balrog, got so excited and tried to get another one of our friends to see it, but our game froze just beneath the balrog, so we didn’t even get to fight it. And then our password didn’t work, so we gave up… right at the end…
I remember trying to play this as a kid when I first discovered emulators, and I tried multiple times but never got really far because it was clunky, confusing and difficult. I thought I was just too dumb to play it, but I guess it just sucks.
I remember renting this back in the day and got lost in the Barrow Downs because a previous renter swiped the instructions. Years later, I found a copy to play any way I could and got stuck in the same place. The samey disorienting dungeons are definitely a thing. An in-game Metroidvania-esque map might not fix all of the games problems, but it would have made it a heck of a lot more playable. A friend and I enjoyed a bit of co-op play back in the day. That revealed another quirk of the game, where only the character who gets the kill-shot on an enemy gains any xp. Such a delight in a game with permadeath and occasional difficulty spikes! We also managed a sequence break where I outran all the Nazgûl guarding the Brandywine Bridge while my friend just spammed parry on the non-Frodo characters. Turns out doing that misses a bunch of fetch quest macguffins and gets you stuck unless you backtrack through the Nazgauntlet.
Man, this was one that I completely missed back in the day. Looks absolutely gorgeous for its era. Im kind of glad I did miss it because I totally would have bought it based on the visuals alone at the time. Having 4 (or 6) members in your party controlled by AI was extremely ambitious for that time, so not surprised they don't work very well. I think the deal breaker for me is the maps in the manual instead of on a pause screen or something. I definitely wouldn't have wanted to sit there trying to work things out with a booklet off screen and with no indication of where I was currently at in the map. But man, those visuals for that era. I'm still impressed with them now.
He complained about every standard component of action rpg, and frankly this game sounded ahead of it's time. He isn't entirely wrong about everything, but given the games Hardware limitations I think it did very well based off of what I saw.
So my first Tolkien game was, The Two Towers. It is a MUD (Multiple User Dungeon). It is a text-based game that predated MMORPGs. I started playing it in 1996-7. This game still exists, and you can play it today.
I saw a preview for this in GamePro in 1993. Man, I was blown away by the one screen shot and the cool tech that made the fights possible (I forgot the name of it). I had just finished the hobbit and was working on Fellowship. I think I would have forgiven the flaws of this game. That was normal game play back then. AD&D Warriors of the Eternal Sun for Genesis also had bland dungeon scenes. I loved it!
I don't understand why it has to be a "Volume 1". Compared to something like Final Fantasy VI, you could easily fit the story of all three books into a single SNES cartridge, which would flow a helluva lot better in terms of narrative.
I liked this despite its flaws, at least back then. the biggest issue was the repeating maps, but you did get used to it, and you could also make your own maps which helps a lot. here's a trick. the block animation allows you to block anything (at least any sword attack). if you hold the button down you will repeatedly block and be effectively immune to incoming attacks in that direction. if you have one character do that, while another stands just behind him, they can attack with their sword through the block and damage what's attacking you. you can do this with ringwraiths and with enough patience you can kill the ringwraiths.
My brother and I (both huge Tolkien fans) LOVED this game. And the music was glorious. This music takes me back to elementary school and makes me think of Donkey Kong Country as well. Got em both same Christmas I believe. Just a flood of mashed up memories.
I got this game back in the mid-90's, either for Christmas or a birthday (I still have it.) I didn't ask for it, and I knew nothing about the series or the games' existence. Whoever got it for me (most likely my grandma, otherwise it was my mom) obviously just thought I would probably like it. It's an RPG, and since I love RPGs it was a perfectly reasonable assumption to make. Unfortunately, I hated it and was never able to get anywhere. I remember the super slow attacks you mentioned, and I also remember it being crazy difficult. Every once in a blue moon I use to pull it out and give it another go, but it never grew on me. The "Vol. 1" part of the title suggests that more of these were planned. I can't say I'm surprised that never happened, and I'm thankful that they spared us.
Great review and video! I really wanted this game as a kid. I was really into LOTR and Warhammer, so it looked right up my street. I saw an advert for it in a magazine but could never find it in the shops. Sounds like I dodged a bullet 😂
I grew out of 'consoles' when the Commodore 64 w/disk drive came out so never saw this but was reminded of another 'ancient' game based on that property - J.R.R. Tolkien's War in Middle Earth (1988)
Had great music, cool atmosphere, nice rotoscoped animation and an almost WRPG rogue-esque openness to it. Was tough to figure out and the password system was a terrible choice to skimp on adding a battery to the cart costs. I rented it, then picked it up used eventually, very cheap. Never got far, or really understood where I was going or what I was doing, but enjoyed it for some reason and was glad to have it in the collection.
I bought this at a flea market as a kid without a manual or any kind of guide. I played it with a big sketch pad next to me and would sit there and map out the caves and dungeons by hand. Did that with Willow on NES too
I missed this game when it came out, but looking at the character portraits, I am thinking that this may have been based on the Ralph Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings. The character portraits are most certainly from that version of the story.
When u briefly mentioned how this game was _not_ like A Link to the Past or Secret of Mana, it made me think how cool it would be if someone were to make a mod of one of those games where you played through the story of Lord of the Rings! That would be so cool!
In the 90's, a Nordic gaming magazine "Super Power" gave this game 5's on every category and on overall score. On a scale of 0-100.
Reminds me of a bit in Flight of the Concords.
That magazine was too kind to this abomination.
I remember that. It was called "Power Player" in Denmark.
Now THAT'S a bit over-the-top. Yeah, it's a really lousy game, but that's the kind of score you give a game that is _literally unplayable._ And 5/100 in every category would mean giving it a 5/100 for the soundtrack, and THAT'S just criminal because if nothing else the main theme and Shire theme are absolutely _phenomenal._
@@ArcaneAzmadi I was thinking the same thing hahahaha
I used to love this game, as frustrating as it was. Fun fact: if you had a human player keep Gandalf well away from the Balrog as you defeat it at the end, you could break the game and have Gandalf alive and in your party during the ending sequence where the Fellowship is lamenting Gandalf's death. 12-year-old me laughed like crazy :)
"Ah, but if only Gandalf were still with us."
"I'm right here."
"He died a hero's death. But he shall live on in our hearts."
"I'M RIGHT HERE!"
"This foe is beyond any of you!"
"Already killed it"
The trick is to avoid letting him join the party until after you slay the Balrog(that for some reason stands in the supposedly DEEP pit under the bridge as a guard enemy which makes no effing sense) because the game basically won’t let you kill it as long as Gandalf is alive in your team. There’s an instructive video somewhere here in YT that shows you how to do it.
You made further than me. I had to stop when I hadn't found all the Simarils to open the gate of Moria (or whichever that gate was for, maybe getting into Rivendel?) and my party died backtracking
@michaeldane75 this game has the Fellowship find the freaking _Silmarils!?_ Thats hugely lore breaking lmao wtf!
I was lucky to get a new game maybe twice a year on Christmas or my Birthday, so when this cartridge showed up at a consignment shop for $10 and I convinced my mom to buy it for me (I was a massive LOTR fan as a little kid too, watched the original 1970s animated movies when I was tiny, read the books before I could understand half of them) I was so excited. I got it home and loved it.
Maybe it was desperation for entertainment, or maybe I had a vivid imagination and saw more in the game then appeared, but I played the absolute hell out of the game and enjoyed almost every minute. Memorized those convoluted dungeons you’re complaining about (I didn’t have the printed maps at all, that would have been super useful), figured out the tricks for keeping party members alive, slowly but surely I made progress and my little stupid butt I guess was too dumb to realize I was playing one of the worst games on the system. I had a blast anyways.
Until I got to the Mines of Moria. I’m assuming that’s the last dungeon in the game as it’s the last part of the first book. I got to to the Mines over and over again and again only to get lost, lose all my health and die. I’d start new games and race there with as much health and healing stuff as possible, but then I’d lose my way in the mines only to wander aimlessly as enemies slowly whittled me down, eventually killing me off. This happened every single time, I must have tried to beat those Mines for months. But it never happened. I’m almost convinced it was impassible. Eventually I lost interest and gave up, Christmas came around and I got a new game so this one started collecting dust.
But just goes to show even the crappiest games can connect with you.
With GameFAQs and UA-cam at your side, you should totally go back and finish the game, once and for all. AVENGE YOUR CHILDHOOD!!!
Yes! Reforge the controller and become the King you were meant to be!
@@michaeloffgrid YOOOOOUUUUU...SHAAAAAALL...PAAAAASS!!!!!!!
Moria isn't where the first book ends, Fellowship of the Ring ends after they travel down the river. Moria is about 75% of the way through.
The game ends after Moria.
You fight the Balrog as a group in order to get over the bridge.
Gimli was the only one who survived the fight lol....
I mean. I really got lucky in getting the whole group there, but then the Balrog killed them all lol....
Still.
All you needed was one to survive.
After the fight?
It rolls the credits as the entire party walks alongside a river.
I loved the game too, but man.... to end it after that killed me.
Then I tried finding the other parts as a teenager only to find out they canceled the other two in the series due to lack of sales.
I WANTED to love this game so badly back in the day. I remember renting this game and spending an entire weekend trying to find the Gaffer's glasses and constantly seeing Pippin reduced to a pile of bones.
Pippin Death Simulator, Vol. 1
Precisely my experience with this is as well. Such a shame
@@umchoyka I was going to say, this was _exactly_ my experience also. How many hundreds of kids suffered our fate?
@@ROMBomb001 at least one more lol
@@charlieprince8671 Me too. Wanted to love it. Kinda even did... Kinda...
I adore the music in this, even though I'm not a fantasy guy myself, but that mixture of folk fantasy-style music with clean samples of 80's-like cheesy synth flutes and harpsichords sounds amazing, truly a relic of the past.
Loved the music
Can I interest you in some Heroes of Might and Magic OSTs?
Wow. It's been ages since I've seen a Komander Keen mushroom. O.o
The music is one of a kind amazing in this game
If you like this kind of music, you probably will like the genre Dungeon Synth.
"It takes like 40 or 50 minutes just to get out of the shire".
I tried reading the fellowship of the ring once. This sentiment seems accurate to the source material.
Once you're past Tom Bombadil it picks up the pace... Bilbo's birthday was a nightmare, indeed
Frank and Brian Herbert did/do long-form writing well (Chapterhouse: Dune notwithstanding). Tolkien seemed to get too caught up in the little details at the expense of pacing. He could fill half a page talking about a freaking tree. The LOTR and Hobbit books were good, but they could have been 2/3 as long with mostly the same impact.
@@encycl07pedia- it’s because in Tolkien’s time people didn’t have the attention spans of golden retrievers
@@DoctorSess Oh, right. Because every book written before 1900 was at least 1,000 pages. Dickens knew how to get things going. Shakespeare did, too. Countless authors before and since managed to get to the point without wasting time describing things like the bark of trees that were never mentioned again. Tolkien seems to be one of very few authors that took "A picture is worth a thousand words" literally and his pacing was trash because of it.
2/3 of over 400 pages is still ~300 pages. That's still beyond the attention span of a golden retriever. Maybe when you're smarter than a golden retriever, you'll understand that.
@@encycl07pedia- Who let the dogs out? - the baha men
True, the music is the only reason to experience this game, so weird that an overall bad game can have some amazing tracks.
There are tons of bad or mediocre games with really good music out there.
It's a weird ass feature of games of the time. So many absolutely garbage games still had some dope af soundtracks.
Even a mediocre developer can luck out and hire a talented composer.
@@ditheremotion there's a cheap cash-in platformer based on moderately popular 90s cartoon Bobby's World that has some of the best music on SNES
@@ditheremotion waterworld comes to mind
I read the books when I was ten and was excited for this game. When I heard the music I was sure it would be amazing. Then I started playing...
Oh man. This was one of my first SNES games as a kid, and my mom had read me the books, so I played this game TO DEATH. I remember messing around with the 'Inventory Code' to get all kinds of gear where it wasn't meant to go. I managed to get the mythril coat (usually limited to Frodo, naturally) onto Aragorn, which made him basically immortal, and walked back and forth across the game meting out revenge on wolves and orcs. Good times. Well, no, they weren't. Making-the-best-of-the-bad times.
You just unlocked a memory for me, I played around with the inventory code a bunch too when I had it. I even started to figure out some of its pattern so that I could start with some bonuses and the early fetch stuff in the barrow downs found already. I genuinely had fun with the game, but a big imagination and limited options go a long way to making the best of it.
Man, this was a snes highlight for me and my brother. In fact, I believe we loved the game for all the reasons the reviewer disliked it: the scenarios were often dark, but this was appropriate for the melancholy mood of the game, at.least certain bits; it took a while to leave Hobbiton, which was kinda faithful to the books; the got lost throughout the tumulary caves and Moria, since the booklet didn't include all the maps, but my brother sketched very detailed maps of everything missing - this made the game feel all the more of a table-top RPG experience. A cool detail was that the profile pics of the fellowship seemed to be borrowed from the old animated movie, at that art was beautiful. So, I couldn't disagree more with the reviewer's overall judgement. That said, thanks for making a video about this game, and it most def isn't a fast paced game - you kinda have to go into it expecting the same sort of pace and tone of the book.
@@sebastiansanhueza9601 this makes me happy. people can find good things in any game I swear.
that's fucking badass
Yes, I used to put in random stuff until it worked. That "bik-BOOP" sound of a failed code happened over and over, then when one finally got through and the screen and music faded out, oh, it was magical. What would I see? Who would be in my party? Where would we be standing? I'm not just talking the inventory code. I'd find codes that gave my Aragorn 1000s of HP. I would sometimes find codes that started me with an invisible character that could attack (could hear the swing) but could not move. Like not enough of the character's data existed. Had to reset when I found one like that.
Man, this game... I still own my original copy, and I remember trying to convince my closest friends to play an actual 5-player game with me - I did own the multitap and three or so controllers, so my friends brought their own. However, I was the only real Tolkein fan in the group, and the game itself doesn't do a great job of advertising itself as a "fun" game, especially in the beginning.
So, after playing the game alone for many hours and eventually getting lost in Moria, I only ever really turned the game on just to listen to the amazing title theme...
And yes, the game really is 5 players, but it's weird: Player 1 controls Frodo until Aragorn joins, and then the hobbit is promptly bumped to Player 4. Samwise is Player 2, Pippin is Player 3, and Gimli is Player 5. I think Meriadoc takes the Player 5 slot until Gimli joins, but I can't exactly remember. The other unmentioned Fellowship characters are only controllable by Player 1 with the R button.
One trick I learned with the AI (since I put so much time in it back in the day): just tap R to get them to their "default" state of following you, though sometimes you have to do it several times as their pathfinding might get snagged again. Holding R lets you control all of them, and if you hold the attack button and then hold R, you can get all of your characters to attack somewhat simultaneously, creating a somewhat defensive line against incoming enemies.
nice
I feel like if someone were to make a ROMhack of this, they could solve many of the problems. They could rework the dungeons to be more memorable and easier to navigate (brighter, too!), fix combat to be less clunky and more fluid, remove permadeath and add a mechanic to revive fallen party members, remove the fetch quests, add an actual save mechanic, fix the party AI so that your companions aren't utterly useless, and tweak the story pacing, among other things. I wanted to love this game when I was a kid, seeing as I've been a life-long LOTR fan, but it has so many flaws that make it nearly unplayable. I never got further than the Barrow Downs before I got so frustrated that I had to call it quits. It's a shame, because this game could have been so much more, but fell so far short of that.
Thats a lot of broken shit for one game yo
@@MrSlicktherick Oh yeah, definitely. It's a shame, too, because it really could have been a good game but they dropped the ball big time.
I think it might be easier to take the music from this game and just make a good game from scratch.
The fetch quests could certainly be streamlined to be more believable. Finding Gaffer's glasses shouldn't require a trek into a hazardous dungeon. Realistically, they should be within the Shire or maybe just outside it a little bit.
i guess (i didn't seem to be mentioned in the review beyond the dungeons being _too_ dark, but i think the aesthetic and sprite work is quite nice, too, albeit admittedly repetitive). there are definitely features in there to recommend it, but i'm sceptical that a romhack could save it. the critical flaw from where i'm sitting has to be the gameplay loop-seemingly little or no interaction with the environment beyond swinging your sword, but constantly having to walk back and forth around _very_ similar-looking arenas, and the occasional bout of extremely rudimentary melee combat. i can easily imagine the endless cycle of walk, stab, walk, walk, walk, stab, stab, walk, walk, stab, walk, etc. as being _extremely_ boring without some more interesting abilities, animations, etc.
When I was a kid this was the one game in my hand-me-down pile of cartridges that would never work, no matter what I did. I remember being a really frustrated 7-year old. Maybe that was for the best, in hindsight lol
Ps. I think Michael Jordan’s Chaos in the Windy City deserves a closer look. That game is kinda awesome!
sounds like you got lucky lol
He's got a video about that game.
Metal Gear was that game for me. Had a copy of Metal Gear on the NES, it would pop up and the demo would run but when you started the game it would freeze up. Guess it might have been a good thing as Metal Gear on the NES wasn't great.
@@vaylonkenadell I thought it was just a highlight in a list video? Very cool if he does have a full video on it.
The fates prevented you from playing the game.
You were destined for greater things.
I remember playing this with my friends back when we were in elementary school. Really had a lot of fun. The maps were a big part of the fun, figuring out which dungeon we were in. We actually beat the Balrog. Left us wishing for a sequel.
Mt uncle had everything on Zsnes when I was growing up. I tried this game, it was around the time second LotR movie came out. I couldn't figure out how to play. The footage gives me some memories good and bad... RIP Uncle Dave.
I loved this game as a kid. Played it all the way through with my brother.
does it cover the complete LOTR storyline from Fellowship through Return?
@@ryanschwarz3024 sadly it stops at Lothlórien. I think they intended to make a sequel. There was a PC Two Towers game from Interplay but it was vastly different.
The music in this game is incredible and deserved a better Lord of the Rings game. The composer should get more credit and I'm sure he's done other amazing work. That being said I had this as a child and I found a way to love it as kids do. I actually thought it had atmosphere, but it felt unfinished and it had loads of bugs. You could reset your character by levelling up too much and I somehow got into Moria without collecting the necessary items. And why did Legolas have no attack. It did kinda suck.
Charles Deenen, in case you were wondering and hadn't looked it up yourself.
Yeah, I also got into Moria without collecting the required stones or w/e it was. I think I also missed Gandalf, or maybe it was Legolas, entirely. I wasn't able to beat Moria though. I should probably try this game again at some point, against my better judgment.
@@ryanscuderi5488 He also did The Lost Vikings (among a ton of other games), which was a real gem in my opinion.
0:34 I remembered Interplay also releasing Lost Vikings, Earthworm Jim, and the greatest SNES game of all time, Rock N Roll Racing. Check the wiki, they have a few more.
This game will forever hold a special place in my heart. I still have my cart. I know its a bad game but theres just something about it that vibes with me. The music is one of a kind amazing. And the graphics are pretty good.
I somehow managed to finish this as a kid....for the most part. I believe I had to contact the local Nintendo hotline for some help near the end in Moria or something like that.
There is a solid foundation that could have been something really great....but instead it got released in this half finished state... :\ If I remember correctly Legolas couldnt even attack at all so he was a useless party member...
I dont remember the manual having maps :o ....now I have to check if my copy even has the manual... Pretty sure I drew my own maps
The drawing of maps for games is something I also remember doing as a kid lol
It's amazing the dedication one can have as a child, but as a forty year old man I can't be bothered!!😆😆
@@spyder_33Sometimes it blows me away how much time and effort I put into video games as a kid. Like holy crap I actually beat some of these pretty difficult games?
I tried to play this back in the 90s. It was terribad. Never made it out of the shire.
Same, rented it and couldn’t progress
Me neither, fuck this game
To be fair..Frodo’s quest in LOTR books is one giant fetch quest. He fetches the ring and brings it to a predetermined spot. Why would the game be different.
That’s just the overall quest though. He’s not grabbing a bunch of random stuff the whole time or the movie and book would suck
Everything in life is a fetch quest
If Secret of Mana got run over by a bus and was struck by lightning, you have this game...
the best comment so far, LOL
I remember there being a HUGE feature in an issue of Nintendo Power showing off the motion capture process for the rotoscoped animation used in this game, does anyone else remember that? It had me SUPER excited about this game, I rented it as soon as it came out and bought it used later...I honestly still enjoy the game, though it's more fun if you can find some other people to play with.
Totally! It was a fun "behind the scenes" feature, with them showing how they got a guy to wear a bathrobe and fake Santa-Claus beard to appear as Gandalf. At the same time, that was the issue which made 9-year-old me realize that gaming magazines (which focused on one console only) might not be an unbiased source of reviews. :b
@@junibug6790 - To be fair though, it was a really big-budget production back in the day...a lot of work went into it even if it doesn't appeal to most and is almost universally reviled nowdays, I really LOVE games like this, Drakkhen, and Beast Wrestler and Heavy Nova for Genesis. They're really niche titles that are actually quite good in my opinion once you take the time to play them in-depth and get used to their quirks, most people just don't bother taking the time to approach them objectively now though...gamers these days are spoiled by instant gratification.
@@JohnnyProctor9 Was it really big budget? It doesn't feel like it at all. Other than the soundtrack.
@@philbrook5655 - Well they used real actors, mocap, and rotoscoped animation...all of which the Nintendo Power article made to sound pretty high-budget and the same methods were used by Ralph Bakshi in the theatrical Lord of the Rings animated film which was also big budget for the time and by Filmation studios in the creation of the He-Man and She-Ra cartoons and drove them out-of-business in the late 80's despite having created two of the most successful syndicated animated series' of all-time, since then all of the animation is outsourced to sweatshops in Korea and other developing countries. Also I'm quite certain that they still had to purchase the rights to use the Lord of the Rings license from the Tolkien Estate. So this game likely cost a pretty penny to make, I'm not sure whether it paid off in sales at the time...I saw the game at most rental shops, so I'm sure that they bought it but I waited and bought it used from them when they stopped carrying SNES games. It was released rather late in the system's lifespan from what I remember...close to the same time as Ogre Battle and Earthbound.
@@JohnnyProctor9 Fair enough. Think people forget that LotT wasn't the huge property it would later become in the 90s.
I got this game for Christmas as a kid, because both of my parents loved the Lord of the Rings books, and I had started reading them by that point too. Fun fact, this game was expensive back when it was new. I remember it costing $70-80 at K-Mart. Yeah, I didn't love it, but I still have nostalgia for it. And I did manage to beat it too.
For some reason that was the average price back then. I can only assume due to cartridge costs. Maybe disc based games were cheaper. I know they were by time PS2 came out at least, $50.
@@timestamp3919 that's what nintendo power told me when I called their $2/min game counseling hotline lmao. yes, i seriously conviced my parents to let me call the pay by minute game tips number just to ask why games were so expensive lol. not necessarily a word of god authority, but the reason the guy on the phone gave was what you said, cartridge production costs.
@@Prodmullefc oh I remember thinking that GameBoy game prices were even outrageous in the early 90's. I wanted regular ol' "Pac-Man" for Game Boy, which was VERY difficult in the Midwest region I lived in, even in the major city game shops and when we finally did find a wal-mart in the middle of nowhere that HAPPPENED to have a 1 copy that was in the back storeroom from someone who special ordered it but never picked it up, they wanted $45, which is what 6 Golden Coins was going for new...for Pac Man......on Game Boy. ..... I guess we can all be glad that $50 has pretty much stayed the standard for new games and hasn't increased in price at the same rate that everything else has.
I grew up reading LOTR and was so excited to see this game when it came out. The character portrait animation was lifted straight from the 1978 Ralph Bakshi cartoon, hence the really bad haircuts (hey, it was the 70s!). If you've never seen it, it is worth a watch. Peter Jackson has even admitted to taking a lot of inspiration for certain scenes. And hey, you get to see Aragorn running around without pants on, voiced by the legendary Sir John Hurt! 😄 Sadly, this whole game felt like utter disappointment. My Dad and I managed to grind our way through to the end, where you technically have a boss fight in the Balrog. However, the only way to beat him is to get Gandalf to hold still long enough to snuff it before you can actually fight the Balrog and escape.
That cartoon was terrible lmao. It’s not worth watching nowadays. Back then it was cool but it certainly hasn’t aged well… like at all
I think someone found an exploit that let them defeat the Balrog with Gandalf still alive, and then the ending had everyone mourning him while he was standing right there in front of them.
I DESPISE this game. I find it hilarious that they called it Vol. 1 like it was good enough to even warrant a sequel.
computer version got a sequel.
I assume that name was because they didn’t want people pissed off when they discovered the game didn’t cover the whole LOTR story, like what happened with the Bakshi film?
It's much better on PC
It isn't the worst but I'd definitely never play it again.
@@timestamp3919 this describes my experience with most SNES games tbh
Definitely remember renting this one back in the mid 90's, not making any progress. When the first Peter Jackson LOTR film came out, the local used-game shop in my town jacked up the price of this game and I laughed at him, told him this game was not very good and utterly useless without the instruction booklet.
Even if this game only exists for the following reason, it's worth it; That music, coupled with the atmosphere the artwork creates in the first part of the game, man. First you have the Shire music, which is so unbelievably jovial medieval fantasy music it hurts. Coupled with the art style of the rich greens of the trees and grass. And then, the best part - getting outside and hearing that forlorn, lonley music with the wind in the background, and what is obviously overcast lighting, and the bushes blowing in the wind (they are extremely well animated). It creates such an atmosphere that it inspires me to this day, to think about making scenes in my games, of overcast, desolate but mystical landscapes that are vast and lonely but waiting to be explored, you might find a ruined castle, a secret cave... it actually did inspire quite a few pencil drawings when I was a teenager.
Too bad the caves in the game are so unnecessarily lengthy and repetitive it's maddening. I still remember the frustration. Wanting to like the game so much, but just getting so lost in the sheer size and repetition of it. It's like they felt they had to cheaply bulk out the size to unreasonable levels to make it "epic" like the books. And given the space limitations of the time, the easiest way to do this is just repeat stuff.
And finding out the game supported FIVE players with the multitap (I bet the mouse was added to allow you to make up the controller numbers) and hiring out some of that gear from the video store and getting far enough to get a handful of players active just to move around together and do some action-RPG stuff in the same game, was very briefly, quite awesome. Until one person died and the game was like, "too bad, you're dead".
The promise of what this game could've been, that's why I'm glad it exists. There isn't anything else like it.
You describe the feeling this game inspires very well! I too had that same sense of wonder and high fantasy, the music and atmosphere were top notch, the cave sounds, all of it. So much potential. And being able to play with your best friend, it was maddening how close this was to a classic
@@BenWeeks1984 that's awesome, it's really good to hear about how it made as much of an impression on others as it did me. As a game developer I have the urge to take up the torch and do something along these lines, make something like what it could have been.
Square should’ve had the rights for a game like this
We definitely know they don’t own the rights this music…oh wait this not Facebook lol
No way! The Japanese of the 1990s would NOT have understood the nuances needed to make this a hit. I’m not sure anyone could have lol
@@chriskoschik391 it would’ve been a 8/10 atleast. Better than a 2/10. Lol
@@chriskoschik391 Well hey, they made an RPG based on a western novel in the past with Square's Tom Sawyer and... oh, I see your point
JRPGs at this time were literally adaptations of western things like Ultima & D&D. It would be a perfect fit.
10 year old me thought you were supposed to run past all the ringwraiths - first ever game where i actually took a step back and said "yeah this is just bad"
Let me take you back to the early 2000s, when the lord of the rings movies where all the hype and my computer was nowhere near to play any of the current games, but by merely chance of destiny I found that exists a game based on the trilogy for the Snes that I had never heard before! And it's even called volume 1 so obviously it means that there's at least another!! Oh boy oh boy am I for a great afternoon playing in this game!
Only for that great anticipation being soured by this maddeningly boring and confusing game 😞
The graphics are quite good for the time that the backgrounds are drawn in a very organic looking manner, and the characters animation is very fluid the only problem is how repetitive and dark everything looks. The music is indeed good but it's very monotone too and when you are lost during the same maze path without being able to find the exit on the frigging cave, the music sounds like it's only helping to drive you nuts. I didn't have access to the internet to look for any guides so I can see you made it a lot longer than I did because I never saw a single orc or goblin I only fought freaking bats. And in this case it's not clear that the game is bad because it was rushed, because I guess with a longer production time they could have fixed maybe the enemy AI or the companion AI and maybe other more creatures but the dark graphics and the nonsense mazes where clearly a choice so this game is very much hopeless
When I first played this game, I was also playing A Link to the Past, Illusion of Gaia, and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.
I even chose Mystic Quest over this one!
Hey now! Mystic quest may be simple but, damn, it has charm!
@@chriskoschik391 Not hating on it at all! It was my beginner's entrance to RPGs.
My mom bought me this game that opening music slaps I also enjoy the character design but yeah if you lost the manual back in the 90's you where boned
I feel like this game is similar to Drakkhen in that the gameplay is pure jank but the music and atmosphere is what carries it a little.
Good comparison. Drakkhen was a bigger disappointment for me. This one I had an enjoyable weekend with.
I have such a love-hate relationship with Drakkhen. Now I only play to level up my characters but not complete any storyline. The nostalgia in the music is enough for me (especially the warp music!)
Ahhh, this takes me back. I've got memories of this game, to be sure. ("Fond ones, right?" *anakinface* "Fond ones... right?")
Imagine the era where RPGs were studded with gems like Final Fantasy 6 (3) and Breath of Fire 2 (Chrono Trigger was a year off, yet), and action-RPGs like Illusion of Gaia and Secret of Mana... and then we get this. Don't get me wrong - Lord of the Rings, a great story. Iconic. But at the time it was "niche". The story was almost 40 years old, and the animated version was over 15, and video games really hadn't delved into it (except a few PC roguelikes, and the Mac game this video briefly mentions). It was not really in the spotlight. But enough about that, on to some of the things the video mentions:
The dungeon design is exactly as portrayed. And while the manual does have maps, you often have to figure which map you need, as it is listing one map for each dungeon layout, several of which get reused. (They're not randomly picked, just a generic set of maps from which given dungeons and floors drew.) Not to mention the final third of the game, which is one entire dungeon with many floors - the Mines of Moria.
And yeah, a character dead is gone forever. I've had to reload - yes, with those passwords - after runs of bad luck. But wait, there's more! First off, Frodo dying = game over. Which is pretty fine up until Rivendell, as you are controlling Frodo. Afterward, Aragorn joins and becomes the player-controlled character (assuming one-player mode). Now, game over is when EITHER Aragorn or Frodo die... and Frodo is now under AI control. Thanks to his mail shirt, he's slightly more durable than the other three hobbits, but still categorically inferior to Aragorn's capabilities.
What this video doesn't show? The inventory screen. I remember it only vaguely, but I do recall feeling it was entirely inadequate to the task of serving the game properly.
And the icing on the cake? Boromir doesn't exist. They straight up shafted the guy, worse than Jackson ever could. Only eight of you leave Rivendell and go through Moria (and only 7 are really party members; Gandalf is 100% guest-joiner material).
As the box art says, this game is "The Lord of the Rings, Vol. 1".... they never made a 2, much less 3. The final boss is the Balrog (where "winning" means "survive until Gandalf does his thing" which still requires reaching a health threshold - unlike the canon where nobody bothered actually fighting the creature because none of them could), and you get an ending cutscene basically describing your visit to Lorien and looking into Galadriel's Mirror.
I will agree on the game's one positive quality: the music is stunning. Does this make up for everything else? No, but if you want the best part of this game experience, just look up soundtrack videos and you're good. All the music, none of the gameplay.
Ah, this game, where if you have a party member die you just can't complete it at all. Goodness gracious, what I wouldn't do without Sam Gamgee saying "I think there's a door here" in my life...
I played this game with my best friend for so long, and had a love/hate relationship for years. I remember getting stuck in the barrow-downs for what felt like WEEKS! Getting to Bree felt like a real accomplishment - and then suddenly getting sent back to find more stuff I had missed, man. What a legendarily tough game. Great music, ridiculous gameplay.
You are right about everything. Anyway there is something about this game. I like the graphic presentation, the large open spaces and the music create a lot of atmosphere. I feel somehow transporter and I project what I know about middle-earth into the landscapes. There are few enemy types in this game and every new one that you meet for this reason is exciting. It's a bad game but it triggers my imagination.
I know what you mean... It's not good but it has atmosphere in spades.
I still use the soundtrack of this game for my DnD campaigns. Remember playing this with my father including secret of mana since there weren't many snes jrpgs in the UK. We know the game wasn't exactly exciting all the time but we got through it together and enjoyed our time on it. One moment I tend to laugh about alot is that my dad would always stick to Aragorn as soon as we got him, he was a bit selfishly strict about his choice. But we always joked about it back then even to recently when I was talking about some coop games I was playing with my friends and he would bring up LOFTRV1 among other games to.
1:10 Actually it's on his "eleventy first" birthday. 😉
My parents got me this and Rock and Roll Racing for my birthday once. Even though I loved R&R Racing my dad has on multiple occasions apologized for getting me this.
Yeah I sure do remember renting this one as a kid and being massively disappointed.
This is still my favorite UA-cam channel. Great video. Glad you're back SNESDrunk!
Sorry, but I disagree. Does this game have its flaws? Yes. Does that mean it's a bad game? NO! In fact, I loved this game as a kid and I still wish they finished the series (Vol. II and III). I don't really know anything about rom hacking or rom editing, but I would learn just to complete and improve this series. I would definitely add a map system, and improve game play mechanics and esthetics.
Nostalgia makes you like it better
You had to be there and be a lord of the rings fan. It was my favorite for a while. Literally 4 friends 24 pack of soda and chips, maps sprawled out adventuring in the barrow downs and Moria. It was amazing for those who loved lotr, had friends, and were open minded.
I bought this when it was new. As a young teen with a measly paper route income at the time, it might have been my first slap in the face purchase. Total waste of what little money I had to spend and a huge disappointment as a young fan of the books.
Watching this gameplay footage, I still want to like this game. But I can also feel my eyes getting sleepy...
The battle scenes would have been cool if it would have gone into a menu-based subscreen like Suikoden. The hobbits could have had a combo attack, whether it was Merry and Pippin together or Sam and Frodo together or all four, Aragorn and Legolas could have teamed up, Gimli and Legolas, etc.
I thought this was a fever dream! Back in the day my cousin had this emulated on his computer along with like 100 other snes games. This game creeped me the fuck out and I have no idea what to do and the wolves and snakes kept killing me 😂
This game is one I wish would be patched by some rom team to make it better. It has a lot of potential of being a classic if reworked. Maybe this will be the game that motivates me to learn how to code.
4:24 Whoa, Samwise has some AMAZING stats for level 4... Honest, non-judgemental question from an old man who played this game as a kid; is there a neat glitch to perform that gets those stats, or Game Genie? I really WANTED to like this game as a kid (It was my first introduction to Tom Bombadil!) but I could only beat it with Game Genie and never felt very satisfied with how it ended.
how does this game end? how far into the first book does it go?
@@pablofmc You beat the balrog, walk past some trees, the living party members do some talking, you see Sauron's eye in a bowl. Nothing spectacular.
@@madspunky how do you even beat the balrog?! I made it to the end two or three times, both with and without gandalf and not once did I ever beat the thing lol.
@@silverbane8065 it's been many years, but I recall just slashing him. Gandalf was turned to bones!
I remember that the sections of the password were for each individual character, so you could use one characters segment for the others. I seem to recall having an entire party armed with Sting swords and pretty decent armor. Also with two players it's easy to level up characters by moving the screen to respawn enemies over and over. Then take the buffed out character's password and copy it over the others and boom instant level up for everyone.
This game was so much fun, felt like a souls title before a souls title
Rented this one when I was a kid because I was a big fan of the books (read all three of them on my own when I was 7), and even then I could tell that the game was just not good. Combat is clunky, graphics are bland, gameplay is tedious and time-wasting and the AI is appalling. I never even made it across the river before I had to return it to the video shop and never bothered getting it out again. But seriously, the music is phenomenal, some of the best on the SNES, and that's VERY high praise. You didn't even play the amazing Shire theme in this video, which is a truly gorgeous piece that runs for almost 2 minutes straight before it starts to loop. I wouldn't say it's worth playing for the soundtrack alone, because UA-cam exists, but you really should go out of your way to look up the soundtrack and listen to it for a bit. It was composed by Charles Deenen, best known for Fallout 1 & 2, The Lost Vikings, Planescape: Torment, Another World and Descent 2.
What a coincidence lol! I just bought this game last Friday but haven’t played it yet tho. Thanks for the great review champ! Dope channel by the way.
03:48 Isn't the Balrog part kind of a boss fight? (Guess what, he has wings...) And yeah, remember that part of the book when the Balrog turns Gandalf in a pile of bones?
As a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s who read The Hobbit and LotR when I was 8, I was on the lookout for whatever LotR-style games I could find. My father was originally an Atari gamer who moved on to PCs in the late 80s, so I had experience with War in Middle Earth for the Atari ST (a weird but compelling Adventure/Strategy War Game hybrid) and then the PC RPG LotR mentioned; I didn't get a SNES until my 12th Birthday in 1994, and eventually found this, uh, game, which I had my parents get because I hoped it was a port of the PC version. And I was also disappointed by just how bad it was.
I remember renting this as a kid. I didn't know anything about LotR at the time so this was my first experience.
The gameplay was dull and I never got out of the shire but most everything else about this game had a charming quality to it, from the music to the drawings of the characters. My guess is the development got rushed.
Having played through this game (with save states, of course), I actually feel you made it look better than it is.
I would not say it does a nice job following the original story. It includes moments that were excluded from the movies (most notably Tom Bombadil), but it mostly makes up quests to fill the game.
Based on those character profile pics, this looks like it was adapted from the 70s LotR movie which is also kind of a mess and incomplete so... at least they're consistent.
From an animation perspective Ralph Bakshi’s LoTR movie is a classic. From a critical perspective it’s a weird gay little tale about some stuff.
@@KnivingDispodia - To be fair, LotR in general is a "weird gay little tale about some stuff", I thought that Bakshi's adaptation was quite excellent and in fact far truer to the books than Jackson's...I wish that he'd been able to finish it, but Rankin/Bass at least MOSTLY finished it (in the animation style of THUNDERCATS no less).
When I was a kid I once traded Donkey Kong Country 2 for this game. Didn't take long for me to realize it was a bad choice.
You should do a video on the snes sailor moon games
I love all the videos you've been dropping recently. Keep em' coming! 👍😁👍
The fact that you came up with anything nice to say about this game is a testament in itself. I don't think anyone would have faulted you for going full negative lol. Was really awesome to watch this though. Even known bad games need love from time to time. Thank you for the videos!
at least the music is good
I haven't looked it up but I have a feeling this game is worth a lot of money. I was a big Nintendo super Nintendo fan and I never even heard of this game, so I bet it's a rare find.
4:24 wtf, Sam is a HP beast. Just send him to fight Sauron.
I remember during the era of renting games, I rented this one. I was in like 5th or 6th grade and you can only rent a game for 1 day for 3.50 dollars. So I always tried to stay up and beat a game. Always, I remember I rented this twice and was so upset with getting lost. It was one of the one games I never beat, because I literally didn't know what I was doing. LOL Oh memories.
Worth playing? It’s the greatest game ever created.
I remember renting this back in the day. I also remember not being able to figure out how to get out of the first area surrounded by hedges or garden walls or some-such. And the rental didn’t come with the manual ☹️ Needless to say, it was not a pleasant gaming experience, though based on how the rest of the game is, maybe was lucky to get stuck 😅 On the plus side, i got to enjoy the awesome music for a good long time while repeatedly wandering from wall to wall in a vain attempt to escape 😄
Man, I remember finding this shortly after I discovered decent SNES emulation. I got so excited when I saw there was a Lord of the Rings game! Boy, was that a let down.
I've already had breakfast this morning but I'm suddenly feeling like I could go for a second one..
I'm still asking myself "why did I beat this game?" It was such a suffering. Btw, do you know that it also has bugs? If I remember correctly there was a point when you need to talk to a tree to do a quest. But I couldn't for some reason, so I had to start from the beginning. This game is a horror
The first time I got close to beating it, I grabbed the final weapon upgrades for Aragorn and Gimli. As it turns out, the programmers didn't anticipate an attack power greater than 99, so when I picked up those weapons, my attack power wrapped around back to 1.
Let me guess: didn't have a lot of games, had nothing better to do, and it still beat doing homework
@@DOSRetroGamer at that time I was really hoping it will get better at later parts. Welp it didn't
I played up until the Mines of Moria a few years ago and did so with no maps, purely going off of memory and or maps I made myself while playing and exploring.
So over many days I get to the mines, and go to save my game again, but just one problem. The 16 bit code the game predetermines for you at this point always includes an "O", which the game does not have, it only has a "Zero". So saving the game was impossible unless you wanted to do Moria in one go. 🙃
Also, the xp for leveling doesn't change -its a flat amount between each level, whether it's 1 or 90. Which means you can kill those Moss giant things before going to the council, then by walking their spawn point on and off screen, respawn them infinitely. I think I got the fellowship to 90+ each in levels, which equates to being unkillable since you'll have 4,000 HP on each member.
I'd only recommend playing this game if you are a LotR fanatic and it's the dead of winter outside.
The soundtrack is 10/10 though.
Watching the 4 Hobbits repeatedly dying and turn to bones was honestly kinda traumatizing back in the day. I remember putting up with the game all the way to Moria but that dungeon is hell and I gave up on it after being lost for absolute hours
I had this as a kid. One of my favorite things to do was play around with the password system. Mostly this was to get items that would let me skip straight to Bree or beyond. Although that depended on whether I lived past the Nazghul screen. Ah sequence breaking, a true joy of password systems.
Played this for an hour or so was surprised by how empty the first dungeon was. Seemed like a mistake.
The animation of a tree eating a Hobbit was great though lol
oh boy! I sure can't wait for volume II to come out!
That kind of optimism is what landed us with a new Bubsy sequel.
I don't even think I knew about this game previously...I guess there is a reason for that! Too bad the amazing music is wasted on this game. It sounds _really_ good for an SNES game!
It was developed by Interplay? I'm surprised none of the hobbits fart, belch, or hock a loogie as was like the standard for some of their 90s games! 😅
I remember there being a HUGE featured article in Nintendo Power back in the day showing off the motion capture process for the rotoscoped animation...
Man your videos are getting just better and better! I love this channel.
Still better than Rings of Power
And Stil is
@@johnhawthorne4716hahahaha
My friends and I played the crap out of this game. We loved it!
We had a map person guide us, and we got everything in the dungeons and everything.
But, we noticed at a certain point the weapons and armour did weird things to your stats, like an overflow, or something?
We also got to the balrog, got so excited and tried to get another one of our friends to see it, but our game froze just beneath the balrog, so we didn’t even get to fight it. And then our password didn’t work, so we gave up… right at the end…
I remember trying to play this as a kid when I first discovered emulators, and I tried multiple times but never got really far because it was clunky, confusing and difficult. I thought I was just too dumb to play it, but I guess it just sucks.
I remember renting this back in the day and got lost in the Barrow Downs because a previous renter swiped the instructions. Years later, I found a copy to play any way I could and got stuck in the same place. The samey disorienting dungeons are definitely a thing. An in-game Metroidvania-esque map might not fix all of the games problems, but it would have made it a heck of a lot more playable.
A friend and I enjoyed a bit of co-op play back in the day. That revealed another quirk of the game, where only the character who gets the kill-shot on an enemy gains any xp. Such a delight in a game with permadeath and occasional difficulty spikes! We also managed a sequence break where I outran all the Nazgûl guarding the Brandywine Bridge while my friend just spammed parry on the non-Frodo characters. Turns out doing that misses a bunch of fetch quest macguffins and gets you stuck unless you backtrack through the Nazgauntlet.
Man, this was one that I completely missed back in the day. Looks absolutely gorgeous for its era. Im kind of glad I did miss it because I totally would have bought it based on the visuals alone at the time. Having 4 (or 6) members in your party controlled by AI was extremely ambitious for that time, so not surprised they don't work very well. I think the deal breaker for me is the maps in the manual instead of on a pause screen or something. I definitely wouldn't have wanted to sit there trying to work things out with a booklet off screen and with no indication of where I was currently at in the map. But man, those visuals for that era. I'm still impressed with them now.
He complained about every standard component of action rpg, and frankly this game sounded ahead of it's time. He isn't entirely wrong about everything, but given the games Hardware limitations I think it did very well based off of what I saw.
IKR? "Fetch Quest To Proceed" is pretty much every action RPG ever.
I loved this game as a kid when it came out. I mapped every dungeon by hand and played 5 player coop with my friends using the adapter.
So my first Tolkien game was, The Two Towers. It is a MUD (Multiple User Dungeon). It is a text-based game that predated MMORPGs. I started playing it in 1996-7. This game still exists, and you can play it today.
I saw a preview for this in GamePro in 1993. Man, I was blown away by the one screen shot and the cool tech that made the fights possible (I forgot the name of it). I had just finished the hobbit and was working on Fellowship. I think I would have forgiven the flaws of this game. That was normal game play back then.
AD&D Warriors of the Eternal Sun for Genesis also had bland dungeon scenes. I loved it!
I don't understand why it has to be a "Volume 1". Compared to something like Final Fantasy VI, you could easily fit the story of all three books into a single SNES cartridge, which would flow a helluva lot better in terms of narrative.
I liked this despite its flaws, at least back then. the biggest issue was the repeating maps, but you did get used to it, and you could also make your own maps which helps a lot.
here's a trick. the block animation allows you to block anything (at least any sword attack). if you hold the button down you will repeatedly block and be effectively immune to incoming attacks in that direction. if you have one character do that, while another stands just behind him, they can attack with their sword through the block and damage what's attacking you. you can do this with ringwraiths and with enough patience you can kill the ringwraiths.
My brother and I (both huge Tolkien fans) LOVED this game. And the music was glorious. This music takes me back to elementary school and makes me think of Donkey Kong Country as well. Got em both same Christmas I believe. Just a flood of mashed up memories.
I got this game back in the mid-90's, either for Christmas or a birthday (I still have it.) I didn't ask for it, and I knew nothing about the series or the games' existence. Whoever got it for me (most likely my grandma, otherwise it was my mom) obviously just thought I would probably like it. It's an RPG, and since I love RPGs it was a perfectly reasonable assumption to make. Unfortunately, I hated it and was never able to get anywhere. I remember the super slow attacks you mentioned, and I also remember it being crazy difficult. Every once in a blue moon I use to pull it out and give it another go, but it never grew on me. The "Vol. 1" part of the title suggests that more of these were planned. I can't say I'm surprised that never happened, and I'm thankful that they spared us.
Great review and video! I really wanted this game as a kid. I was really into LOTR and Warhammer, so it looked right up my street. I saw an advert for it in a magazine but could never find it in the shops. Sounds like I dodged a bullet 😂
This reminds me of Young Merlin but without the fun oddities.
I grew out of 'consoles' when the Commodore 64 w/disk drive came out so never saw this but was reminded of another 'ancient' game based on that property - J.R.R. Tolkien's War in Middle Earth (1988)
Had great music, cool atmosphere, nice rotoscoped animation and an almost WRPG rogue-esque openness to it. Was tough to figure out and the password system was a terrible choice to skimp on adding a battery to the cart costs. I rented it, then picked it up used eventually, very cheap. Never got far, or really understood where I was going or what I was doing, but enjoyed it for some reason and was glad to have it in the collection.
I can't imagine the struggle it was too make this video! Thanks man!
I bought this at a flea market as a kid without a manual or any kind of guide. I played it with a big sketch pad next to me and would sit there and map out the caves and dungeons by hand. Did that with Willow on NES too
Man this is my favorite UA-cam channel
don't insult FlowBee!! that thing saved me a ton of money!
I missed this game when it came out, but looking at the character portraits, I am thinking that this may have been based on the Ralph Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings. The character portraits are most certainly from that version of the story.
Thank you so much for this series, I’m glad I can count on your coverage instead of committing to something much longer and less informative
When u briefly mentioned how this game was _not_ like A Link to the Past or Secret of Mana, it made me think how cool it would be if someone were to make a mod of one of those games where you played through the story of Lord of the Rings! That would be so cool!