Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!
Extra Note: We're down to the wire now, just a few loose ends to tie up. Specifically, figuring out which of two (or three) very similar games from the same franchise is the superior entry. Our strict one-game-per-franchise policy means we'll need to bring in some science to determine the truly shelf-worthy here in The Top Shelf's third round: The Battle Royales!
Konnichiwa minna-san, to another Battle Royale comin' atcha instanter. We've got our first triple-threat this week: the entire The Lord of the Rings trilogy for PS2. While the three games share some fundamental similarities along with the source material, the first of them was actually produced by a different developer and publisher team and based on the novels instead of the Peter Jackson movies. I'm almost tempted to put that against the third game alone, which really just improved on everything in the second game to the extent that the choice between those two is a little more obvious, but I figured we might as well do the whole thing. One does not simply half-ass one's way into Mordor, or something. 2001 memes!
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is our odd duck, having been developed by WXP Games (short for "The Whole Experience" - this was their first game) and published by Black Label, a division of Ubisoft-devourers Vivendi. Vivendi had the rights to adapt Tolkien's literary works, but the movie rights had been acquired by Electronic Arts, putting them in an awkward position of making a The Lord of the Rings novel-derived game in the midst of the Jackson film trilogy, which was months away from premiering the second movie. In spite of this, and in spite of the completely different development team working simultaneously on EA's "The Two Towers" game, it actually has a lot in common with EA's duo. For one, you alternate playing as various characters, and both present an action-RPG model where you have to be careful to preserve a limited stock of healing items and ranged ammo while taking down enemies with weapon combos. Fellowship has less of the straightforward arcade hack-n-slash sensibility of its brethren, with a few random stabs made at a quest structure and occasional (and terrible) stealth sequences.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King might as well occupy the same blurb, because despite having different development teams - venerable CRPG developers Stormfront Studios for the former, and EA Redwood (a.k.a. the recently defunct Visceral Games) for the latter - they feel more or less identical, but for the different movie footage they use and some important quality-of-life updates for the latter. Both are more invested in a cinematic Call of Duty-like experience, where the action is relentless and cutscenes regularly give way to footage from the movies, creating this neat but slightly unfortunate effect where the in-game graphics take over from the movie clips (and vice versa) in a single frame of animation. Good for tricking the audience into feeling like they're playing the movie, bad when you consider how much more dated it makes the PS2 graphics look. These games are also built on replayability, in part because they're fairly short if you just mainline them. By playing levels you gain experience which can be spent on new combos, passive boosts and other upgrades: you're likely to get through levels with a low score the first time if you survive at all, but after progressing through the game and acquiring a handful of new skills, you'll find yourself doing a lot better when replaying the earlier levels, in turn earning more XP for more upgrades to assist with the tougher later levels.
That's the LOTR game trilogy in a nutshell, so let's get started with the comparisons. We're going for another three categories this week: "Source Material Fidelity", important for licensed games; "Character Progression", which is one of the few areas where The Two Towers and Return of the King have significant differences; and "Gameplay Variation", which includes but is not limited to quest design and what you're expected to do to accomplish your goals.
Source Material Fidelity
When adapting The Lord of the Rings trilogy for any medium, you have a certain amount of pressure on you to recreate those novels as closely as possible, because there's a legion of screaming fans that will come down on you harder than the orcs at Helm's Deep if you don't. I think Peter Jackson's gone on record to say the trilogy prematurely aged him decades because of this (largely self-inflicted) strife. Two of these game adaptations had some of that pressure off, thanks to the fact that they could crib directly from Jackson and Weta Workshop's visual designs for the movie trilogy, basing characters on their actors and set and costume design from what you see in the movies. The other game adaptation isn't quite so lucky: while the first movie existed, they had to specifically avoid drawing too much attention to what they and Jackson were doing to avoid any sort of litigious fracas with license-holders EA (if it hasn't been made abundantly clear of late, EA are kind of dicks).
So with Fellowship of the Ring, each of the game's setpieces and character design had to be derived from the text of the novels rather than the visuals of the movie. This is tough, because Jackson was adamant about getting his vision of the Lord of the Rings as close to the source material as possible. There were a few aces in WXP's hand, however, though "aces" might be a stretch: the fact that the first movie, in the interest of brevity, had to cut out a lot of early and relatively pointless content involving the hobbits on their journey to the Prancing Pony in the human town of Bree, where they would meet Strider/Aragorn and proceed to the dramatic encounter with the Nazgul on the crest of Weathertop and the formation of the titular fellowship in Rivendell. (Curiously, the game ends with an entirely fabricated boss fight against a Nazgul rider in a hilly area near the river of Anduin, which is where the first movie ends with that big fight against Lurtz and the other Uruk-Hai.) This means that the game is free to indulge in sequences featuring Tom Bombadil, who gives you a fetch quest to complete before helping you which is entirely germane to how annoying he is in the book, and the hobbits' journey through the eerie and macabre Barrows with its vicious wights. It's remarkable how close the areas in the game come to resembling those of the movie, without actually getting all the way there, and how something as simple as having a clean-shaven Aragorn or a set of interchangeable hobbits makes the party feel distinct from their movie appearances. It was a tricky balancing act, but the Fellowship game does all right in setting itself apart from the movie just enough. Really needed to invent a final boss, though? After being so painstaking about everything else?
I'm throwing The Two Towers and The Return of the King into a single paragraph again because they're functionally identical as far as this category goes. As stated before, the game does this thing where it displays an FMV clip of the movie, and a certain point between frames the game drops the FMV and switches over to in-game graphics in a seamless way that wouldn't have been possible before the PS2 era. It's a great effect, because it shows how closely they managed to make everything in the games look like the movies. Likewise, the level design is largely shot for shot from the movies, excepting parts where it needed to get bolstered for the sake of having enough to build a game around, and you invariably have a front-row seat for each of the movies' biggest set-pieces. The Two Towers goes one step further by starting the game with the Weathertop fight from Fellowship, expanding the events it covers to one and a half novels' worth. Return of the King, for its part, is given three story chains to follow - Gandalf the White (which later includes Pippin once they reach Minas Tirith), the hobbits Frodo and Sam, and the remaining fellowship members Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli - and builds its game around dropping in and out of each, locking later stages by ensuring the player has progressed sufficiently with the three teams. There's no doubting that the developers went above and beyond trying to make their games as close to the source material as possible, more so than the majority of movie license games that are often forced to take liberties to fit their movie's plot into a game structure that makes sense. I'll have to give this category to The Two Towers for pioneering most of this approach, including the movie-out-game-in fast cut style since that's not a technique seen too often in movie license games.
Advantage: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
Character Progression
This presented another obstacle for the game developers, because while everyone expects the LOTR games to be RPGs - it's the grandfather of the entire fantasy RPG concept, after all - you can't really do much in the way of character equipment and skills. Especially with the former, as you have Gandalf wielding Glamdring, Aragorn with the reforged Anduril, and Frodo with Sting and his mithril chainmail, and you can't really break that tradition for the sake of a loot RPG format. Likewise, all but the hobbits begin as formidable warriors with storied histories, so your progression mechanics have to reflect that these guys can effortlessly take down dozens of orcs while still leaving room for improvement. Each of the three games handle character progression in varying ways, each balancing a sensible approach regarding the lore of the novels/movies with one that would be more fun in a video game context to different degrees.
The Fellowship of the Ring handles the expectation of RPG mechanics in a very pragmatic way, which is to say by doing away with them entirely. In fact, it can often be deleterious to get into combat if it's unnecessary because you have little to gain with no XP or character development to be concerned about, and a lot - health, and the limited number of items that restore it - to lose. You could scarcely call it an RPG for that reason, even if it does include things like optional side-quests (which reward you nothing, for the most part). It's really more of an action-adventure game, in the vein of a Tomb Raider or a The Legend of Zelda.
The Two Towers is absolutely an action-RPG however, albeit a limited one. You gain XP with every enemy slain, with bonuses for combo-ing kills and avoiding damage, and at the end of each chapter you can spend that XP on acquiring new abilities for the playable character. So, if you complete a level as Gandalf, you might be able to spend those XP on a new spell for his staff, a new attack combo for Glamdring, or a passive skill that boosts his maximum health. The majority of skills are both level-locked and prohibited until you have its predecessor(s), as with most skill trees, and there's a number of them - like basic combos - that can be acquired by multiple characters. The game is built around levelling up, acquiring better skills and combos, and then revisiting earlier levels to grind for the XP to take on later levels. Decent players, of course, can escape this grind cycle completely by simply being good enough at the game to survive each level, though the harsh checkpointing and tough boss encounters can sometimes make the occasional revisit warranted. Stages tend to be short enough that it's not padding the game's length out to a tiresome degree, fortunately.
The Return of the King makes some very welcome tweaks to the system that The Two Towers establishes, allowing players to spend more XP on acquiring abilities for the whole group. So, in the above example, Gandalf might choose to spend some of his earned XP in acquiring a basic weapon combo, but if he spends about 250% of that value he can acquire that same skill for everyone. If half the game goes by before you play as Gimli - since his chapters always include Aragorn and Legolas, if they're your preference - you'll have a lot of his skills waiting to be unlocked because you've already purchased them as someone else. Gimli will still need to level up to match the respective level-locks on those abilities, but it is effective immediately as soon as he hits that cap: no need to go to an interstitial menu screen between levels to activate all the freebies he has waiting for him. It's an elegant system that greatly diminishes the amount of grinding involves, allowing you to prioritize preferred characters without being completely bereft of hope should you be forced to play a largely untested character in the late-game when you sorely need those abilities to survive.
Advantage: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
Quest Variation
The greatest challenge for the developers of these games, besides the distinct perils they had to face to make the game resemble (or not resemble) the movies, is figuring out how to make following the LOTR books fun in a video game format, beyond the inherent appeal of the content tourism of living out the journeys of Frodo, Aragon, et al. Can there be more to a LOTR game than simply killing orcs? Or is that all you really need to build an entertaining game around?
The Fellowship of the Ring, bless it, tries its darndest early on to establish Middle-earth as this living place where people need help and have their own lives to lead irrespective of the ringwraiths and Uruk-Hai in their midst. Unfortunately, the minions of Sauron become all-encompassing as the existence of the good races of men, elves and dwarves come under threat by the Dark Lord's ubiquitous terror, but at least Fellowship begins with a few minor, pleasantly rural tasks for Frodo to accomplish until it comes time to take the One Ring and escape the Shire. These involve fixing a weathervane (actually a tutorial for how the first-person ranged combat works), taking care of wolves (tutorial for melee combat), and collecting healing herbs (tutorial for being on the lookout for healing items). As the parentheticals might suggest, each of these early side-quests are intended to impart vital game mechanics to the player before throwing them into the thick of it, but even if they largely amount to fetch quests (you also later have to find all the components to create the fake hobbits to fool the ringwraith in Bree) and obnoxious stealth sequences where it's very easy to get spotted by enemies you can't see, at least it's a break from slashing at orcs.
The Two Towers and The Return of the King, meanwhile, steadfastly refuse to deviate from combat, only occasionally dropping combat-adjacent goals like destroying catapults or fending off orcs while NPCs escape. The combat and its attached progression mechanics are compelling enough that the games can just about get away with this, but it feels comparatively more like a slog as a result. Especially with how these games are built around replaying levels for additional XP.
Advantage: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Conclusion
OK, well, I think we've discovered a flaw to applying this format to three games instead of two. Since all three games have each won a separate category, we've now entered a lockdown scenario where we're unable to move on. However, I have a contingency plan in place.
Therefore, the winner of this Battle Royale is... Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone!
You see, once EA changed developers from Stormfront to EA Redwood for the final movie game, Stormfront decided to go off and create a new game with the techniques they'd devised for The Two Towers (which also found their way into The Return of the King) and modify them for a new license: the Forgotten Realms, of the larger D&D multiverse. It's familiar territory to Stormfront, who had cut their teeth so long ago developing the FR-based "Gold Box" CRPGs such as Gateway to the Savage Frontier and Treasures of the Savage Frontier along with SSI, and had also more recently developed the so-so Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor remake for Ubisoft.
Despite the complete change in setting (though hardly a huge thematic shift), Demon Stone plays like a superior successor to The Two Towers, even more so than The Return of the King. In addition to a more D&D-focused development system which also incorporates a second progression mechanic - cash, found in nooks and crannies and also from fallen foes, which allows players to upgrade their gear between stages as well as levelling up skills - it also dropped the whole "play one character per session" system to allow players to switch between three characters on the fly, including a stealthy thief, a durable tank warrior, and a mage who is a powerhouse at range. You'd ideally switch between them depending on the circumstances, but there were also occasions where you'd briefly be locked into one character, especially early on when the game was still establishing each one's respective strengths. These mechanics elevate Demon Stone just ahead of The Return of the King in my estimations, and having an original story set in the Forgotten Realms universe that draws in the likes of Waterdeep's Khelben Blackstaff (voiced by Patrick Stewart!) and the extradimensional githyanki and slaad races is a point in its favor also. It's certainly a distinctive entry in the wide pantheon of Forgotten Realms games, even if it can't resist sneaking in a gratuitous guest episode with ol' Drizzt Do'Urden, and while I'm not going to suggest that The Lord of the Rings isn't one of the greatest fantasy narratives ever told, it has become a little familiar over the years to say the least.
Result: So, in a completely transparent twist, Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone proceeds to the Top Shelf Reserves List while The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King are all eliminated.
Next time, we hop into a completely different fantasy universe to give a hoot about two looters of some repute with a route to give one the boot to resolve the dispute. For now, I hand it over to you guys to astutely refute (fine, I'm stopping) this shocking result in the comments below.
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