The Top Shelf: The Second Round 017: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

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've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.

The official The Fellowship of the Ring PS2 game took its inspiration directly from the novel of the same name, recreating scenes and characters from their descriptions in Tolkien's text. The New Line Cinema movies operated on the same principle, such was Peter Jackson's painstaking process to replicate precisely every facet of Tolkien's lore, presumably out of a deep love for the material and an equally deep desire to do right by it. It couldn't have been easy to adapt those three enormous tomes to a movie format in the best of circumstances, but to do so with a perfectionist streak and still produce three movies so well-regarded that the last of them was showered with awards was a no doubt exhausting feat.

There's no mistaking where The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers gets its inspiration from specifically, however. Each cutscene is bookended with actual FMV footage from the New Line Cinema movies, and they seamlessly cut to game footage moments before the player gains has control, and switches back once the level is complete. I say "seamlessly" despite there being something of a gulf between the live-action actors and sets to the PS2's approximation thereof, but the in-game scenes are set up to closely resemble the movies and it's a neat effect when the game engine kicks in a frame after the FMV movie clip ends with no breaks for loading. Despite the two games releasing around the same time, the character models of The Two Towers are a little stronger than those of The Fellowship of the Ring, perhaps because the artists had clearer character designs and the actor's faces to work from, though both games still spend most of their time as dark, incoherent messes. If anything, The Two Towers might be a little harder to discern due to some obnoxious motion blur effects and how much closer it zooms in on the active character, making it more difficult to pick out enemies from a distance.

The core of the game has changed too, though only slightly. While Fellowship made a few feeble grasps towards RPG mechanics and side-quests early on before settling into a routine of smashing orcs across Middle-earth as one of the members of the Fellowship, The Two Towers is all combat all the time. The game feels more like a 3D arcade brawler than anything else, with the player's martial prowess rated at the end of each level and given a certain amount of "upgrade points" based on their performance: these points can then be spent on increasing the active character's stats or unlocking new combos and techniques for them to use. It feels simplistic and reductive to abridge the LOTR trilogy to a hack-and-slash action-adventure which minimizes the loot aspect (as if Aragorn's going to stop using the reforged Anduril, or Gandalf is happy to switch out Shadowfax for a DLC horse that breathes fire), but these games were built to tie in with the movies and RPGs take a long time to plan out. I can empathize with the eternal struggle license game developers must feel to balance enforced deadlines with quality, but it's strange to think of Tolkien's books - which were the Ur staple of what we consider high fantasy and inspired almost every RPG with orcs and elves and dragons, i.e. 90% of them - being turned into brawlers which are essentially Golden Axe with incremental power-ups.

It was kind of a bummer also that, because the game starts with the Weathertop Nazgul encounter (actually, it starts with the Isildur vs. Sauron prologue, but let's not split hairs), the hour of the game I played drew entirely from the Fellowship novel - repeating a lot of what I'd already seen in the Fellowship game. However, that did make it easier to directly compare the two. Take, for instance, the fight against the Watcher in the Water outside of the Hollin Gate to Moria. It features in both games, and in both cases the fellowship simply does enough damage to ward it off for long enough to pass down to the mines of Moria below. In the Fellowship game, the fight is chaotic and aimless: it's less about doing damage and more about simply surviving, as you deflect tentacles with ranged attacks until the Watcher finally gives up. With The Two Towers, in which it appears towards the start of the game instead of around the mid-point, the game uses it as a tutorial boss of sorts. By hitting the useful parry button, the whipping tentacles are temporarily knocked askew and can be lopped off with a regular attack. This causes the aggrieved Watcher's head to emerge from the lake, at which point an arrow can be shot at it for a set amount of damage to the boss's lifebar, after which the boss cycle starts anew. It feels a little less genuine to give it a health bar and such an obvious "boss fight" strategy, but at the same time it works as a handy demonstration of the game's basics: parry when an enemy attacks you, take them down with the appropriate counter (speed attacks for unarmored foes, fierce attacks for those with shields), and use the bow whenever you have enemies you can't reach. I can't really fault either game's approach to this fight, which was similarly a brief but chaotic skirmish in both the novel and movie. I'll say this too: in both games it resembles an enormous octopus, as befitting the movie depiction, but Tolkien's description left it deliberately vague beyond the tentacles - it was simply an old and evil creature that had made the lake its home.

The Two Towers game has not aged particularly well in my view, but I'm not ready to toss it out just yet. After all, it's part of a trilogy, and I ought to try out all three before I figure out which one of them deserves to stay in shelf contention, if any do at all. It's a shame I don't have the PS2 version of The Third Age: a traditional turn-based RPG would be more appealing than these brawlers, even if it just happens to be a completely nuts fanfiction-turned-game.

Result: Progresses to the Third Age Round.

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