Although the game box promised a collectible card inside, no such card was in the box when I bought it. I don’t think it can be considered to be “complete in box” without it! So, there goes that resale value.
TLotR:TFotR occupies a weird place in the history of “The Lord of the Rings”-adjacent games. The first of the Peter Jackson movies had just come out, but the games that were based on the movies hadn’t yet been released. I’ve played many of those games. Most recently, “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”, which, like the others, are very combat focused, action-RPG games, using the likenesses of the movies’ actors for player characters.
This version, for the PS2, doesn’t know anything about the Peter Jackson movie. It also doesn’t know anything about the 1978 Ralph Bakshi movie, The Lord of the Rings, from which Jackson took so much inspiration. Because Bakshi (and therefore Jackson) cut out so much of the original book, games based on the movies do not typically include Old Man Willow, meeting Tom Bombadil, or the encounter with the Barrow Wights, preferring to speed the hobbits on their meeting with Aragorn.
This game leaves nothing out.
This PS2 version of The Fellowship of the Ring follows Frodo, Aragorn and Gandalf through the story, switching characters as the plot demands it. Each of the characters plays to their strengths; as Frodo, you are likely to meet dangers such as spiders and Black Riders by sneaking past them rather than confronting them directly. Aragorn takes a more combat-oriented approach, while as Gandalf, you wield a wide variety of magic.
Frodo can use the One Ring to skip the more dangerous encounters, but he will suffer soul corruption which can lead to a Game Over should he find himself fully under Sauron’s control. The time he can spend under the Ring’s influence is controlled by the Purity meter. Completing quests and encounters can raise the meter so that Frodo can spend more time invisible (won’t work against the Riders, of course). This is not much different from the movie-inspired games, which use a similar scheme.
Frodo’s first quest ends when he reaches Rivendell, when Aragorn presumably takes over. I haven’t gotten to that part in the game, yet. Right now, we’ve just spent the night with Tom Bombadil and Goldberry (having collected 12 water lilies from the nearby spider-infested marshland to gift her). If we’re following the book, Frodo and company are just about to find themselves taken by the Barrow-Wights, last seen, by me, in the excellent LotR game “The War in the North”.
Game ripped from the actual, physical disc with ImgBurn and played on the PCSX-2 emulator with a PlayStation 4 controller enabled by DS4Windows. This is what I have to go through to play PS2 games these days. Worth it.
