J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: Volume 1 (Interplay Productions, 1994, SNES) playthrough

This week we're diving into yet another thing that I am a fan of, J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for the SNES. My thoughts: As a big time fan of Tolkien, when I saw there was a pre-Peter Jackson RPG game on the SNES, I knew I had to play it. And, well… visually it is quite decent looking, the music as well as the ambient sounds are nicely medieval, and different from the Howard Shore's more epic score for the movies… as for everything else… The gameplay is slow, sluggish and feels quite unresponsive at times. I literally had to speed the game up for the last battle, because it was hard to react with the slow controls. The speeding up made them more responsive. And what I claim to be the most interesting aspect of the game is the fact that it is actually a 2-player. In the beginning, you control Frodo, and once you unlock Samwise, he becomes controllable by the 2nd player (hence why he doesn't move in my playthrough). Then, as you unlock Aragorn, he becomes the 1st player character, while Frodo switches to 2nd player (hence why I why he doesn't move from that point onwards. The unfortunate thing is though, that the switch is sudden, forced, and Aragorn is only playable AFTER you exit Bree, while Frodo switches to P2 and unless you have a controller in port 2 (or know to switch your controller to port 2) you'll be stuck, unable to move. Also a funny thing, while the second player can talk to people, only the first player can actually move and exit the dialogue box, well designed, right? And as if that wasn't enough messing with you, there is also a well known bug, which flips your stats from 100 to 0, meaning you can't equip the strongest weapons in the game because they will actually you weaker, so instead of giving you, say, 124 attack, they give you just 24… great design, huh? But that doesn't mean that if you play singleplayer, you only have one useless character sitting there at the edge of the level. Oh no, EVERYONE in your party is quite useless and stupid. They are more than happy to go fight any enemy they see and die, or just get lost somewhere. At least, you are not stuck to them like you are to the party members in Secret of Mana. And then there's the level design, or the lack thereof. Every dungeon looks the same, like there is a handful of different level pieces, and they are just randomly organised into different maps. It's almost like playing a modern rogue-like with procedurally generated maps. It sucks. And worse yet, most of the dungeons are just too big. Especially the mines of Moria. They are HUGE, and when every corridor looks the same, they are impossible to navigate without a map or a guide. Most likely the game expects you to draw a map as you move, because the game is impossible without. And lastly there is of course the main loop of gameplay, which is literally just fetch and collect quests. First you collect junk to get you out of the Shire, then you collect more junk to get you across the river to Bree. Next you collect even more junk to get you to Moria. And oh, to open the doors of Moria, you have to collect these crystals hidden across all the previous areas. And once inside Moria, you have to collect keys scattered about, to progress… the maze like dungeon design does not make it any more enjoyable. Overall… as much as I hate to say it, I'd give the game a 5/10, and two of those points are simply because it's Lord of the Rings. The game is overall quite awful, and I have no intention of ever playing it again.