The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Score: 70% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Black Label Games Developer: Pocket Studios Media: Cart/1 Players: 1 Genre: RPG
Graphics & Sound: The Lord of the Rings is a story that has been told and retold many times, on many different mediums. With the upcoming theatrical release of part two of this trilogy, The Two Towers, we are seeing several video game adaptations of last year's The Fellowship of the Ring finally appearing. While the Pocket Games' Game Boy Advance version of The Fellowship of the Ring is certainly better that previous attempts, it still doesn't quite live up to Tolkien's vision of Middle Earth. The quality of the graphics in The Fellowship of the Ring can be summed up in one word, satisfactory. The sprites themselves are detailed and clean. The overall color scheme tends toward more earthy toned colors, which I feel is very appropriate for any setting in Middle Earth. However, this also makes the sprites a tad difficult to separate and quite often it is hard to tell what's what on the screen. Thankfully, a cursor appears whenever you are near an object you can pick up, so you don't have to strain your eyes looking over every little detail of the landscape. Another problematic area is the character portraits that appear in the dialogue boxes. For some reason, Pocket Games has decided that every person living in Middle Earth is terribly unattractive. Even characters such as Galadriel look, umm, unpleasant. The final area of note is the item and equipment icons. While the icons that are there look nice, there just isn't enough variety. A large chain shirt looks the same as a small leather tunic. If you had to choose a word to describe the sound of The Fellowship of the Ring the one that springs to my mind is unsatisfactory. The sound effects, what few there are, are dull, generic and pretty typical. While the music is very nice, you're lucky if it starts playing for you most of the time. This is the game's only glaring bug, and it's a doozy. Every single time you load up your saved game, the music won't start playing. In fact, the music won't start playing until after some random amount of time has passed. This is truly a shame as the music is one of the best parts of this game and captures the feel of the various areas perfectly. Walking through Hobbiton in silence isn't nearly as much fun as with a homely little jaunt playing in the background. While it 'may' be possible that this seemingly random playing of music was an intentional designed feature of the game, it certainly wouldn't have been at the top of my list. Oh, and one more thing, there isn't any battle music, and battling barrow wights to the cheery sound of highway music isn't very thrilling.
Gameplay: I'd have to use two words to describe the gameplay of The Fellowship of the Ring, RPG light (okay so RPG isn't technically a word). Your typical RPG staples - walking, talking, and fighting - make up the meat of the gameplay. You'll do a fair bit more walking and talking however. Compared to most other RPG's, there is a lot less emphasis on the fighting. In fact, there's no real way to 'power up' your characters. Every enemy has a predefined location and once you kill them, that's it, they're gone. Not that there's too much to powerup. In keeping with the 'RPG light' mentality, every character only has two stats, hit points and a battle skill. You choose which stat to raise whenever you 'level up'. You actually get more level ups from doing quests than you do fighting. Much like the book, the game is focused more on the journey, with battles being few and far between.
Difficulty: Like most other games you would classify as RPG light, The Fellowship of the Ring doesn't really offer any gameplay that's terribly challenging. Since most of your character powerups will come from doing quests, it's absolutely imperative that you do as many as possible. As there is no way to completely restore your characters' hit points (sleeping, etc...) all of your healing will come from the healing items you find during the game. Ultimately the difficulty of the game is centered around your ability to manage your very limited inventory. Doesn't sound very exciting, does it?
Game Mechanics: The game mechanics are pretty simple, if a tad slow and clunky. The directional buttons are used to move your characters and menu cursors. 'A' is for confirm/action and 'B' is cancel. The 'L' button allows you to switch characters, 'R' brings up your current characters inventory, and start pauses the game. The save mechanics are a tad irritating. While you can save your game whenever you want, it forces you back to the main menu whenever you do so. So if that darn music finally started playing, if you wanna save you're going to have to wait all over again. The most cumbersome aspect of the game has to be the inventory. You have to go through the entire process of switching characters if you want to interact with their inventory. All in all The Fellowship of the Ring isn't a 'bad' game. However a few bugs and cumbersome game mechanics bring down the experience to one that merely passes the time.
-Alucard, GameVortex Communications AKA Stephen Triche
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