The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (GBA)

When you first start a game, you have the choice of five characters. You can either be Aragorn the fighter, Gandalf the mage, Frodo the hobbit, Legolas the archer, or Eowyn, the woman that plays less of a role in the movie than the others. Picking a character doesn’t just affect who you are in the game. It determines what skills you have, the style in which you play (while running into the fray as Aragorn might be okay, doing the same with Frodo will get you killed), and at some points, which direction the game goes. You can either follow Frodo as Aragorn and fight off the Uruk-hai from Boromir’s dead body or play as Gandalf, wandering through the under-caverns of Moria. In addition to these five characters, in multiplayer, you can play as Gimli, everyone’s favourite dwarf. I found this quite annoying, because I would’ve liked to play as Gimli in single-player.

Every time you level up, you get one skill point and five ability points. The ability points can be distributed among five stats: strength, which raises attack; accuracy which raises chance to hit; health, which raises…health; defense, which raises chance to dodge; and courage, which raises your spirit (mana) and health. Each are important, while some are more important for certain characters than others. The skills are an interesting point in the game, for each character has their own sets of skill trees (not unlike Diablo, but) that are divided between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ skills. Active skills are those that must be selected by cycling through them (something that can become problematic when you have more than a few skills), while passive skills are continuously working. There is an extremely wide variety of skills between all the characters, ranging from wielding two weapons at a time with Aragorn, to raising damage from magic by one with Gandalf, to using the ring of One with Frodo, becoming invisible and attracting the gaze of Sauron.

The moment the game started, I was surprised at the quality of the graphics. The GBA was able to emulate clips from the movies themselves, and while the graphics are obviously not perfect, it was still quite an achievement on a Game Boy. The game takes place from a top-down, isometric view, an obvious choice for an action-RPG. This presented no problems, though at times, I found I was fighting nothing more than a blurry group of pixels. I didn’t know whether I was fighting a goblin, an orc, or some other creature. I didn’t know whether it was a troll I was fighting, because although it wields a big club and is one annoying bugger to take down, I was squinting and trying to decipher the details out. Unfortunately, this is present all of the game, but it didn’t really detract from it. I mean, hey, if I hit it and it dies, I’m happy.

The multiplayer was a fun and interesting new innovation to the game. With another friend, GBA, andLOTR cartridge, as well as a link cable, you can play two players in the game, following each other around and whooping orc butt. This added a new level of replayability to the game, as characters from single player can be played in multiplayer, and vice versa. However, I would have liked a little arrow that points where your friend is when he or she is off-screen. Finding them in the large areas can be really hard sometimes. And then, when the game ends (each character takes about a day of playing to beat), what is the best thing about the game is that there are either four more characters to play as, you can play a game with your friend, or you can play the whole game over with your leveled up characters! After you beat the game, you save, and then you can start a new game with that save file. Just like Diablo, there are three difficulties: Normal, Hard, and Grueling. Each of these difficulties grant you greater experience and a chance to reach even higher levels.

Final Grade: 88%