The Lord of the Rings - The Third Age

Watching Gandalf fight the Balrog from a ledge, then taking your own turn against a lesser cave troll a few minutes later, tells you exactly what this game is: a Final Fantasy X-style turn-based RPG that insists on standing just off-camera from the famous parts of the story. EA Redwood Shores built it around a party of characters Tolkien never wrote — Berethor, a Gondorian in Denethor's service, plus an elf, a ranger, a dwarf and a couple of Rohirrim — who trail the Fellowship through Moria, Amon Hen, Helm's Deep and the Pelennor without ever quite meeting it.

The combat system is the reason it works at all. Turn order runs along a visible queue, each character has a stance that changes what their abilities do, and actions spend a shared pool that builds as the fight goes on. Skills are learned by using related ones repeatedly, so a healer who keeps casting basic restoratives eventually opens up better ones, which rewards deliberate play over spamming attacks. Perfect-mode attacks arrive with timed button presses. It is derivative, openly so, but the borrowing is intelligent and the fights have real texture on the harder encounters.

What dates badly is the structure around it. Levels are corridors with branching pockets, encounters are frequent enough to feel like a toll, and the story is stitched together with New Line film clips that only underline how much better the source material looks. The invented party never earns much characterisation beyond a few lines of exposition between chapters, and Berethor's secret is signposted early. Ambition outran writing here.

Still, there is something oddly honest in the premise. Most film tie-ins of the era shoved you into Aragorn's boots and let you swing a sword at orcs in real time; this one accepted that the heroes were busy and gave you the people who cleaned up behind them. The Evil mode unlocked after the campaign, which flips you to the other side of several major battles, is a rougher proposition but at least it understood its own conceit.

For a PS2 owner who wanted a console JRPG wearing Middle-earth's clothes, it delivered on that narrow promise, and the turn queue still reads clearly two decades on. It is the rare licensed game that is more interesting for its system than for its licence.