True Adventurer, Part 2: Story Mode

Thanksgiving is a day for reminding ourselves what we have to be thankful for. Right now I personally am thankful that I had some time off work where I was able to play through the story mode of LEGO: The Lord of the Rings. I was going to review it piecemeal, similar to how I chronicled my journey through Batman: Arkham City, but I found that I just in fact couldn't bring myself to stop adventuring long enough to reflect. With the main story behind me, I'm ready to take a pause before embarking on my quest for 100% completion.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Upon playing through Weathertop and finding myself at Rivendell, I realized I had to amend my previous statements about multiple hub worlds: there is in fact only ONE giant Middle Earth hub world, but the various cities are spaced so far apart that at the time I thought I was dealing with multiple locations. This feature sets up a nice dichotomy between the actual action-packed levels on one hand and the low-key hub world on the other, through which you have to travel in order to reach the next level. You can use the map to go directly to certain locations, but only after you've unlocked the "Map Stone" for that area, but it's more fun to wander through the landscape and listen to the majestic music pulled right from the movie soundtracks. Plus, if you quick-travel, you miss out on all the side-quests and hidden Mithril Bricks hidden throughout the land!

I'll go into the rewards-collection process in my next post - before you can even begin thinking about collecting all the prizes in the game, you need to unlock more characters/items than are available to you simply from playing through the story mode. Suffice it to say, the game provides you with just enough resources to progress, but not to thrive in the treasure hunting business. For example, if you have to shoot down some boulders that are blocking your path on the Pass of Caradhras, you now have Legolas who's equipped with a bow. Or if there's a crack in the floor of the Mines of Moria that you have to smash through, Gimli's axe will do the trick. (And if that crack is situated high up on the wall, don't worry: one of the bigger characters can pick Gimli up and toss him! Just don't tell the Elf...) But forget about grabbing those orange handles or blowing up those shiny metallic LEGO bricks until way down the road.

Speaking of the mines of Moria, I was immediately struck by the lack of a boss fight with Gandalf vs. the Balrog - I guess you have to play The Third Age if you want to re-live that scene - but I was immediately gratified when we got to play as Gandalf as he plummeted through the chasm and fought the Balrog in free-fall. Plus we revisit the wizard's fight with the ancient demon on top of the peak of Zirak-Zigil two levels later, when Frodo sees the events in a dream while wandering through the Emyn Muil with Sam. But that doesn't happen until after you finish the levels associated with Fellowship and watch the game's credits roll, for the first of three times. At this point I was 10.8% done with the game.

Speaking of Frodo and Sam's adventures, it seems like this game struggles a bit with coming up with meaningful gameplay in the chapters that feature the Hobbits. For example, there's a long sequence where you have to search for fish to distract Gollum enough to punch him, and in the Dead Marshes using Frodo's Elven cloak to hide from the Black Riders over and over gets pretty repetitive. Thankfully the monotony is broken up by... Treebeard and the Ents! While these characters brought only minutes of slow-talking boredom to the table, it's much more fun to smash orcs and toss huge boulders while playing as them. Except for the missed opportunity to remove Aragorn's unnecessary red-herring death of falling off the cliff at the conclusion of the Warg Attack, the rest of The Two Towers plays out extremely satisfyingly, including an epic trip to Helm's Deep. My progress now stood at 19.7%.

Speaking of missed opportunities to remove superfluous bits added to the movie, I don't know why they found it necessary to keep in the whole bit of Frodo sending Sam away at the stairs of Cirith Ungol. I will speak out against that decision as long as I am able. On the other hand, a section of the movie that was cut but shouldn't have been was EVERYTHING THAT TOOK PLACE IN MINAS TIRITH! You don't meet Denethor, you don't get to play as Gandalf and Pippin inside the gates of the city, nothing! At least it's satisfying to fight the Witch King as Eowyn and to take out all the Oliphaunts with Aragorn and Legolas. The fight at the Black Gate was less so, as you basically just find three different yet similar ways to dispatch some trolls (which we'd already seen in Moria), before switching back to Sam and Frodo, who I'm glad to say get a costume change for their trek up Mount Doom. After completing Return of the King, I was 29.9% of the way through. That's a lot of ground to cover for my next post. But if anyone's up to the task....