 It's pretty funny how when you hear the title, The Lord of the Rings, it has a lot of positive connotations now, but back in the 90s, that wasn't always the case. Of course, the novels had a massive cult following, but a lot of other works that tried to adapt the story onto other media didn't always do so well, and one of the absolute worst is J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Volume 1, made by Interplay for the Super Nintendo in October 1994, and already we're off to a bit of a conspicuous start since their other two games, made for the Super Nintendo, were Clayfighter 2 and Boogerman. Those games aren't necessarily bad, Boogerman has its charm, I guess, and Clayfighter 2 is a decent novelty fighter, but you'll have to forgive me if that resume doesn't exactly fill me with excitement. I do want to mention very quickly that this game is not to be confused with The Lord of the Rings PC game made in 1990. The Super Nintendo game is totally different. One of the most frustrating things about this game is that it actually gets off to a good start. It faithfully follows the story, with you playing as Frodo, right as Bilbo is getting ready to leave the Shire on his 111th birthday. You walk around and meet familiar folks, and you get a second party member right away when you meet Pippin. And hey, it's an action RPG, so you get to go around and slash wolves, snakes and bats and stuff, and yeah, the attack, well it's not great, it's one of those detailed but slow attack animations where you have to time it just right, not exactly as crisp as something like Link to the Past or Secret of Mana to say the least, and sadly you can only attack in four directions. But hey, at least there's some action here, and it's in a familiar setting with familiar characters. Anyway, you start to explore some caves, and hey, here's some armor for you to use, and a mushroom you can use for healing, you know, all the typical action RPG stuff. What could go wrong? Well, this cave dungeon is when we first begin to understand why this game isn't so great. Number one, everything in this game is really dark. That's not my video capture, that's just how the game looks. I mean, I know it's a cave setting, but geez. And that number two, every part of this dungeon looks exactly the same. Exploring in this game is actually disorienting, because every couple minutes I can't help but think, wait a second, have I been here before? There's almost zero landmarks you can go by, and that goes for every dungeon in this game. Thankfully, the manual does have maps you can go by, but geez Louise, look at this. Yep, as you play through this one, you'll begin to learn that some of the mazes are freaking huge, and full of pointless dead ends that only exist to waste your time. Sure, the maps in the manual do help, but like I said earlier, every dungeon feels so incredibly repetitive. It's like they only had four or five tile sets to choose from when they were designing this game. There's the cave, the swamp, the forest, and each dungeon has like zero landmarks, and with the same enemies popping up over and over again. There's just absolutely nothing interesting happening in any of these dungeons, and it's so incredibly dull and boring. I mean, it gets to the point where I want to pull out a Game Boy or something and play a game on that while I'm playing Lord of the Rings, just so I'm not so freaking bored out of my mind. So what do you actually do in this game? Every mission is a fetch quest of some kind, and Frodo plays the part of Delivery Boy. You find a magic fern and bring it to this old guy, and he'll give you a gem. Go and find the old guy's reading glasses and he'll give you a key so you can actually, you know, leave the Shire. Seriously, it takes something like 40 or 50 minutes just to get the hell out of the Shire. But hey, good news. Once you leave the Shire, it's more of the freaking same. Go get a letter from the farmer to use the fairy, but first you have to find an ore for the fairy. Ugh, what the hell kind of crappy adventure is this? So now you get to wander around a huge forest before you go into another massively long dungeon maze. No boss fights, nothing interesting, just wandering around and killing the same enemies over and over while running errands for NPCs. But at least the game makes up for all that by making you backtrack out of every dungeon after you find what you're looking for. Oh wait, that's bad. Okay, I've gotten most of the bad stuff out of the way, which is most of the game unfortunately, but Lord of the Rings does have some strong points. One is that this game is 4 player compatible with the SNES multi-tap, and there's 6 playable characters to choose from, Frono, Sam, Pippin, Mary, Gimli and Aragorn, so that's pretty cool even if they all look like they got their haircuts from a flowbee. You can even use the SNES mouse to play through this one for whatever reason, if you'd like to I guess. But the thing is, if you're playing through this game by yourself or even with one other player, you're left at the mercy of the computer AI that controls the other party members. And as you might expect, those characters end up acting just a wee bit brain dead. They tend to wander around offscreen and get themselves killed one way or another, awkwardly thrusting their sword in random spots like they're reaching for a light switch in a dark room. In theory, it's a nice feature to have in an action RPG like this, but it's only useful if they, you know, actually help you out instead of bumbling around like a drunk guy at a music festival. You're supposed to be able to use the R button to keep everyone close by, for whatever reason that doesn't always work, and everyone just kind of keeps on doing it whatever it is they're doing. But hey, at least when those characters die, they are permanently dead for the rest of your playthrough, so you don't have to deal with them anymore. Just, I mean, this freaking game, what the hell? I will say for all its flaws, this game has some great music. It does help alleviate the pain and boredom, at least momentarily. And I did feel the need to progress through this one just so I could hear more of what tunes this game had to offer. But yeah, Lord of the Rings Vol. 1 for Super Nintendo is just not good. There are some good ideas here, like four-player compatibility, the music is high quality, and the game does a nice job following the original story to a certain extent. But man, there is just way too much here that needs to be fixed. You could start by making the attack quicker, getting some more enemy types, getting some more tile sets, getting some boss fights, get a battery save instead of a long-ass password system. And yes, this game has your classic 16-bit era passwords that are like 30 characters long. But in addition to all that, I mean, just get something, anything to make this game resemble something that might actually be interesting. Ugh, just avoid this game. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.