The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age [GBA]

Having to develop for home consoles as well as handhelds is a challenge that was (is?) pretty unique to movie tie-ins. It's hard enough to transpose the pacing, style and perspective of the medium with a firm and pressing deadline, but now you also have to manage to bring it both to the Playstation 2 and the GBA? Publishers would usually simply opt to have multiple developers create separate games, and suffice to say, there was really no way to bring an RPG with 3D graphics following the exploits of totally original characters™ during the War of the Ring to the little screen.

Keep in mind that this is The Third Age, not the third movie - this game was intended to be an adaption of Peter Jackson's complete movie trilogy. Even more to squeeze onto a single GBA cartridge. One has to wonder why these games rarely turn out good and never turn out great...

Structure

Not entirely for want of trying in the case of this game. It presents key moments (i.e. battles), sorted by movie, in the form of a simple, top-down turn-based strategy game, featuring all your favorites: orcs, uruk-hai, Rohirrim, trolls, ents, even the occasional mûmakil. While the movies are well-known for their spectacular eye-popping action and massive scale (two things the GBA cannot provide either), leaving out all other scenes and story beats obviously leaves the story ridiculously disjointed. The most striking evidence is the fact that Sam, Frodo and Gollum don't appear in the game at all. Someone not familiar with the movies would definitely be left without a chance of ever interpreting the low resolution models and icons correctly or figuring out how the hell the story progresses as it does (e.g. why the final mission ends with a plain text pop-up reading 'Frodo destroys the Ring!").

The game does need to employ some artistic license to assemble the desired 24 main story missions. The siege of Helm's Deep and the siege of Minas Tirith are spread out over 2 and 4 (!) missions respectively, brief combat moments like the second movie's ambush in Ithilien and the Rohirrim's nightly attack on Pippin and Merry's captors receive their own full mission, as do the battle on the river Isen and the futile attack of the knights of Gondor on Osgiliath, neither of which is shown directly in the movies. And it goes even further than that: There's also missions based on the reconquest of Osgiliath (the aftermath of which was shot for the movies, but cut for the theatrical release) and fights that blatantly didn't occur in the movies (one against the Nazgul at Bree, one during the initial deforestation of Fangorn, one immediately after leaving the mines of Moria, one in defense of the villages of Rohan against Saruman's marauders and two over the beacons of Gondor?!).

Units

This segmented vignette format allows GBA's Third Age to set itself apart from its home console brethren even further by offering the entire campaign from the evil side as well, bringing it more in line with Battle for Middle-Earth in that regard. But as such, you're also playing on specific set maps, with a specific set roster of units to fulfill specific set objectives tailored to the mission at hand. The only morsel of decision-making you're offered before starting a mission comes in the form of hero selection, for which all the aforementioned elements carefully organized to fit the lore are happily tossed overboard. Lurtz at Helm's Deep? Sure. Théoden at the Black Gate? Why not. Grima in Osgiliath? Have at it. And thanks to the game having you choose a main hero as the backbone of your campaign whom you'll bring to every mission, there's no way to avoid this. Which itself is a strange bit of replay-bait. All the secondary heros of light and darkness you can pick from for each mission (at least those that allow you to bring any), but if you want to use Gandalf or Elrond instead of Aragorn, you have to overwrite your single light savefile.

Of course, you can play with 'Sauron Mode' enabled, in which case losing any of your secondary heros disables them for the remainder of the campaign, not just the next mission (a meaningless setback, since you can always replay the rather simple third mission to wait out this injury). Not that I consider it a good option; at worst it will just make the game a lot more bland by leaving you with generic placeholder heros. In fact, this facet of the game has a bunch of issues in general, even though based on the movies it should be a home run. For one, the heros of good/light outshine (heh) the heros of evil/dark, though that's a bit of asymmetry that fits neatly with the rest of the game, as does the variety in skills and stats which loosely divides the heros into commanders enabling other units and fighters who personally fight on the frontline.