Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!
Extra Note: We've entered Shelftember! In this much-vaunted month, we will be processing one of the second round entries every day. I'll be spending one hour apiece with each game - inspired by DanielKempster's backlog-clearing series "An Hour With..." - and determining its fate from there.
It's remarkable that all three PS2 The Lord of the Rings games - each with a different developer, and one that doesn't even focus on the movies - could play so similarly. Not just in the sense that all three are hack-and-slash action-RPG brawlers, but that they all operate on very similar mechanics on the micro level. There's a down-stab for finishing off foes that makes you vulnerable to other enemies nearby; each character has their own ranged option for taking out enemies at a distance; the game regularly has you switch from character to character, each with their own independent level progression and route through the game; and even the combo chains are similar, though to be fair there's only so many combos that might work with the games' light/heavy/parry dedicated face button system. Obviously The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King has the most similarities with The Two Towers, as both are explicitly based on the New Line Cinema movies and share a publisher (EA), but while it hews very close to the blueprint The Two Towers developed it finds ways to set itself apart while at the same time. (The developer for The Return of the King, incidentally, is none other than EA Redwood Shores: the studio that would later become Visceral Games, the ones behind Dead Space. We've already seen another game from them this month: 007: Agent Under Fire.)
One big change to The Return of the King is that the player can choose their next stage beforehand. They still need to complete early stages to unlock later ones, since there's a story to follow, but the game frequently branches to let players take on any of the three concurrent threads of The Return of the King in an order of their choosing: Gandalf's mission to Minas Tirith, where he meets up with Pippin and tries to rally a defense of Gondor's walled city while its mad steward Denethor threatens to undermine their efforts; Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, as they seek to entreat the King of the Dead and his army of oathbreakers to join the battle at Minas Tirith by offering an end to their restless afterlives; and Samwise Gamgee as he protects Frodo on their perilous quest through Mordor. Gandalf and Samwise are the protagonists of their respective paths, but the player is given the option of either Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli for that particular route; this sadly means you'll have to finish the same levels with all three to reap the maximum benefit, or risk having an insufficiently leveled character for the later and more challenging stages on their path.
However, the game does mitigate this a little with its new upgrade system. In The Two Towers, you were given a unique XP pool for each character which they would spend on new combos, charged moves and passive boosts like extra health or increased ranged damage. In The Return of the King, many of the non-character-specific abilities can be acquired for everyone at the same time, not just the character who earned that experience. It'll often cost a little more, but it means that when you switch to a new character and hit the necessary level to use those abilities, they'll be immediately available in that level instead of the player needing to wait and purchase them again at the interstitial menu screen. This greatly reduces the amount of time you have to spend earning XP for each character to unlock the same universal basic combos and stat boosts: now, whenever I eventually try playing the game as Gimli, I know he'll have instant access to the techniques and power-ups he'll need. Oddly, some of these universal techniques appear to unlock at earlier levels for certain characters, so you might regain some of your favorite abilities sooner than you expect when you start a new character's path.
There are still some undesirable elements that The Return of the King couldn't alleviate, either because they're too integral to the core of the format or because the developers didn't see them as an issue the same way I have. One is the aforementioned repetition of stages featuring multiple playable characters. The second is how bonus XP is earned via a combo gauge: by continually killing enemies without incurring damage, the player builds a gauge that - at certain percentages - will start rewarding better experience for each kill, going from "fair" to "good" to "excellent" to "perfect". The gauge will drain after getting hit, but it will also just drain on its own whenever the player isn't actively in combat. This means that earning extra XP is entirely dependent on the layout of the stage and how frequently it tosses enemies at you, rather than a factor the player is able to control. There are passive boosts that increase this combo gauge faster, meaning it's likely that returning to a level with these additions will net you far more experience than it did last time, but it still feels arbitrary in a way that could've been fixed by not letting the gauge exhaust on its own between encounters.
Otherwise, I think The Return of the King is a fine follow-up to The Two Towers that's careful to replicate its strengths - I still love that the game does its instant transitions between movie footage and in-game graphics, as unfortunately stark as the difference can be - but also improve upon it in a number of meaningful ways outlined above. It's going to make for a tricky Battle Royale later in the third round of this feature, where I ponder the age-old question of which is superior between a pace-setting originator versus its incrementally improved sequel.
Result: Progresses to the Third Round.
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