Product Description

A striking role-playing scenario unfolds as the Fellowship begins the great Quest. Take your handheld along as you develop a variety of characters, created by Tolkien but fully realized by you. This first installment demands strategy and quick-thinking, as the horrific servants of the Dark Lord struggle to reclaim the Ring.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12113 in Video Games
• Brand: Vivendi Universal
• Released on: 2006-05-06
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platform: Game Boy Advance
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

Features

• For Play on Your Game Boy Advance
• Journey through J.R.R Tolkien's magical world of Middle Earth
• Published by Vivendi
• Game Genre: Action/Adventure, Game Sub-Genre: Adventure

Amazon.com Product Description
This is a single-player role-playing game with a fast-paced, turn-based combat system. Players follow the storyline of the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's saga and control the members of the Fellowship, at times directing the actions of up to nine characters at once during battle sequences. Gameplay takes place across realistic backgrounds faithful to Tolkien's descriptions. The semilinear structure of the game allows players to experiment and explore the world of Middle-earth while staying true to Frodo's quest to keep the One Ring from the hands of the Dark Lord Sauron.

Customer Reviews

Gorgeous when it runs
Game Boy Advance players get a treat with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The game is gorgeous. That is, when it runs properly.

By now, anyone who doesn't know at least the basic story of Lord of the Rings must be living in a cave. Hobbits. A Ring. A Quest to Take the Ring to Safety. Evil Riders. This game has them all.

The graphics are really pretty stunning. The little Hobbiton village, the forests, it all gives you a real sense that you're in Tolkein's world, interacting with the characters. Combat is simple turn-based stuff. You do a lot of message-delivering and mushroom-gathering.

Now, for the bad part. First, the game is very directional. You must get Item A from Spot 1 to Spot 2. Receive a coin. Take a message over to Person C. Get a cabbage. You gather a few coins by raiding your friends' homes and then steal their crops! Not very nice.

And when you've found these few items, you're stuck. There's no way to find more. If you want a third dagger for your party, sorry, the vendor only had 1. If you want to kill more Big Dogs to get your characters better at fighting, nope, you killed the only Dogs in Town. You roam the area looking for more things to do, but you are forced to trudge along to the next area.

Which leads to the REALLY bad part. Just about every single person I've talked to about this game has complained of severe crashing problems. The Mines of Moria are particularly notorious for crashing a lot, but crashes happen elsewhere as well. A crash can easily destroy hours of very tedious back-and-forth plodding.

A good game to borrow from a friend to see if it's your type of game, but be prepared to save early, save often as you get into it a bit.

Don't believe any hype
First off, those stating how great this GBA game is obviously haven't played it or they find happiness in torture; this GBA version of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring is one of the absolute worst games I've ever played and is a prime example of a licensed video game gone awry. You play as Frodo and you go through just about all the areas described in the original book while interacting with villagers and performing favors to get special items while also taking place in turn based battles with enemies. While this sounds good on paper (and like some old 16-bit RPG's that will remain nameless) there are so many glitches, bugs, and control issues (not to mention the battles take such an excruciating long time your head will spin in agony) that the overall feel of the game seems unfinished. All in all, this game will disappoint even the most hardcore fans of the Lord of the Rings series and they, along with any self respecting GBA owner, should avoid this at all costs.

Slow, buggy, and awful
I had high hopes for this game since I'm a big Tolkien fan and really like good GBA RPGs. Boy, was I disappointed! First off the game is horribly slow. Combat takes forever, and is boring since your character miss all the time. You'll spend hours walking around looking for mundane items like flowers or Pippen.

Add to that fact that the game is horribly buggy. Gimli turns invisible in one quest, sometimes the elves don't give you items you need, and I've yet to meet anyone online who found a way out of Moria without the game crashing.

Don't buy this waste of a game. Save your money and either wait for one of the other Lord of the Rings games coming out this Christmas (The Two Towers) or buy Golden Sun or Castlevania instead. This is a prime example of a great license going to waste.