An Ode to the Unneccessarily Difficult Tie-In Video Game

My brain works in weird ways sometimes.

I've spent the past few weeks getting increasingly excited for the release of Star Wars: Zero Company, a new tactics game set at the height of the Clone Wars from Respawn and Bit Reactor. I've been hungering over every second of previews, listening to podcasts, and positively chomping at the bit to make a battalion of Star Wars OCs I can customize and give backgrounds to to my heart's content, all for the risk of them biting the blaster bolt in the XCOM-alike's permadeath-as-default difficulty. As I've gotten older I've definitely waned when it comes to playing games on challenging difficulties; gone are the Halo 3 LASO (that's "Legendary All Skulls On," for those unfamiliar) runs of my youth, but when it comes to tactics games I do still love the background thrill of committing to the fact any one of my characters could bite it if I make a mistake or just get unlucky.

I promise that will become relevant when I tell you that somehow instead for the past few days I've been re-devouring the 2004 turn-based licensed RPG The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. Made back when EA was really trying to pump as much as it could out of owning the gaming rights to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, The Third Age stepped away from the hack-and-slash and strategy action of other LOTR games of the time and made a bold statement: What if we just made Middle-earth Final Fantasy X?

Wrapped around this wholesale theft of the conditional turn-based battle system from FFX is a story about what is basically a Fellowship of the Ring but with the serial numbers filed off: a party of two Gondorians, an elf, a dwarf, and two Rohirrim whose adventure just so happens to conveniently track about 30 minutes behind the actual Fellowship of the Ring, letting them experience all the big set pieces from the movies while only faintly having any impact on the war for the titular Third Age.

I'd been having a pretty easy time slipping back into it since this past weekend—I'm much better at video games now than I was in 2004—and have managed to breeze through about two-thirds of the game at this point. But what's struck me at the point I've gotten to, transitioning through the Battle of Helm's Deep and into the events of Return of the King, is that sometimes The Third Age will just kick you in the nuts and tell you to try again.