In the 90's, a Nordic gaming magazine "Super Power" gave this game 5's on every category and on overall score. On a scale of 0-100.

I was lucky to get a new game maybe twice a year on Christmas or my Birthday, so when this cartridge showed up at a consignment shop for $10 and I convinced my mom to buy it for me (I was a massive LOTR fan as a little kid too, watched the original 1970s animated movies when I was tiny, read the books before I could understand half of them) I was so excited. I got it home and loved it. Maybe it was desperation for entertainment, or maybe I had a vivid imagination and saw more in the game then appeared, but I played the absolute hell out of the game and enjoyed almost every minute. Memorized those convoluted dungeons you’re complaining about (I didn’t have the printed maps at all, that would have been super useful), figured out the tricks for keeping party members alive, slowly but surely I made progress and my little stupid butt I guess was too dumb to realize I was playing one of the worst games on the system. I had a blast anyways. Until I got to the Mines of Moria. I’m assuming that’s the last dungeon in the game as it’s the last part of the first book. I got to to the Mines over and over again and again only to get lost, lose all my health and die. I’d start new games and race there with as much health and healing stuff as possible, but then I’d lose my way in the mines only to wander aimlessly as enemies slowly whittled me down, eventually killing me off. This happened every single time, I must have tried to beat those Mines for months. But it never happened. I’m almost convinced it was impassible. Eventually I lost interest and gave up, Christmas came around and I got a new game so this one started collecting dust. But just goes to show even the crappiest games can connect with you.

"It takes like 40 or 50 minutes just to get out of the shire". I tried reading the fellowship of the ring once. This sentiment seems accurate to the source material.

I used to love this game, as frustrating as it was. Fun fact: if you had a human player keep Gandalf well away from the Balrog as you defeat it at the end, you could break the game and have Gandalf alive and in your party during the ending sequence where the Fellowship is lamenting Gandalf's death. 12-year-old me laughed like crazy :)

I WANTED to love this game so badly back in the day. I remember renting this game and spending an entire weekend trying to find the Gaffer's glasses and constantly seeing Pippin reduced to a pile of bones.

I adore the music in this, even though I'm not a fantasy guy myself, but that mixture of folk fantasy-style music with clean samples of 80's-like cheesy synth flutes and harpsichords sounds amazing, truly a relic of the past.

Oh man. This was one of my first SNES games as a kid, and my mom had read me the books, so I played this game TO DEATH. I remember messing around with the 'Inventory Code' to get all kinds of gear where it wasn't meant to go. I managed to get the mythril coat (usually limited to Frodo, naturally) onto Aragorn, which made him basically immortal, and walked back and forth across the game meting out revenge on wolves and orcs. Good times. Well, no, they weren't. Making-the-best-of-the-bad times.

True, the music is the only reason to experience this game, so weird that an overall bad game can have some amazing tracks.

Man, this game... I still own my original copy, and I remember trying to convince my closest friends to play an actual 5-player game with me - I did own the multitap and three or so controllers, so my friends brought their own. However, I was the only real Tolkein fan in the group, and the game itself doesn't do a great job of advertising itself as a "fun" game, especially in the beginning. So, after playing the game alone for many hours and eventually getting lost in Moria, I only ever really turned the game on just to listen to the amazing title theme... And yes, the game really is 5 players, but it's weird: Player 1 controls Frodo until Aragorn joins, and then the hobbit is promptly bumped to Player 4. Samwise is Player 2, Pippin is Player 3, and Gimli is Player 5. I think Meriadoc takes the Player 5 slot until Gimli joins, but I can't exactly remember. The other unmentioned Fellowship characters are only controllable by Player 1 with the R button. One trick I learned with the AI (since I put so much time in it back in the day): just tap R to get them to their "default" state of following you, though sometimes you have to do it several times as their pathfinding might get snagged again. Holding R lets you control all of them, and if you hold the attack button and then hold R, you can get all of your characters to attack somewhat simultaneously, creating a somewhat defensive line against incoming enemies.

I loved this game as a kid. Played it all the way through with my brother.

I read the books when I was ten and was excited for this game. When I heard the music I was sure it would be amazing. Then I started playing...

To be fair..Frodo’s quest in LOTR books is one giant fetch quest. He fetches the ring and brings it to a predetermined spot. Why would the game be different.

When I was a kid this was the one game in my hand-me-down pile of cartridges that would never work, no matter what I did. I remember being a really frustrated 7-year old. Maybe that was for the best, in hindsight lol Ps. I think Michael Jordan’s Chaos in the Windy City deserves a closer look. That game is kinda awesome!

I got this game for Christmas as a kid, because both of my parents loved the Lord of the Rings books, and I had started reading them by that point too. Fun fact, this game was expensive back when it was new. I remember it costing $70-80 at K-Mart. Yeah, I didn't love it, but I still have nostalgia for it. And I did manage to beat it too.

I feel like if someone were to make a ROMhack of this, they could solve many of the problems. They could rework the dungeons to be more memorable and easier to navigate (brighter, too!), fix combat to be less clunky and more fluid, remove permadeath and add a mechanic to revive fallen party members, remove the fetch quests, add an actual save mechanic, fix the party AI so that your companions aren't utterly useless, and tweak the story pacing, among other things. I wanted to love this game when I was a kid, seeing as I've been a life-long LOTR fan, but it has so many flaws that make it nearly unplayable. I never got further than the Barrow Downs before I got so frustrated that I had to call it quits. It's a shame, because this game could have been so much more, but fell so far short of that.

I remember playing this with my friends back when we were in elementary school. Really had a lot of fun. The maps were a big part of the fun, figuring out which dungeon we were in. We actually beat the Balrog. Left us wishing for a sequel.

I remember there being a HUGE feature in an issue of Nintendo Power showing off the motion capture process for the rotoscoped animation used in this game, does anyone else remember that? It had me SUPER excited about this game, I rented it as soon as it came out and bought it used later...I honestly still enjoy the game, though it's more fun if you can find some other people to play with.

When I first played this game, I was also playing A Link to the Past, Illusion of Gaia, and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. I even chose Mystic Quest over this one!

Square should’ve had the rights for a game like this

I tried to play this back in the 90s. It was terribad. Never made it out of the shire.

The music in this game is incredible and deserved a better Lord of the Rings game. The composer should get more credit and I'm sure he's done other amazing work. That being said I had this as a child and I found a way to love it as kids do. I actually thought it had atmosphere, but it felt unfinished and it had loads of bugs. You could reset your character by levelling up too much and I somehow got into Moria without collecting the necessary items. And why did Legolas have no attack. It did kinda suck.

This game will forever hold a special place in my heart. I still have my cart. I know its a bad game but theres just something about it that vibes with me. The music is one of a kind amazing. And the graphics are pretty good. I somehow managed to finish this as a kid....for the most part. I believe I had to contact the local Nintendo hotline for some help near the end in Moria or something like that. There is a solid foundation that could have been something really great....but instead it got released in this half finished state... :\ If I remember correctly Legolas couldnt even attack at all so he was a useless party member... I dont remember the manual having maps :o ....now I have to check if my copy even has the manual... Pretty sure I drew my own maps

I DESPISE this game. I find it hilarious that they called it Vol. 1 like it was good enough to even warrant a sequel.

I feel like this game is similar to Drakkhen in that the gameplay is pure jank but the music and atmosphere is what carries it a little.

I grew up reading LOTR and was so excited to see this game when it came out. The character portrait animation was lifted straight from the 1978 Ralph Bakshi cartoon, hence the really bad haircuts (hey, it was the 70s!). If you've never seen it, it is worth a watch. Peter Jackson has even admitted to taking a lot of inspiration for certain scenes. And hey, you get to see Aragorn running around without pants on, voiced by the legendary Sir John Hurt! 😄 Sadly, this whole game felt like utter disappointment. My Dad and I managed to grind our way through to the end, where you technically have a boss fight in the Balrog. However, the only way to beat him is to get Gandalf to hold still long enough to snuff it before you can actually fight the Balrog and escape.

Even if this game only exists for the following reason, it's worth it; That music, coupled with the atmosphere the artwork creates in the first part of the game, man. First you have the Shire music, which is so unbelievably jovial medieval fantasy music it hurts. Coupled with the art style of the rich greens of the trees and grass. And then, the best part - getting outside and hearing that forlorn, lonley music with the wind in the background, and what is obviously overcast lighting, and the bushes blowing in the wind (they are extremely well animated). It creates such an atmosphere that it inspires me to this day, to think about making scenes in my games, of overcast, desolate but mystical landscapes that are vast and lonely but waiting to be explored, you might find a ruined castle, a secret cave... it actually did inspire quite a few pencil drawings when I was a teenager. Too bad the caves in the game are so unnecessarily lengthy and repetitive it's maddening. I still remember the frustration. Wanting to like the game so much, but just getting so lost in the sheer size and repetition of it. It's like they felt they had to cheaply bulk out the size to unreasonable levels to make it "epic" like the books. And given the space limitations of the time, the easiest way to do this is just repeat stuff. And finding out the game supported FIVE players with the multitap (I bet the mouse was added to allow you to make up the controller numbers) and hiring out some of that gear from the video store and getting far enough to get a handful of players active just to move around together and do some action-RPG stuff in the same game, was very briefly, quite awesome. Until one person died and the game was like, "too bad, you're dead". The promise of what this game could've been, that's why I'm glad it exists. There isn't anything else like it.

Definitely remember renting this one back in the mid 90's, not making any progress. When the first Peter Jackson LOTR film came out, the local used-game shop in my town jacked up the price of this game and I laughed at him, told him this game was not very good and utterly useless without the instruction booklet.

Yeah I sure do remember renting this one as a kid and being massively disappointed.

Ahhh, this takes me back. I've got memories of this game, to be sure. ("Fond ones, right?" *anakinface* "Fond ones... right?") Imagine the era where RPGs were studded with gems like Final Fantasy 6 (3) and Breath of Fire 2 (Chrono Trigger was a year off, yet), and action-RPGs like Illusion of Gaia and Secret of Mana... and then we get this. Don't get me wrong - Lord of the Rings, a great story. Iconic. But at the time it was "niche". The story was almost 40 years old, and the animated version was over 15, and video games really hadn't delved into it (except a few PC roguelikes, and the Mac game this video briefly mentions). It was not really in the spotlight. But enough about that, on to some of the things the video mentions: The dungeon design is exactly as portrayed. And while the manual does have maps, you often have to figure which map you need, as it is listing one map for each dungeon layout, several of which get reused. (They're not randomly picked, just a generic set of maps from which given dungeons and floors drew.) Not to mention the final third of the game, which is one entire dungeon with many floors - the Mines of Moria. And yeah, a character dead is gone forever. I've had to reload - yes, with those passwords - after runs of bad luck. But wait, there's more! First off, Frodo dying = game over. Which is pretty fine up until Rivendell, as you are controlling Frodo. Afterward, Aragorn joins and becomes the player-controlled character (assuming one-player mode). Now, game over is when EITHER Aragorn or Frodo die... and Frodo is now under AI control. Thanks to his mail shirt, he's slightly more durable than the other three hobbits, but still categorically inferior to Aragorn's capabilities. What this video doesn't show? The inventory screen. I remember it only vaguely, but I do recall feeling it was entirely inadequate to the task of serving the game properly. And the icing on the cake? Boromir doesn't exist. They straight up shafted the guy, worse than Jackson ever could. Only eight of you leave Rivendell and go through Moria (and only 7 are really party members; Gandalf is 100% guest-joiner material). As the box art says, this game is "The Lord of the Rings, Vol. 1".... they never made a 2, much less 3. The final boss is the Balrog (where "winning" means "survive until Gandalf does his thing" which still requires reaching a health threshold - unlike the canon where nobody bothered actually fighting the creature because none of them could), and you get an ending cutscene basically describing your visit to Lorien and looking into Galadriel's Mirror. I will agree on the game's one positive quality: the music is stunning. Does this make up for everything else? No, but if you want the best part of this game experience, just look up soundtrack videos and you're good. All the music, none of the gameplay.

Ah, this game, where if you have a party member die you just can't complete it at all. Goodness gracious, what I wouldn't do without Sam Gamgee saying "I think there's a door here" in my life...

Based on those character profile pics, this looks like it was adapted from the 70s LotR movie which is also kind of a mess and incomplete so... at least they're consistent.

My mom bought me this game that opening music slaps I also enjoy the character design but yeah if you lost the manual back in the 90's you where boned

4:24 Whoa, Samwise has some AMAZING stats for level 4... Honest, non-judgemental question from an old man who played this game as a kid; is there a neat glitch to perform that gets those stats, or Game Genie? I really WANTED to like this game as a kid (It was my first introduction to Tom Bombadil!) but I could only beat it with Game Genie and never felt very satisfied with how it ended.

Let me take you back to the early 2000s, when the lord of the rings movies where all the hype and my computer was nowhere near to play any of the current games, but by merely chance of destiny I found that exists a game based on the trilogy for the Snes that I had never heard before! And it's even called volume 1 so obviously it means that there's at least another!! Oh boy oh boy am I for a great afternoon playing in this game! Only for that great anticipation being soured by this maddeningly boring and confusing game 😞 The graphics are quite good for the time that the backgrounds are drawn in a very organic looking manner, and the characters animation is very fluid the only problem is how repetitive and dark everything looks. The music is indeed good but it's very monotone too and when you are lost during the same maze path without being able to find the exit on the frigging cave, the music sounds like it's only helping to drive you nuts. I didn't have access to the internet to look for any guides so I can see you made it a lot longer than I did because I never saw a single orc or goblin I only fought freaking bats. And in this case it's not clear that the game is bad because it was rushed, because I guess with a longer production time they could have fixed maybe the enemy AI or the companion AI and maybe other more creatures but the dark graphics and the nonsense mazes where clearly a choice so this game is very much hopeless

I still use the soundtrack of this game for my DnD campaigns. Remember playing this with my father including secret of mana since there weren't many snes jrpgs in the UK. We know the game wasn't exactly exciting all the time but we got through it together and enjoyed our time on it. One moment I tend to laugh about alot is that my dad would always stick to Aragorn as soon as we got him, he was a bit selfishly strict about his choice. But we always joked about it back then even to recently when I was talking about some coop games I was playing with my friends and he would bring up LOFTRV1 among other games to.

4:24 wtf, Sam is a HP beast. Just send him to fight Sauron.

03:48 Isn't the Balrog part kind of a boss fight? (Guess what, he has wings...) And yeah, remember that part of the book when the Balrog turns Gandalf in a pile of bones?

You are right about everything. Anyway there is something about this game. I like the graphic presentation, the large open spaces and the music create a lot of atmosphere. I feel somehow transporter and I project what I know about middle-earth into the landscapes. There are few enemy types in this game and every new one that you meet for this reason is exciting. It's a bad game but it triggers my imagination.

The battle scenes would have been cool if it would have gone into a menu-based subscreen like Suikoden. The hobbits could have had a combo attack, whether it was Merry and Pippin together or Sam and Frodo together or all four, Aragorn and Legolas could have teamed up, Gimli and Legolas, etc.

You had to be there and be a lord of the rings fan. It was my favorite for a while. Literally 4 friends 24 pack of soda and chips, maps sprawled out adventuring in the barrow downs and Moria. It was amazing for those who loved lotr, had friends, and were open minded.

I thought this was a fever dream! Back in the day my cousin had this emulated on his computer along with like 100 other snes games. This game creeped me the fuck out and I have no idea what to do and the wolves and snakes kept killing me 😂

This game is one I wish would be patched by some rom team to make it better. It has a lot of potential of being a classic if reworked. Maybe this will be the game that motivates me to learn how to code.

What a coincidence lol! I just bought this game last Friday but haven’t played it yet tho. Thanks for the great review champ! Dope channel by the way.

I've already had breakfast this morning but I'm suddenly feeling like I could go for a second one..

Rented this one when I was a kid because I was a big fan of the books (read all three of them on my own when I was 7), and even then I could tell that the game was just not good. Combat is clunky, graphics are bland, gameplay is tedious and time-wasting and the AI is appalling. I never even made it across the river before I had to return it to the video shop and never bothered getting it out again. But seriously, the music is phenomenal, some of the best on the SNES, and that's VERY high praise. You didn't even play the amazing Shire theme in this video, which is a truly gorgeous piece that runs for almost 2 minutes straight before it starts to loop. I wouldn't say it's worth playing for the soundtrack alone, because KZfaq exists, but you really should go out of your way to look up the soundtrack and listen to it for a bit. It was composed by Charles Deenen, best known for Fallout 1 & 2, The Lost Vikings, Planescape: Torment, Another World and Descent 2.

I bought this when it was new. As a young teen with a measly paper route income at the time, it might have been my first slap in the face purchase. Total waste of what little money I had to spend and a huge disappointment as a young fan of the books. Watching this gameplay footage, I still want to like this game. But I can also feel my eyes getting sleepy...

This is still my favorite KZfaq channel. Great video. Glad you're back SNESDrunk!

This reminds me of Young Merlin but without the fun oddities.

The fact that you came up with anything nice to say about this game is a testament in itself. I don't think anyone would have faulted you for going full negative lol. Was really awesome to watch this though. Even known bad games need love from time to time. Thank you for the videos!

Man, I remember finding this shortly after I discovered decent SNES emulation. I got so excited when I saw there was a Lord of the Rings game! Boy, was that a let down.

I remember renting this back in the day. I also remember not being able to figure out how to get out of the first area surrounded by hedges or garden walls or some-such. And the rental didn’t come with the manual ☹️ Needless to say, it was not a pleasant gaming experience, though based on how the rest of the game is, maybe was lucky to get stuck 😅 On the plus side, i got to enjoy the awesome music for a good long time while repeatedly wandering from wall to wall in a vain attempt to escape 😄

4:18 - FYI all the character portraits are definitely directly inspired by the animated 1978 Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings movie character designs - for better or worse...

You should do a video on the snes sailor moon games

I remember renting this as a kid. I didn't know anything about LotR at the time so this was my first experience. The gameplay was dull and I never got out of the shire but most everything else about this game had a charming quality to it, from the music to the drawings of the characters. My guess is the development got rushed.

Sorry, but I disagree. Does this game have its flaws? Yes. Does that mean it's a bad game? NO! In fact, I loved this game as a kid and I still wish they finished the series (Vol. II and III). I don't really know anything about rom hacking or rom editing, but I would learn just to complete and improve this series. I would definitely add a map system, and improve game play mechanics and esthetics.

My friends and I played the crap out of this game. We loved it! We had a map person guide us, and we got everything in the dungeons and everything. But, we noticed at a certain point the weapons and armour did weird things to your stats, like an overflow, or something? We also got to the balrog, got so excited and tried to get another one of our friends to see it, but our game froze just beneath the balrog, so we didn’t even get to fight it. And then our password didn’t work, so we gave up… right at the end…

Worth playing? It’s the greatest game ever created.

I remember playing this when it was new. Even back then I thought it was absolute ass.

I played up until the Mines of Moria a few years ago and did so with no maps, purely going off of memory and or maps I made myself while playing and exploring. So over many days I get to the mines, and go to save my game again, but just one problem. The 16 bit code the game predetermines for you at this point always includes an "O", which the game does not have, it only has a "Zero". So saving the game was impossible unless you wanted to do Moria in one go. 🙃 Also, the xp for leveling doesn't change -its a flat amount between each level, whether it's 1 or 90. Which means you can kill those Moss giant things before going to the council, then by walking their spawn point on and off screen, respawn them infinitely. I think I got the fellowship to 90+ each in levels, which equates to being unkillable since you'll have 4,000 HP on each member. I'd only recommend playing this game if you are a LotR fanatic and it's the dead of winter outside. The soundtrack is 10/10 though.

So my first Tolkien game was, The Two Towers. It is a MUD (Multiple User Dungeon). It is a text-based game that predated MMORPGs. I started playing it in 1996-7. This game still exists, and you can play it today.

I'm still asking myself "why did I beat this game?" It was such a suffering. Btw, do you know that it also has bugs? If I remember correctly there was a point when you need to talk to a tree to do a quest. But I couldn't for some reason, so I had to start from the beginning. This game is a horror

Watching the 4 Hobbits repeatedly dying and turn to bones was honestly kinda traumatizing back in the day. I remember putting up with the game all the way to Moria but that dungeon is hell and I gave up on it after being lost for absolute hours

I played this game with my best friend for so long, and had a love/hate relationship for years. I remember getting stuck in the barrow-downs for what felt like WEEKS! Getting to Bree felt like a real accomplishment - and then suddenly getting sent back to find more stuff I had missed, man. What a legendarily tough game. Great music, ridiculous gameplay.

Having played through this game (with save states, of course), I actually feel you made it look better than it is. I would not say it does a nice job following the original story. It includes moments that were excluded from the movies (most notably Tom Bombadil), but it mostly makes up quests to fill the game.

Played this for an hour or so was surprised by how empty the first dungeon was. Seemed like a mistake.

Still better than Rings of Power

I remember renting this back in the day and getting very little use out of it.

As a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s who read The Hobbit and LotR when I was 8, I was on the lookout for whatever LotR-style games I could find. My father was originally an Atari gamer who moved on to PCs in the late 80s, so I had experience with War in Middle Earth for the Atari ST (a weird but compelling Adventure/Strategy War Game hybrid) and then the PC RPG LotR mentioned; I didn't get a SNES until my 12th Birthday in 1994, and eventually found this, uh, game, which I had my parents get because I hoped it was a port of the PC version. And I was also disappointed by just how bad it was.

I don't even think I knew about this game previously...I guess there is a reason for that! Too bad the amazing music is wasted on this game. It sounds _really_ good for an SNES game! It was developed by Interplay? I'm surprised none of the hobbits fart, belch, or hock a loogie as was like the standard for some of their 90s games! 😅

I remember trying to play this as a kid when I first discovered emulators, and I tried multiple times but never got really far because it was clunky, confusing and difficult. I thought I was just too dumb to play it, but I guess it just sucks.

Could you render your videos in 4:3 or 5:4 please? It would enable me to watch your videos in full screen on my 5:4 CRT monitor. Now the game footage is just a small box in the middle of the screen surrounded by huge black edges. I know my request is kinda fringe, but most of the games you feature are not widescreen anyway so it would make sense.

My parents got me this and Rock and Roll Racing for my birthday once. Even though I loved R&R Racing my dad has on multiple occasions apologized for getting me this.

If Secret of Mana got run over by a bus and was struck by lightning, you have this game...

I grew out of 'consoles' when the Commodore 64 w/disk drive came out so never saw this but was reminded of another 'ancient' game based on that property - J.R.R. Tolkien's War in Middle Earth (1988)

I love all the videos you've been dropping recently. Keep em' coming! 👍😁👍

I had no idea that the character images on their stat sheets were based on the Bakshi film (which also didn’t get a sequel for a similar reason, lack of sales). The Bakshi film is quite the something, like if Middle Earth existed entirely on the side of some stoner’s van in the 70’s. Alas, the game was just dull.

I missed this game when it came out, but looking at the character portraits, I am thinking that this may have been based on the Ralph Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings. The character portraits are most certainly from that version of the story.

I liked this despite its flaws, at least back then. the biggest issue was the repeating maps, but you did get used to it, and you could also make your own maps which helps a lot. here's a trick. the block animation allows you to block anything (at least any sword attack). if you hold the button down you will repeatedly block and be effectively immune to incoming attacks in that direction. if you have one character do that, while another stands just behind him, they can attack with their sword through the block and damage what's attacking you. you can do this with ringwraiths and with enough patience you can kill the ringwraiths.

I bought this at a flea market as a kid without a manual or any kind of guide. I played it with a big sketch pad next to me and would sit there and map out the caves and dungeons by hand. Did that with Willow on NES too

I had this as a kid. One of my favorite things to do was play around with the password system. Mostly this was to get items that would let me skip straight to Bree or beyond. Although that depended on whether I lived past the Nazghul screen. Ah sequence breaking, a true joy of password systems.

I saw a preview for this in GamePro in 1993. Man, I was blown away by the one screen shot and the cool tech that made the fights possible (I forgot the name of it). I had just finished the hobbit and was working on Fellowship. I think I would have forgiven the flaws of this game. That was normal game play back then. AD&D Warriors of the Eternal Sun for Genesis also had bland dungeon scenes. I loved it!

I remember during the era of renting games, I rented this one. I was in like 5th or 6th grade and you can only rent a game for 1 day for 3.50 dollars. So I always tried to stay up and beat a game. Always, I remember I rented this twice and was so upset with getting lost. It was one of the one games I never beat, because I literally didn't know what I was doing. LOL Oh memories.

This was one of those weekend game rentals back in school where there wasn't any manuals and no internet help. I absolutely could not figure anything out.

As a Tolkien lover, I traded in so many other games and CD's in '95 to get enough to cover the $50 price at our local buy/sell game shop for the one used copy they had. I am not sure I have ever been as disappointed with a purchase as I was with this.

The character portraits with the Flowbee haircuts looked very reminiscent of the Ralph Bakshi movie.

FWIW, Interplay was much more respected in the PC gaming space, with many very good games under their belt. But they didn't fare well on consoles, for some reason. In this case, the problem is that it was a good CRPG in 1990, but was totally outdated by the time they ported it to SNES.

oh boy! I sure can't wait for volume II to come out!

Great review and video! I really wanted this game as a kid. I was really into LOTR and Warhammer, so it looked right up my street. I saw an advert for it in a magazine but could never find it in the shops. Sounds like I dodged a bullet 😂

Oh my Lanta, the character portraits are taken from Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the rings! pure Gold!

How on earth would you play this with the mouse lol I might download the ROM- I mean play it any way I can- just to see

That music really is dope though. When I’m drooling and ancient in a retirement home pooping my pants more often than I recognize another person, I will still recognize the music from the 8 and 16 but video game era.

My dad and I loved boogerman on the Genesis along with ren and stimpy growing up in the 90’s We had the soundtrack on VHS tape in orange we played all the time in the car stereo

Aw, dang. You didn't let people hear the Horn of Gondor. (Which is used on this game show I watch; Arcade Pit.)

When u briefly mentioned how this game was _not_ like A Link to the Past or Secret of Mana, it made me think how cool it would be if someone were to make a mod of one of those games where you played through the story of Lord of the Rings! That would be so cool!

There is a part where you leave the shire and are heading west to Rivendell or wherever, but you have to cross a field with Nazgul. They kept running me down and killing me so I assumed that was the wrong way. I went back and explored every nook and cranny of every cave and field until I figured out that yes, this is the way I was supposed to go. I just never made it across that field and eventually I gave up playing. Fun to watch competent people beat the game on youtube years later though.

I got this game back in the mid-90's, either for Christmas or a birthday (I still have it.) I didn't ask for it, and I knew nothing about the series or the games' existence. Whoever got it for me (most likely my grandma, otherwise it was my mom) obviously just thought I would probably like it. It's an RPG, and since I love RPGs it was a perfectly reasonable assumption to make. Unfortunately, I hated it and was never able to get anywhere. I remember the super slow attacks you mentioned, and I also remember it being crazy difficult. Every once in a blue moon I use to pull it out and give it another go, but it never grew on me. The "Vol. 1" part of the title suggests that more of these were planned. I can't say I'm surprised that never happened, and I'm thankful that they spared us.

0:34 I remembered Interplay also releasing Lost Vikings, Earthworm Jim, and the greatest SNES game of all time, Rock N Roll Racing. Check the wiki, they have a few more.

"Drunk guy at a music festival" made me LOL!

Jeez I remember the overhead view from a screen shot in a old Game Players mag.

Starting at 5:40 tell me that doesn’t sound like the outro music to Coast to Coast? I half expected George Noory to finish the narration of the video