YMMV / The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age

Tropes for the console version

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The Nazgul encountered in the final level are Elite Mooks who are dangerous, but the game gives you Aragorn as a party member during these fights, and he has the power to call the Army of the Dead. Said attack is almost always a one-hit kill, and if they do survive, you can easily finish them off after before they get a turn.
  • The Dark Lord, Sauron, boasting 736,973 HP on Hard Mode, can be taken down in under ten turns (on Hard Mode); fifteen if it is your first time fighting him.
• Ass Pull: There is absolutely no setup for Berethor being married to Morwen besides a cutscene at the end of Osgiliath, and even that comes out of nowhere, given the last scene concerning this matter was in Rohan, where Idrial bitches at Berethor for helping Morwen and Rohan over the Elves-she's basically accusing him of being easily swayed by a pretty face.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Final Boss. While fighting through the Pelennor Fields, you suddenly get warped to the top of Barad-dûr, fighting the Eye of Sauron itself, and the ending monologue afterwards just rambles about how the Fourth Age has begun.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome:
  • Mixed with Heartwarming - a random soldier in Helm's Deep mentions that the only thing he has to lose is his life, which he received freely and is more than willing to give in order to save others. the matter-of-factness with which this line is delivered is surprisingly poignant.
  • In Osgiliath, when Berethor learns that he's been brainwashed by a Morgul blade shard embedded in his body, he immediately goes about fixing it by grabbing a dagger and literally digging the blade out of his flesh.
  • It's generally agreed upon that the best moments of the game are when the party works together with a Fellowship hero such as Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli. Aragorn especially has some amazing attacks that absolutely shred enemies.
• Demonic Spiders: Late-game Easterlings, among others. They have the ability to put your entire party to sleep at once, as well as use automatic counterattacks and a damaging shield. There's not really a safe way to approach them, and dealing with them can be pretty painful.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: While the new characters are pretty cliche, Hadhod is well liked by players, and in general fans of the franchise due to being a dwarf that brings some of the best moments in terms of awesome, and comedy in the game, on top of being a good playable unit.
• Evil Is Cool: As is tradition in The Lord of the Rings games, playing as the bad guys is a highlight of the experience. The most famous example in this game is the Balrog, who is so obscenely powerful that he can wipe the entire party sans Gandalf in about 2 moves.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: A good amount of fans ship Berethor/Idrial. Because of that, they were annoyed with the reveal of Berethor being married to Morwen all along, not helped by Morwen's less-than-friendly attitude during cutscenes.
• Game-Breaker: A lot. See below. Basically, everyone has at least one that can be abused for massive advantage.
  • Berethor inflicts the most damage out of all the characters with his 5-hit melee combo. This only combines with his ability to tank hits with Taunt and buff allies with Leadership skills.
    • The Company Might (Improves offence power) + Fellowship Grace (Restores AP) combo. For some reason, the former interacts with the latter to produce massive amounts of AP whilst both are active, giving you infinite AP. Good thing, too, as restoration items are a limited resource for some time, and even when they're not(which takes some grinding), require AP to make.
    • Add Royal Grace onto that for healing, and Idrial is hardly even needed.
    • War Cry makes your allies use their strongest attack on a single target (or a random second/third/etc, if your intended target dies partway through). It only costs 200 AP, and the attacks are free (You don't get skill points for them though). With the right set of team mats and unlocked skills (Eaoden's Rampage of the Helm, Elegost's True Shot, Berethor's Gondor Rampage), this is the most damaging single "attack" in the game.
  • Just pump stat points into Idrial's spirit stat, and she can average 20,000 damage a turn mid-game.
    • Aura of the Valar is completely broken. It auto-revives a character on death with full health and mp and they immediately get to attack and Idrial can cast it on herself. This means even if she dies on the very next attack, she still has an opportunity to cast it before she dies, meaning once she casts it on herself, you are invincible and it is impossible to lose (except for the few enemies with Dispel).
  • Elegost has 2 big ones. True Shot, the final Bow Craft, is a Spirit attack that is capable of truly massive amounts of damage, at least 24,000 each shot. Boosted by Elfstones, and it begins to get insane. Arrows of Sleep is a Ranger Craft that you can actually get pretty early, and it starts a pretty mediocre attack, putting one opponent to sleep for a few turns. What's game-breaking about it is when it is powered up by two of Elegost's Passive Skills: Sleep Volley and Lingering Sleep. The first makes Arrows of Sleep hit all enemies; the second makes the sleep last forever (or at least until they are hit with something). Most Bosses and a few Elite Mooks are immune to Sleep, but being able to put all the Mooks out of commission with a single hit is pretty damn powerful.
  • Hadhod can actually inflict more damage with his Spirit skills than Idrial can. Yes, this is a Dwarf who's a Magic Knight capable of wiping out entire groups of enemies, shield allies with his Mountain Shield, and still pack a mean punch with his melee skills. In particular, his Mountain Shield ability renders all party members immune to an X amount of damage. No enemy in the game can break through this barrier in one attack, and even when pummeled by lesser enemies they won't break through without you being unable to put the shield up again. This means that you are immune to damage and can grind whatever skill you want.
  • Morwen has Cloak of the Plains, a Thief Craft that prevents the enemies from targeting her for a few turns. With enough Speed and a way to replenish your AP, she can stay invincible while casually hitting the enemy.
  • Eaoden's final passive skill, Absorb Malice, makes him immune to all spirit attacks and gives him action points every time he is hit by one. And since the final boss only has spirit powers, all he can do is enable Eaoden to spam his most powerful attacks without worrying about action points.
  • Stunning and Crippling. Most bosses are vulnerable to at least one of them, and since you can see the turn order several turns ahead, if you have any sense of planning ahead at all you can prevent some bosses from ever attacking you at all.
  • Fear. It's available as a Shadowcraft through the Elfstone of Fell Shadow, meaning that everyone can learn it with enough grinding. It completely immobilizes an enemy for several turns, making them unable to doge your attacks or counter attack. And almost every single enemy in the game(except bosses of course) is vulnerable to it. There's a Lightcraft that does the same thing, but also does damage to the enemy while it's active.
  • The Elfstones of Fell Shadow and Pure Light. They can teach skills such as healing, AP draining, hasting, resurrection, slowing opponent's attacks, stopping them from using Spirit Moves, putting them to sleep, Fear (see above) and powerful Light, Shadow, and Fire Spirit attacks. It can turn any character into a completely self-sufficient power house.
  • Morgul Decay, a rare item that can completely remove an enemy Defense stat, and no one is immune to it, making even the toughest bosses go down in around five minutes.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Eaoden can exploit one to do way more damage than he's supposed to and leech himself to full with every attack.
  • Rather than gradually restore AP, Phial of Vigor will catch in a loop and spam the target character with the restoration effect at the beginning of every turn.
  • Hadhod's Mountain Shield blocks so much damage that it can actually render healing entirely obsolete on hard mode.
  • The (generally high-level) items obtained from Evil Mode can be saved onto any play file, allowing Berethor to start the game with the Sword of Isildur.
  • The Xbox version is compatible with the Xbox 360, but whenever you approach a treasure chest, the faint glowing effect instead floods the entire screen with light. The game seems really excited to let you know you've found a new item.
• Narm: Many of the lines in the game fall under this category, like this gem from Berethor:
  Berethor: Watch out! Those tentacles are powerful!
• Narm Charm: This little gem from the Mines of Moria fight with a Goblin Chieftain is unintentionally funny, but since Hadhod is the one who said it, its both funny, and awesome at the same time.
  Goblin: Who dares!?
  Hadhod: I think I do!
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The game's plot is basically just following the Fellowship where they go, and participate in the important battles/events, with the cast of characters being cardboard cuts with no real arcs or all that complex of characterizations. The core gameplay is generally solid though, and being able to follow the Fellowship and see reimaged areas from the films in game is considered fun and interesting. The only story you get is Gandalf's logs he leaves behind, which provide some surprisingly in depth looks into the lore of the world.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: The entirety of the game sets up this really awkward and laughably bad Unresolved Sexual Tension between Berethor, Idrial and Morwen when she shows up. Then right at the end the Nazgul says they have claimed what Berethor loves, right before they clash.
• That One Attack: The Mûmakil encountered during the final chapter have a powerful party wide attack that has a high chance of stunning the party. While this is bad on its own, the fact you often fight two of them at the same time means they can chain said attacks together and lock your team in stuns while they kill them. Its even worse if they ambush you, as they may open with said move and kill you before you can counter attack.
• That One Boss:
  • The last fight in the Helm's Deep level. Once the player moves down the stairs to aid Aragorn at the gate, they are sucked into a long (and tough) series of battles against a veritable army of Uruk-hai and, in the later stages, Trolls. The very last fight in the level is against several waves of Berserkers, who can sometimes take more than one action in a turn, and powerful Attack Trolls. Berethor's "Last Gasp" technique is more or less mandatory for this fight. Not only that, but with the previous fights, you had access to a Hero unit like Aragorn, which helped even the odds, but here, its just your default party, and yet the games enemies fight like its balanced for four. Hope you restored all your HP and AP beforehand!
  • The second battle against Gothmog. Not only he is very tough, but also comes with four mooks that loves to cast Dark Mirror on themselves and cast Morgul Vapours on you party. He also can poison everyone and, if you kill his underlings, he just summon more.
  • The Witch King is unquestionably the hardest boss in the game. Part of the reason is Eowynn, who joins for the fight. While the other guest characters are powerful and fill special roles in combat, Éowyn stands as the single weakest character in the game despite having good skills, in large part due to having absurdly low stats for how powerful the Witch King is. For comparison, Éowyn's strongest attack will do only in the upper hundreds/low thousands of damage per hit, at a point where characters like Berethor, Hadhod, and Morwen can casually deal more damage in a single hit, and their mult-attacks do far more damage than she can. As for the Witch King himself, he has a ton of HP, powerful group hitting attacks, and a Life Drain attack, making him a Marathon Boss in a game that doesn't really work well with the concept. Not helping is the fear attacks he has, which can paralyze a unit and make the fight a Total Party Kill if you aren't careful.
• That One Level: East Emnet Gullies, right after leaving Moria, is a rather confusing labyrinth of gullies and rocky promontories filled with rather tougher-than-you're-really-ready-for-at-that-point Uruk-hai. It also does practically nothing to move forward what little plot actually exists.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Aranel, the Lothlorien scout whom you meet in the East Emnet Gullies doesn't really get a chance to shine. Despite tailing your party and appearing to have a personal connection to Idrial, you don't really get much characterization out of him, and he's gone from the adventure as abruptly as he arrived.
  • Berethor's party as a whole suffers from this as they don't really get much of a chance to show off their personalities, especially after Moria. Most of the information about each party member is told to you (and by extension Berethor) by Gandalf's voiceover cutscenes. You very rarely see any of them even talk to each other, let alone other characters. This problem contributes to the game world not feeling very organic.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The game's premise is based around the idea of what others were doing while the Fellowship was journeying to Mordor. But that's not really what's happening. As it stands, Berethor's company is just following behind the events of the film, unable to make even the slightest change to their outcomes. Much of this owes to the fact that EA didn't own the rights to make games based on the books, meaning that they could only show things that either happened in the films or could be reasonably guessed to have done.

Tropes for the GBA version

• Breather Level: Generally happens in any level in which the other side faces stacked odds.
• Game-Breaker: Gandalf's Stealth skill. Nominally, it's okay, as all it does is protect him from 33% of the ranged damage per level. However, at level 3, it not only makes him immune to ranged damage but seems to make him draw ranged fire from every single enemy unit, even if they have to step out of melee combat to do it, as the game code makes it into an A.I. Breaker. Abusing his Stealth skill is one of the most popular strategies to defeat "The Black Gate Opens" on Grueling and unlock the secret mission "The Board is Set," as it is almost impossible to beat that level and difficulty without it.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Goblins, in any level where they appear in force — primarily "Flight From Moria", "Balin's Tomb", and "The Last Alliance".
  • Peasants and woodsmen, defending against the evil player's Ringwraiths in "Darkness Upon Bree".
• That One Level:
  • For the side of Good:
    • "Defense of the Beacon": your units are few and weak, and your lone primary hero is far from the main point that you need to defend. Meanwhile, the Witch-king is leading a sizable force of tougher evil units and, as soon as he can, starts spamming his Terror ability and preventing your units from moving at all. Good's only advantage is defensive positioning.
    • "Charge of the Rohirrim", as well as "Pelennor Fields": in both cases, your crucial heroes are lightly defended at one end of the map, while a bunch of your Elite Mooks are at the other end, with a truly massive Evil army in between. If you can't get The Cavalry into the fight quickly enough to save your leadership, you are screwed.
    • "The Black Gate Opens": you have your primary hero, two secondaries and a bunch of weaker troops against the massed might of the hordes of Mordor. Your objective is simply to survive for at least 15 turns while Evil beats the crap out of you.
  • For the side of Evil:
    • Oddly enough, the very first level right after the tutorial, "Mission From Rivendell". The Good forces are composed entirely of a primary hero, two secondary heroes and a large number of Elven swordsmen and archers. Meanwhile, outside of heroes, Evil has a numerically and positionally inferior force of generic Morannon Orcs.
    • The two missions in Isengard. Ents are bad enough to face one by one ... now try facing an entire army of them.

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