When the Lord of the Ring movies were announced, I was partially giddy with anticipation and partially full of dread. Here was a classic story that had always defied attempts to fit it into other media. Of course, in the end the movies were spectacular. And, even if the movies weren't 100 percent true to the books (not that they could have been given the limitations of the medium), they certainly captured the feel of the stories and introduced Middle Earth to a much wider audience.

Big screen to small screen
But, of course, for every big movie franchise there will come the video game adaptations. Return of the King for the GBA is such a video game based on the Lord of the Rings movies. They attempted to take the big screen epic and fit it onto the small screen of the GBA. This is a sequel to the GBA version of The Two Towers (which I have not played, I might add). I've been told, however, that the gameplay is very similar between the two games.

The game borrows heavily from the movie. The long intro splash logos (which you can't skip, damn them!) show you the New Line Cinema logo while the haunting intro music from the movie plays. Music from the movie plays in many places as you play the game. You get cutscenes, images taken directly from the movie, when you hit major points in the game. Even the little character sprites in the game are recognizable as the characters from the movies.

One man (or woman) against an army of orcs!
I'm going to preface this by saying, for all my quibbling (I quibble a lot) I like this game. Keep that in mind! At its core, Return of the King is a game very obviously inspired by previous games such as Diablo 2. You pick your character from one of six heroes from the movies: Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Frodo, Gandalf and Eowyn. I picked the pointy-eared toehead as my first character in this game, but later played Gandalf considerably and played a bit with Gimli, Frodo and Eowyn.

Your character has the basic RPG statistics, including hit points, spirit points (mana), armor, to hit, dodge, strength, accuracy, etc. You gain experience by killing enemies, and when enough experience is gained the character gains a level. You can increase your stats plus you get the ability to select skills. Each character has their own set of skills, although some characters do share skills. Each skill is rated from 0 to 5 points (except for a single unique character skill available at level 20 with only 1 upgrade possibility), and you get one point per level. Some skills can't be selected until you reach the appropriate level.

For example, Legolas has the Accuracy skill which gives you +1 accuracy stat point as well as adding +3 critical damage per point you add to the skill. You can add the first point at second level, the second point at fourth level, etc. This is a very nice beginning skill for the "pansy" elf to have, since he often misses the broad side of an orc at the beginning of the game. In all, Legolas has access to 14 different skills, ranging from passive skills like Accuracy or Fleet of Foot (+10% movement speed, starting at level 8), to active skills which take spirit points like Spread Fire (shoot +1 arrow per level in an arc in front of you starting at level 4 and costing 90 spirit points), to the unique character skill Archer of Mirkwood, which at 20th level allows you to shoot a second arrow with your normal attack.

The game essentially plays like early point-and-click RPGs with Lord of the Rings-themed art. Kill monsters, pick up gold, er, I mean "gems" and items. You can upgrade your equipment if you find better items, or sell the stuff for more gems. Each character can use certain types of equipment, so while a strong character like Gimli uses various axes that elven Legolas will have to rely on all types of bows. Items are often restricted by level, so you might find things you want to hold on to until later.

The Amazon could probably take Legolas
The game does offer some innovation over its obvious inspiration. The game is linear in nature, meaning that once you leave one area you cannot go back to previous areas. This can get very annoying since the exits aren't always well marked. Your only option if you want to go back is to reload a previous saved game, but that will repopulate the area with all the monsters you might have previous slain.

Since there's no central town area, you sell your items at special locations such as forges or shrines. These are located at certain intervals around the area, waiting to be found. These locations also provide special services; forges allow you to purchase whetstones that increase weapon damage, while shrines allow you to buy healing herbs, stat points, and even skill points for a rapidly increasing amount of gems.

One special area is the Ranger Hollow. This area allows you to put items you have found into it which are available from other saved games! This means that if some elf finds a sword his twig-like arms can't properly use, he can put it in the Ranger Hollow and some strong warrior, like the shieldmaiden Eowyn, on another saved game can use it.

There's also the Eye of Sauron. Certain monsters will bring the notice of the Dark Lord of Mordor. For example, crebain (large crow-like birds for those that don't have the books memorized) will fly off — if they reach the edge of the screen, the Eye becomes larger. Orcish drummers will draw the attention of the Eye while they are on-screen. As the Eye grows, the enemies get a bit tougher. If the Eye reaches full power, a horrible Nazgul is sent generally ensuring the death of any nearby fragile characters (too often elves).

There are also NPCs that occasionally join you in certain areas; they often rush ahead of you and help take out monsters that can be hard for you. So, the brave and strong Gimli can rush ahead and help take out the cave troll while your less melee-centered elf sits back and ineffectively tries to poke it with arrows. Of course, these NPCs also like to get stuck in weird positions, teleport ahead of you, and kill enemies in strange positions making it hard to pick up the loot.

Finally, there are some nice bonus maps. You can take your character on a temporary vacation to these bonus maps to pick up new items and gain more experience. Did your elf have to use up all his herbs because of the nasty orcses? Is he now facing the unpleasant task of having to take down a cave troll without a dwarf to hide behind? Take a stroll in scenic Moria, where you can slaughter goblins and pick up some more! Get a few levels while you're at it so that those mean ol' orcs aren't such a hassle next time around. That cave troll will never know what hit him once you come back with an extra level or two.

Too much is never enough
Overall, Return of the King is a game that makes you wish it were more. It's a thoroughly entertaining little game, but there's just little annoyances that make you wish that it did just a bit more.

First of all, the game only offers you four save slots when there are six initial characters. That means that if you want to play them all, you're going to have to delete one of your beloved characters. This isn't so bad, because Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn all share very similar stories and paths. But, there's a secret that is unlocked when you defeat the game with every character. So, if you want to see that game, you'll have to delete at least two of your level 20+ characters. Ouch.

Second, the game hints at a bit more depth but doesn't provide it that often. There's a few "quests" in the game that require you to travel extensively in a single area. One such quest reunites two siblings that were separated during travel. Unfortunately, these types of quests aren't available that often, lending the game to the more simplistic "kill everything that moves" type of gameplay that make such quests easy to overlook. While these quests aren't true to the movies, it does add in a bit of variation.

Third, the game is very stingy in awarding points for skills. It would have been nice to have a wider variety of abilities for my characters. At the end, Legolas was level 21 and had only mastered four of the 13 skills available. He also had half-mastered three other skills. There are six whole skills that he had no ability in! Although I could continue replaying the game (even at a harder level), it's not as much fun to go through all those areas the second time.

Fourth, some characters were a bit unbalanced. Arrows shot by Legolas homed in slightly on enemies, for example, something that would have been nice for other characters. Legolas also had an "overdraw" maneuver that allowed him to charge up his power by holding down the attack button, giving him an extra chance to hit, another feature that would have been nice for other characters.

Finally, the game also misses one of the most fun things about similar RPGs: shopping! Even macho dwarves have to admit that part of the fun was grabbing a bunch of high-value loot then taking a town portal back to town to sell it all off. Then you saved up all your hundreds of thousands of gold pieces to go buy some nifty weapon at the shop that had just been generated.

Return of the King only gives you eight inventory slots to hold extra items. Since you never knew where the forges or shrines will appear, you often have to guess which loot is the most expensive and ditch the lesser items. Of course, since you can only really evaluate an item while holding it in your inventory, you sometimes throw away an expensive object just to find out that the new item has the "cheap" attribute on it meaning it's worth less money! In addition, if you are holding an item for later use such as rare arrows for your pointy-ear archer, you have even less space to work with in your inventory. Finally, you have to walk all the way over to a forge or shrine to sell items; you can't just double-click on a town portal scroll and sell your loot.

Of course, the biggest thing that kills the shopping experience is that there are no real shops to buy stuff from! The best you get is the "adventurer's bargain" option at forges, which gives you a random item for an amount of gems. This item is never worth what you pay for it, and you often get a completely garbage item which is weaker than your equipment.

The good, the bad and the ugly (wait ... wrong movie)
The biggest problems I had with the game were with the controls. It was often hard to line an attack and hit an enemy. Legolas had an advantage because his arrows are slightly auto-aiming, although you could get into certain positions where your arrows didn't aim properly and repeatedly missed a stationary enemy. Gandalf, on the other hand, has a special beam attack that was a real pain to aim. I often wasted my spirit points on that attack to no effect. Melee-focused characters also sometimes had troubles hitting an enemy that seemed to be within their attack arc. The crebain and orcish drummers were particularly hard to hit due to their size and speed; this little quirk was annoying since they brought the unwanted attention of Sauron if you didn't kill them soon enough.

The graphics also presented some problems. The crebain were often just black blobs sitting against dark backgrounds like pine trees. I'd often walk near a tree to see a crebain flying off at too fast a pace to properly turn around and fire an arrow at it. This was even on a GBA-SP with the backlit screen. This problem was worse with melee characters that had no hope of hitting the birds. In addition, sometimes paths weren't obviously marked. In general, you cannot walk on water, but in some areas you can. In one specific area you can only walk on water that has large rocks in it. These muddled graphics are a shame, since the rest of the game is actually quite sharp looking on the GBA.

There also was some frustrating little parts of the game. Many low-level items have negatives associated with them, making them relatively useless. Any item that reduces accuracy just isn't going to be helpful. Plus, there are some things that don't make sense. After getting Gandalf to ninth level to use a special rare staff Legolas found and passed through the ranger hollow, I found that I was no longer able to use my beam attack for some reason! This was especially annoying since I had put most of my points into that skill, and because the staff gave me extra spirit points that I needed to keep using that power. Plus, the staff had tied up one of the nine slots in the ranger hollow for a long time. There seemed to be no reason for this restriction, other than the fact that the staff had some kind of graphical effect when equipped. I was very frustrated and disappointed when this happened.

Finally, the gameplay was not terribly balanced. At the end of my Legolas game, he had over twice the number of accuracy stat points, about 100, compared to any other stat. If you can't hit an enemy, then you can't damage it — making accuracy a much more vital stat than just about any other. Items that give accuracy are more useful in gameplay terms than most other items. Plus, not all skills are equally useful. Why spend skill points on a skill like Orcslayer, which gives you a +1 to damage orcs when you could spend the points on Rangemaster, a skill that allows you to do +1 damage to all enemies? Or, why would you ever take the White Knives skill with Legolas when it takes spirit points and only does a short-range attack compared to the default long-range attack?

Well, I guess I ended the story with all my fingers
My impressions, by category:

Graphics: The graphics were very good overall. The character sprites were recognizable considering their size. There were some problems with the graphics obscuring some important gameplay elements, such as the dark crebain enemies against dark backgrounds. The hobbits were also a bit harder to tell apart due to their even smaller sprite size.

Sound: The sound was excellent. The music was taken from the movie and was very appropriate and clear. The sounds were appropriate to the game and helped give cues in situations like when you "missed" an enemy.

Control: The game controls could use work. It was too easy to leave an area before you wanted to leave, especially since you couldn't go back to a previous area. It was easy to miss enemies completely even if you seemed close enough, and some enemies moved amazingly fast.

Gameplay: The gameplay is very good overall. The action was fairly smooth and the game was fun. Could use a bit more in many areas (more inventory, more shopping options, more puzzles, etc), but it was pretty good for what it is: a Diablo-like game. There's a number of little things that can lead to frustration, however, keeping it from being a perfect game.

Multiplayer: The game offers multiplayer if you have multiple cartridges. I did not get a chance to try out the multiplayer options.

Extras: Pretty good. You can connect your GBA with this game to a GameCube with the GC version of Return of the King to open up some bonuses (not reviewed). The game is fully translated into multiple languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, and French in addition to English; from what I could tell from the Spanish translations, they were reasonably accurate even if not quite perfect. Finally, there are bonus maps and characters to unlock as you progress in the game, adding to the replayability.

Overall: For all its flaws, Return of the King is a good game that helps pass the time. At its core, it's a very competent action-RPG on the GBA. One might wish for a bit more from the game, but it's still fun to play. I doubt this will be remembered in a decade as a "classic" game, but it's still a good game to pick up on sale if you're itching for a good action game to take on a trip.

Reviewer system: GBA-SP with the standard speaker (no headphones).