The Lord of the Rings The Third Age

The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age is a 2004 role-playing video game developed by EA Redwood Shores for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube. A turn-based tactics version of the game was developed for the Game Boy Advance by Griptonite Games. The game was published on all platforms by Electronic Arts, and released worldwide in November 2004.

The game is a loose adaptation of Peter Jackson‘s Lord of the Rings film trilogy; The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003). As it is not an adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien‘s 1954 novel The Lord of the Rings, anything from the novels not specifically mentioned or depicted in the films could not be represented in the game. This is because, at the time, Vivendi Universal Games, in partnership with Tolkien Enterprises, held the rights to the video game adaptations of Tolkien’s literary works, whilst Electronic Arts held the rights to the video game adaptations of the New Line Cinema films.

The game received mixed to positive reviews. Most reviewers praised the graphics, but many found the storyline and character development weak, and the gameplay somewhat too derivative of Final Fantasy X.