The PS2 Lord of the Rings Game That Stole Hearts and Kept Players Hooked for Over a Decade

Maybe you played it on PlayStation 2, PC, Game Boy Advance or Gamecube. It doesn’t matter, the important thing is that you played it back in 2003, with the release of the movie in theaters. Many of us couldn’t put the controller down for months.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was a game that broke the mold in terms of adapting a work from film to video games. Two media that never got along too well and that we saw many times in the 2000s.

If Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was a big hit that even Hogwarts Legacy is still remembered today (flippin’ great!), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is another of the great titles that lived up to expectations. At that time Electronic Arts was serious.

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♬ original sound – Retro Corner

For those who don’t remember, this title was a hack and slash style action game of button mashing and combos to kill as many orcs, goblins and other minions of the Dark Lord as possible.

The game went through the whole movie, that is, you could know the fate of Aragorn and Frodo just by playing the videogame, without the need to go to the cinema to see Peter Jackson’s movie.

The best thing about the game wasn’t the graphics or the dialogues, it was the counter that popped up at the end of each mission and you had to compete with your playmate… to see who was the one who had killed the most orcs. Make fun of FIFA.

Those of us who have entered our 30s and those who are already a decade older will surely remember this title, since we had to wait more than 15 years to receive another great game set in Tolkien’s universe.

And yes, I’m talking about Middle-earth and its Shadows of War and Shadows of Mordor. This new franchise is pretty good and also has that touch of action gameplay and combos very fun. Of course, it is no longer faithful to the movies, but to present and invented lore. A breath of fresh air always comes in handy.

While we wait for EA’s new game, either of these two is good to kill the bug.

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