Just to add, I completely understand the reason why the names are so basic but thank you all for letting me know 😊 The main reason I pointed it out was more to do with the fact that, because they were so basic, it became hard to remember who was who. Multiple enemy characters had the same "Cruel" adjective before their name and it became hard to keep up with it 😅 Also, thank you all so much for the support on this video!! I really do appreciate every single one of you!
I don't understand why anyone would encourage the devs of this game buy giving them your money? Parts of the industry are bad enough without people paying for absolute rubbish, all for what some pretend trophy that does not exist? Very disappointing
@@danielcalabrese5769Spent what is to the devs a negligible amount of money to show hundreds of thousands of people why they shouldn’t play this game. Seems pretty worthwhile to me. It’s not like the devs are gonna make a profit from the handful of people willing to review their garbage.
I 100% thought, in that scene with the big white orc at about 5:50, the options were "threaten", "beg" and "give head". And thought the developers really put their own spin on this
TO BE FAIR player models turning invisible when the camera gets too close IS in fact a technique a lot of very well polished games use to prevent the camera from clipping into it and showing the inside
@@Slayerlord13 It is a bit more complex then that as I believe if you move the camera into them fast they will just be completely invisible to avoid obstructing the screen. In an action game this is important because being blind is potentially fatal.
The funny thing is that, according to the developers, they didn't want to just copy Jackson's movie trilogy and wanted to make their own original visuals based on the original books. Yet, they failed miserably on both fronts: Not only did they end up copying Gollum's look from the movies anyway (deliberately or inadvertently, who knows), but in their attempt to make him look "different" and "original" they just ended up making him look really bad and laughable.
If he didn't look like a ps3 model in a ps4 game that was ported to the ps5, I think he'd look really good reimagined. Though his design is very close to just being gollum with hair.
@@strangevol5264 But they are a relatively small indie studio that has done only relatively small games (their point&click games cannot in any way be classified as anywhere even close to triple-A). Maybe they should have made this game into a point&click one.
I'm genuinely surprised none of the achievements weren't just straight up broken and impossible to get. I feel like I've seen broken achievements in better games. So, I guess the guy who programmed the achievements actually knew what they were doing. Good for them, I guess!
I honestly don't mind the characters having generic and unspecific names. Perhaps Gollum doesn't know or doesn't care to learn their actual names. Perhaps they occupy a minimal space in his mind as mere archetypes. I think it is a neat bit of world/character building for Gollum in an otherwise absolutely garbage game.
Yeah this was the other thought I had but there was no variety within the names For example cruel woman, cruel elf, cruel orc are all pretty much the exact same and it got confusing trying to remember each character 😅
@@Satiire Indeed, if they did have names, but Gollum didn't care about them, at least have the name said. I find it odd that the Cruel Woman at least is not ever given a name, or even a proper title like her dad.
They could've done the trick of using different colors and fonts for subtitles. Going for a half assed 14p Arial "Cruel Orc" only shows lack of effort.
30:47 The swimming achievement could be a reference to Smeagol knowing how to swim, which is apparently very rare (or at least uncommon) among hobbits. Remember, he and his cousin Deagol found the Ring at the bottom of a river after all. See also Frodo's parents drowning in a boating accident when he was a child and Sam almost drowning while running after Frodo when Frodo departs following the Fellowship breakup.
He's so old that he was one of the Stoors (I believe) who were river-Hobbits who lived around the Anduin. That's how he knows how to swim and is indeed very rare in the 3rd Age 😂
The issue isn't that the achievement is for swimming, the issue is that the achievement is for swimming an unreasonable distance given the amount of swimming that takes place during a single playthrough -- a player must essentially go out of their way and spend at least ten minutes doing nothing but swimming to earn it, as nobody is going to replay this game enough times to earn it "naturally." The worst achievement of this nature that I am aware of is "Tour de Dante Manor" from Lucius, which you get from riding the tricycle for 10 miles -- the tricycle being an item you unlock for completing all the chores. The player can expect to unlock this achievement after a modest 30 minutes of nonstop tricycling (it's recommended to make circles in the garden). Of course, that game also had achievements based on play time (20 and 40 total hours) so it's pretty obvious those devs wanted to get people playing the game as long as they could to boost metrics. But yeah, Smeeg was a special water boy so that he could find the ring in the riverbed. Why Tolkien chose to write this specifically we may never know. Ostensibly invented an entire subset of hobbits just so one could go on to find the ring at the bottom of a river by accident.
Nice video, and thanks for the big shoutout, man! ❤ It's crazy how many bugs you and some other people had in this game. I literally had 0, except for a few weird/missed jumps. Regarding the "Sweet Darkness" trophy, you just have to turn off 10 lanterns in the game, and not all of them. And for the stone trophy, you have to throw a total of 50 stones.
No worries man, if it wasn't for you then I think this video would've been scrapped so I appreciate the help! Thank you for the correct info on these trophies, I wasn't too sure in regards to either of them as there isn't much info about this game anywhere 😅
I figured that this game would either not have any trophies because it was clearly created for the PS2 and didn't get an update since then, or it would have been like one of those instant-achievement games that are released on Steam and would just front-load all of it's trophies at the beginning as a reason to purchase the game altogether.
I think the worst part isn't getting the trophy, but waking up every day knowing you spent time and money on this game when literally anything else would have been a better use of either.
I wouldn't be surprised if the development team forgot all about this game, the trailer ended up in the recommendation of one of thr interns one month before release, and then six people cooked the game up in an outdated version of Unity.
This video was actually the first time I saw the Frail Man's beard animation when he speaks. I'd heard about it, but actually seeing it had my jaw on the floor. Pretty sure most people involved with making this game realized ages ago that they had a Mumakil-sized disaster on their hands, and aside from still having to work on patches, are now just happy that it's over.
The naming conventions in the game are probably the one thing I would be willing to defend the game on. They seem to be names given to the characters by Gollum and feeds into the idea of playing as him. It's probably the only thing in the game that I feel succeeds at feeling like Gollum.
True, but given how it flies over so many people’s heads makes me think they didn’t do enough to hammer the point home. I haven’t played the game, but it seems like Gollum doesn’t actually call them by these names in voiced dialogue so it just comes off as a lazy character naming convention.
Now to be fair I think the idea of having to convince your multiple personalities of something via a gameplay section is actually really really cool. I honestly think it fits right in there with the use of sound from senua's sacrifice.
I remember seeing trailers for this game and being like "Hell ya! I could play a game where you're Gollum. Sounds interesting!" Then it released and I saw the gameplay and all interest was crushed.
@mgsxmike Why not? Playing as a conniving miniscule little garbage pile resorting to underhanded means to get what he wants could be a fun game. Unfortunately we're still apparently waiting for it. 😛
Great video! This game looks so broken... though I will say one thing in its 'defence', and that's on its naming system I think the point of the names being generic is that we see them through Gollum's perspective. Gollum doesn't really use names - look back at LotR, he calls Bilbo 'Baggins' because that's how Bilbo introduced himself but seems to think of it more as an object name than a personal one, he calls Frodo 'Master', Sam 'Fat Hobbit' and so on. The characters are called 'Cruel Woman', 'Beastmaster', 'Candle Man' etc because that is the only thing Gollum would think to refer to them as. He doesn't see people as people, he sees people as objects and one specific object - the One Ring - as a person.
Thank you man! Yeah I believe this to be the case too but it got really repetitive as they're all pretty much the same names I think if they had "Cruel Woman" and then something like "Nasty Orc", it would've been way less forgetful but I completely understand what they had set out to do, just a poor execution I think 😅
I believe that's the case, but - correct me if I'm wrong, I didn't touch the game myself - don't other characters use those 'object names' as well? Like the frail man referring to candle master? I know it can be explained by "Gollum doesn't even hear their names, instead immediately translating to his version", but it feels a bit like a cop-out.
AFAIK the spider eats the dude regardless of whether you try to save him. So basically you wasted your time. Welcome to Gollum. EDIT: Unless that doesn't count as killing him, which would still be major jank.
Yeah I'm not 100% sure whether letting him die without choosing it still unlocks the trophy or not and I didn't want to risk it so I just took the safest route 😅
Yeah tbh it's probably just Gollum trying to pretend like you can make your own choice and impact the game in some significant way, when in actuality you can't. If that guy was alive they would have to write more dialogue for him and I guess that was too much to ask from them.
@@helion_ut They could just have the guy leave Gollum after surviving. Something like "I can return to my Family now! Thank you, Gollum!" You know, have SOMETHING
The names are that way because gollum almost never calls anyone by name, he refers to frodo as "master" and sam as "fat hobbit" so its fitting that the names of the npcs resemble how gollum perceives them
It would be funny if this became the rarest platinum trophy of all time, not because of difficulty or unobtainability, but the sheer torture one must endure to achieve it xD
17:30 -- Shout out to whoever made that audio effect for the elf talking through the river. That's actually pretty neat. Now if only the rest of the game had thought put into it. :P
So Gollum dies when he touches water, then 30 seconds later he is diving and swimming? May as well have turned this into an on rail shooter with no shooting.
what i thought was especially funny is that they had the balls to put all the lore and info about lord of the rings into paid DLC on steam like you know... the stuff you just normally include in a thematic game to help the game along a bit
This game was like the devs all sat around the table, lead dev: "Okay does anyone else know what Lord of the Rings is and Gollum?" Developer: "What's a Gollum?"
What I want to know is why it's so easy for gollum to just choke people and they never try to reach back and grab at him or fling around or throw their backs against hard objects. They just go uh oh and die.
Now the choice system is actually interesting. It's not just a button press, you have to convince Gollum for the choice. Too bad it was executed terribly like everything else
I read somewhere that the reason none of the characters are named is because Gollum doesn't care enough to ask or remember them. I'm not sure if that's actually the intention, though.
That's exactly what I gathered and I've only watched the first LoTR. The way Gollum describes things is very vague and childlike so it's just prob a characteristic of his.
It’s a genuine shame that this game has pretty unique mechanics that could have hard carried the game if they put more care into even just overall design
@@hanzwusrt6755lmao what? It just has better graphics and that is all. Do you know what Mario 64 is? Or the octarina of time? And these are of even older generation than PS2.
Thanks for the upload man, great video :) I just can't get over how completely different the character looks, I get that it's a different time or whatever but he still shouldn't look like that, complete removal from the original design, no idea why they did that!
I think they just rushed development and cut corners with graphics and character designs etc, it's sad to see because with the correct story and graphics this would've been a semi decent experience 😅
We should have had a continuation of the Gollum from Shadow of Mordor/War, obsessed with finding Celebrimbor to serve his "Bright Master" again. THAT would have been an interesting game.
Honestly, I saw an ad about this game on a random wiki page that made it look like a parodical, cheap knock-off and, in some ways, even like a really weird bootleg porn game with how it was presented - and I totally believed it was just that, a random malware-infested game meant to steal your credit card info or something. Really, that says a lot about how this game looks and is presented.
Lord have mercy…as a fellow trophy hunter and completist watching you platinum this game gives me anxiety. 🤣 Still congrats on achieving the trophy through all of the garbage man. Now burn the game in the fire of Mt. Doom!
It might of been fix by now, but on xbox on release the game was so buggy that there was a decent chance that in chapter 10 your save would break so badly you would have to do chapter NINE again. And there was a good chance that it would crash trying to get back to the point you where.
So many things I don't understand about this game. Why is Mell imprisoned? No idea. Why did she become blind? Dunno. Why was Mell forced to open the door? Hell if I know. Why was Tharanduil able to summon the haze when not even the Maiar have such powers? Shrug. Why doesn't Thatanduil know that elves reincarnate and thus there's no reason to mourn his wife? Why did Bird betray Smeagol, only to turn around and save him at the very end? Why the hell did Smeagol, SMEAGOL, want to kill the Riddle Master?
Love the video but one thing I have to bring up is the naming. I know we're used to telepathically knowing everyone's name but realistically, you would have no idea what their name is so Gollum would just give them general names or what he hears they're called.
jesus christ. I was burnt out after watching the 30 mins you condensed the playthroughs into. I cannot imagine doing multiple playthroughs of this crappy game. kudos to you for sticking with it
I love this game. I’ve never played it, had to cancel my pre order bc bills and was upset at the time and now feel lucky I didn’t pay for it. I love it for the hours of content on TH-cam watching people completely destroy it. Pretty entertaining.
It seems so counterintuitive that killing the Riddlemaster is a Smeagol option. Is it just because Gollum is more likely to throttle the orc? Like why does he have to throw a rock down there and kill him? What good does that do?
Sorry I may of left that part out of the video 😬 I think smeagol wants to be mells only friend and the riddlemaster will take her away so he wants to get rid of him basically :)
I first and only saw the trailer for this video game in a movie theatre preview. I kept expecting it to be the a fake video game in some movie or something (gave me Enders Game video game vibes). My jaw dropped when the release date showed.
Yeah shout out to Broome Stella for the music, it's pretty good. I'd give the environments as a pro to though I thought the game looked nice in a lot of areas, I assume the complaints about graphics are centered around the character models? Unfortunately the no-death achievement didn't unlock for me, so third playthrough awaits!
Yeah that was a big worry of mine with the no death run, the only other thing I could suggest is cloud saving after every section and see if that works? I'd hate to keep redoing playthroughs so hopefully it unlocks for you soon!
The "now convince gollum" mechanic is a very nice idea for a game... Trying to get the character to do what you want by arguing with them is very interesting Maybe someone could make a good dramatic game with this idea
My guess is they had the idea of using those simple names to reflect how Gollum would see them, he wouldn't see Bob Bradock the beastmaster, he would see the beastmaster. But since the game is just bad, the naming doesn't really help, if it had been a good game it would've fit perfectly
I salute you for playing this game to Platinum. It's done, it's documented, and now no one ever needs to do it again. We can let it burn in the fires of Mount Doom, to a failure of a crisp.
kind of feels like someone fucked up and formatted all the drives containing the game's assets 6 months before shipping and the publishers refused to push the release date back.
Probably the most absurd thing about this game was the fact that they expected you to pay $60 for a game that feels like it should have been priced at least $20, especially in the buggy condition it was released in. Not to mention that they had the gall to make a book accurate language option into a purchasable DLC, making you pay even more money than you really should for this aborted fetus of a game.
To be fair about the names. Gollum doesn’t care about what their actual names are. He calls them what he remembers them as. So “cruel orc” “cruel woman” “frail man” are all in character
Just to add, I completely understand the reason why the names are so basic but thank you all for letting me know 😊
The main reason I pointed it out was more to do with the fact that, because they were so basic, it became hard to remember who was who. Multiple enemy characters had the same "Cruel" adjective before their name and it became hard to keep up with it 😅
Also, thank you all so much for the support on this video!! I really do appreciate every single one of you!
I almost said something but decided not to when I saw this 😂 but honestly using that as a naming system is good in theory but executed horribly.
I 100%ed Balan wonderworld and ride to hell. I don't think I can do this on. But congrats
I don't understand why anyone would encourage the devs of this game buy giving them your money? Parts of the industry are bad enough without people paying for absolute rubbish, all for what some pretend trophy that does not exist? Very disappointing
@@danielcalabrese5769Spent what is to the devs a negligible amount of money to show hundreds of thousands of people why they shouldn’t play this game. Seems pretty worthwhile to me. It’s not like the devs are gonna make a profit from the handful of people willing to review their garbage.
idk i like it
I 100% thought, in that scene with the big white orc at about 5:50, the options were "threaten", "beg" and "give head". And thought the developers really put their own spin on this
Not quite canon I would have to say
It is give head at 0:25
Would make the game so much better xD
They got ahold of a long lost Tolkien letter apparently
Saw the meme at 0:25 right as I read this comment 😂
You could literally replace Gollum with any other random captured slave and the plot would make more sense.
True
Except for the part where they start a war just to get this nobody back to their camp, like, huh??? Still doesn't make sense even when it's Gollum :D
Grashneg MC edition
Lol, starts out with you as a random Uruk slave. Work your way up to a warchief just to get decapitated by some immortal ranger.
@@CapitalGearGamingwould be a better game then this one
TO BE FAIR player models turning invisible when the camera gets too close IS in fact a technique a lot of very well polished games use to prevent the camera from clipping into it and showing the inside
I think better games tend to have the model briefly fade before going invisible to make the transition less jarring which helps a lot
@@Slayerlord13 It is a bit more complex then that as I believe if you move the camera into them fast they will just be completely invisible to avoid obstructing the screen. In an action game this is important because being blind is potentially fatal.
@@Buglin_Burger7878 Nono I don't mean them being partially faded, I mean they fade and then become invisible.
Yeah, Genshin does this. When you are climbing, and the camera is too close, obstructing the view, the character model will fade out so you can see.
@@Buglin_Burger7878 Unless you're an NPC in this game in which being blind apparently doesn't matter lol
The funny thing is that, according to the developers, they didn't want to just copy Jackson's movie trilogy and wanted to make their own original visuals based on the original books. Yet, they failed miserably on both fronts: Not only did they end up copying Gollum's look from the movies anyway (deliberately or inadvertently, who knows), but in their attempt to make him look "different" and "original" they just ended up making him look really bad and laughable.
If he didn't look like a ps3 model in a ps4 game that was ported to the ps5, I think he'd look really good reimagined. Though his design is very close to just being gollum with hair.
And the thing is? Daedalic made really good point and click games, those being the Edna and Harvey series. They’re dark but really good P&C games.
@@strangevol5264 But they are a relatively small indie studio that has done only relatively small games (their point&click games cannot in any way be classified as anywhere even close to triple-A).
Maybe they should have made this game into a point&click one.
he really looks like moe from the three stooges. moellum.
And also why does he have a full head of hair? it just makes him look weird and not like gollum
This game was so close to being perfect. All they had to do was burn all copies before releasing it.
LMAO 💀
💀👌
💀
Burning CDs is so early 2000s..
this game really makes you feel the torture Gollum went before shout "Shire! Baggins!"
10/10 IGN
Gollum was forced to play this game in Barad Dûr.
He does that at the beginning of the game after the wraiths catch you.
The fact that the trophy for not dying is "how did you do that?" is so unbelieveably ironic lmao
I'm genuinely surprised none of the achievements weren't just straight up broken and impossible to get. I feel like I've seen broken achievements in better games. So, I guess the guy who programmed the achievements actually knew what they were doing. Good for them, I guess!
That was a worry I had going into this but after finding the guides, I knew it was possible 🤣
It's bad when Security Breach is a phenomenal game in comparison.
And Scott couldn't even make it to begin with.
Its honestly pretty depressing that the best achievement they could come up with was “idk swim for 10 minutes or smt”
I honestly don't mind the characters having generic and unspecific names. Perhaps Gollum doesn't know or doesn't care to learn their actual names. Perhaps they occupy a minimal space in his mind as mere archetypes. I think it is a neat bit of world/character building for Gollum in an otherwise absolutely garbage game.
Yeah this was the other thought I had but there was no variety within the names
For example cruel woman, cruel elf, cruel orc are all pretty much the exact same and it got confusing trying to remember each character 😅
@@Satiire I didn't know that. Yeah at that point it gets pretty generic.
Good idea, awful execution. Like the rest of the game… minus the good idea part.
@@Satiire Indeed, if they did have names, but Gollum didn't care about them, at least have the name said. I find it odd that the Cruel Woman at least is not ever given a name, or even a proper title like her dad.
They could've done the trick of using different colors and fonts for subtitles. Going for a half assed 14p Arial "Cruel Orc" only shows lack of effort.
30:47 The swimming achievement could be a reference to Smeagol knowing how to swim, which is apparently very rare (or at least uncommon) among hobbits. Remember, he and his cousin Deagol found the Ring at the bottom of a river after all. See also Frodo's parents drowning in a boating accident when he was a child and Sam almost drowning while running after Frodo when Frodo departs following the Fellowship breakup.
He's so old that he was one of the Stoors (I believe) who were river-Hobbits who lived around the Anduin. That's how he knows how to swim and is indeed very rare in the 3rd Age 😂
The issue isn't that the achievement is for swimming, the issue is that the achievement is for swimming an unreasonable distance given the amount of swimming that takes place during a single playthrough -- a player must essentially go out of their way and spend at least ten minutes doing nothing but swimming to earn it, as nobody is going to replay this game enough times to earn it "naturally."
The worst achievement of this nature that I am aware of is "Tour de Dante Manor" from Lucius, which you get from riding the tricycle for 10 miles -- the tricycle being an item you unlock for completing all the chores. The player can expect to unlock this achievement after a modest 30 minutes of nonstop tricycling (it's recommended to make circles in the garden). Of course, that game also had achievements based on play time (20 and 40 total hours) so it's pretty obvious those devs wanted to get people playing the game as long as they could to boost metrics.
But yeah, Smeeg was a special water boy so that he could find the ring in the riverbed. Why Tolkien chose to write this specifically we may never know. Ostensibly invented an entire subset of hobbits just so one could go on to find the ring at the bottom of a river by accident.
Nice video, and thanks for the big shoutout, man! ❤ It's crazy how many bugs you and some other people had in this game. I literally had 0, except for a few weird/missed jumps. Regarding the "Sweet Darkness" trophy, you just have to turn off 10 lanterns in the game, and not all of them. And for the stone trophy, you have to throw a total of 50 stones.
No worries man, if it wasn't for you then I think this video would've been scrapped so I appreciate the help!
Thank you for the correct info on these trophies, I wasn't too sure in regards to either of them as there isn't much info about this game anywhere 😅
I figured that this game would either not have any trophies because it was clearly created for the PS2 and didn't get an update since then, or it would have been like one of those instant-achievement games that are released on Steam and would just front-load all of it's trophies at the beginning as a reason to purchase the game altogether.
It does play and look like one of those instant trophy games but unfortunately it is a full Triple A game that is full price and completely broken 😵
Some PS2 games have this feature, of course at the time, it was exclusive to the game itself and not a platform standard.
I think the worst part isn't getting the trophy, but waking up every day knowing you spent time and money on this game when literally anything else would have been a better use of either.
Thank you for your sacrifice soldier for playing such a horrible game
No worries brother 🫡
The precious was worth
😂😂
Its not horrible, actually its quite nice
I wouldn't be surprised if the development team forgot all about this game, the trailer ended up in the recommendation of one of thr interns one month before release, and then six people cooked the game up in an outdated version of Unity.
that people still get hyped for pre rendered trailers without gameplay is honestly the scariest part
Agreed but it has become the norm sadly :/
Can't wait for a game to come out with nothing but pre rendered quick time events and nothing else....
YIPPEE
@@randomguy-randomness Reminds me of Order 1886, while "gameplay" existed, it was a glorified tech demo.
Cyberpunk 2077
@@randomguy-randomnessdetroit become human comes pretty damn close i think. It certainly tries it's damned best to.
They had the entire LOTR universe to play with and this is what they chose to create
This video was actually the first time I saw the Frail Man's beard animation when he speaks. I'd heard about it, but actually seeing it had my jaw on the floor.
Pretty sure most people involved with making this game realized ages ago that they had a Mumakil-sized disaster on their hands, and aside from still having to work on patches, are now just happy that it's over.
The naming conventions in the game are probably the one thing I would be willing to defend the game on. They seem to be names given to the characters by Gollum and feeds into the idea of playing as him. It's probably the only thing in the game that I feel succeeds at feeling like Gollum.
True, but given how it flies over so many people’s heads makes me think they didn’t do enough to hammer the point home. I haven’t played the game, but it seems like Gollum doesn’t actually call them by these names in voiced dialogue so it just comes off as a lazy character naming convention.
It was a bold and brave move to give Gollum the Moe Howard bowl cut I must say.
The way Gollum is unprotected while strangling the characters and how little they try to take him off is just funny to me
The fact that someone took the time to win this platinum is ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTFUL.
And I'm sorry for enjoying your pain.
Now to be fair I think the idea of having to convince your multiple personalities of something via a gameplay section is actually really really cool. I honestly think it fits right in there with the use of sound from senua's sacrifice.
I remember seeing trailers for this game and being like "Hell ya! I could play a game where you're Gollum. Sounds interesting!"
Then it released and I saw the gameplay and all interest was crushed.
People are excited to play as Gollum? When I saw first saw this all I could think of is why?
@mgsxmike Why not? Playing as a conniving miniscule little garbage pile resorting to underhanded means to get what he wants could be a fun game. Unfortunately we're still apparently waiting for it. 😛
Thought I was the only person that thought it was an interesting concept.
This game is 10/10 it really makes you experience hell, just like they planned.
In response to the names in this game, it makes sense. Smeagol doesn't call Frodo, Frodo. He calls him Master. Or Sam the Fat One
Great video! This game looks so broken... though I will say one thing in its 'defence', and that's on its naming system
I think the point of the names being generic is that we see them through Gollum's perspective. Gollum doesn't really use names - look back at LotR, he calls Bilbo 'Baggins' because that's how Bilbo introduced himself but seems to think of it more as an object name than a personal one, he calls Frodo 'Master', Sam 'Fat Hobbit' and so on. The characters are called 'Cruel Woman', 'Beastmaster', 'Candle Man' etc because that is the only thing Gollum would think to refer to them as. He doesn't see people as people, he sees people as objects and one specific object - the One Ring - as a person.
Thank you man! Yeah I believe this to be the case too but it got really repetitive as they're all pretty much the same names
I think if they had "Cruel Woman" and then something like "Nasty Orc", it would've been way less forgetful but I completely understand what they had set out to do, just a poor execution I think 😅
I believe that's the case, but - correct me if I'm wrong, I didn't touch the game myself - don't other characters use those 'object names' as well? Like the frail man referring to candle master? I know it can be explained by "Gollum doesn't even hear their names, instead immediately translating to his version", but it feels a bit like a cop-out.
AFAIK the spider eats the dude regardless of whether you try to save him. So basically you wasted your time. Welcome to Gollum. EDIT: Unless that doesn't count as killing him, which would still be major jank.
Yeah I'm not 100% sure whether letting him die without choosing it still unlocks the trophy or not and I didn't want to risk it so I just took the safest route 😅
Yeah tbh it's probably just Gollum trying to pretend like you can make your own choice and impact the game in some significant way, when in actuality you can't. If that guy was alive they would have to write more dialogue for him and I guess that was too much to ask from them.
@@helion_ut They could just have the guy leave Gollum after surviving. Something like "I can return to my Family now! Thank you, Gollum!"
You know, have SOMETHING
The names are that way because gollum almost never calls anyone by name, he refers to frodo as "master" and sam as "fat hobbit" so its fitting that the names of the npcs resemble how gollum perceives them
Yeah I thought that too. It's on-character.
It would be funny if this became the rarest platinum trophy of all time, not because of difficulty or unobtainability, but the sheer torture one must endure to achieve it xD
17:30 -- Shout out to whoever made that audio effect for the elf talking through the river. That's actually pretty neat.
Now if only the rest of the game had thought put into it. :P
So Gollum dies when he touches water, then 30 seconds later he is diving and swimming? May as well have turned this into an on rail shooter with no shooting.
A character well-known for his semi-aquatic lifestyle having spent literally hundreds of years in a flooded cave system I might add.
what i thought was especially funny is that they had the balls to put all the lore and info about lord of the rings into paid DLC on steam
like you know... the stuff you just normally include in a thematic game to help the game along a bit
The "story" at 5:30 perfectly sums up the gollum experience
29:20 the whole game Gollum isn't able to kill Orcs with helmets, but suddenly he gained that ability for this cutscene
I remember my step mother showing me this and wanting to buy my step brother this game for his birthday. I feel better now about telling her not to
This game was like the devs all sat around the table, lead dev: "Okay does anyone else know what Lord of the Rings is and Gollum?"
Developer: "What's a Gollum?"
What I want to know is why it's so easy for gollum to just choke people and they never try to reach back and grab at him or fling around or throw their backs against hard objects. They just go uh oh and die.
Probably for the same reason not everybody on fire stops, drops, and rolls: panic.
It's amazing someone actually played this and said yea let's sell this for $60 dollars.
Now the choice system is actually interesting. It's not just a button press, you have to convince Gollum for the choice.
Too bad it was executed terribly like everything else
I read somewhere that the reason none of the characters are named is because Gollum doesn't care enough to ask or remember them. I'm not sure if that's actually the intention, though.
That's exactly what I gathered and I've only watched the first LoTR. The way Gollum describes things is very vague and childlike so it's just prob a characteristic of his.
A part of this mans soul was taken for our entertainment
2:09 for all the faults of the game, that's actually a feature to allow players to look upwards without Gollum blocking the view.
I like this guy
He has a cadence to his voice
Glad I got you recommended
It’s a genuine shame that this game has pretty unique mechanics that could have hard carried the game if they put more care into even just overall design
Like what? From all I've seen this just looks like a bad unpolished ps2 game
@@mobcont8335the looks have no direct bearing on mechanics, as bad as both are.
@@mobcont8335Name a PS2 game that looks and plays like Gollum.
You just cant compare a PS2 game with modern games, even if it is a bad game.
@@hanzwusrt6755lmao what? It just has better graphics and that is all. Do you know what Mario 64 is? Or the octarina of time? And these are of even older generation than PS2.
@@abbas-aliibnmohammadal-nam929 Yeah Mario 64 is whack as hell. Name a good good one. Maybe Tony Hawks underground 2.
Thanks for the upload man, great video :)
I just can't get over how completely different the character looks, I get that it's a different time or whatever but he still shouldn't look like that, complete removal from the original design, no idea why they did that!
I think they just rushed development and cut corners with graphics and character designs etc, it's sad to see because with the correct story and graphics this would've been a semi decent experience 😅
@@Satiire that makes sense, I totally agree it's a shame and could have been good! And thanks for replying 😃
We should have had a continuation of the Gollum from Shadow of Mordor/War, obsessed with finding Celebrimbor to serve his "Bright Master" again.
THAT would have been an interesting game.
Particularly because no game based on this media franchise can top Shadow of War XD
wow.. what a terrible game, glad you were able to pull through and make a great video!😎
Thank you man! Definitely up there as one of the worst games in a while for sure, glad I finished it in the end! 😊
0:40 The bizarre yelps Gollum makes whenever he dies will never not be funny to me. 😂
Honestly, I saw an ad about this game on a random wiki page that made it look like a parodical, cheap knock-off and, in some ways, even like a really weird bootleg porn game with how it was presented - and I totally believed it was just that, a random malware-infested game meant to steal your credit card info or something.
Really, that says a lot about how this game looks and is presented.
You're probably 1 out of 10 people who actually platinum this game.
There aren't many people that own this platinum and I'm not suprised 😅
@Satiire There's also the people who own it and never got past the first parts, so that can be a big reason, too.
1 out of 10??? more like 1 outta 10000
That's the usual rate for plats. Try 0.01/10
It's at 0,3 percent currently.
Lord have mercy…as a fellow trophy hunter and completist watching you platinum this game gives me anxiety. 🤣
Still congrats on achieving the trophy through all of the garbage man. Now burn the game in the fire of Mt. Doom!
It might of been fix by now, but on xbox on release the game was so buggy that there was a decent chance that in chapter 10 your save would break so badly you would have to do chapter NINE again. And there was a good chance that it would crash trying to get back to the point you where.
So many things I don't understand about this game. Why is Mell imprisoned? No idea. Why did she become blind? Dunno. Why was Mell forced to open the door? Hell if I know. Why was Tharanduil able to summon the haze when not even the Maiar have such powers? Shrug. Why doesn't Thatanduil know that elves reincarnate and thus there's no reason to mourn his wife? Why did Bird betray Smeagol, only to turn around and save him at the very end? Why the hell did Smeagol, SMEAGOL, want to kill the Riddle Master?
Some people just are blind, I don’t know about the other stuff though
Your persistence and fortitude through this torture is admirable, a sub from me.
Love the video but one thing I have to bring up is the naming. I know we're used to telepathically knowing everyone's name but realistically, you would have no idea what their name is so Gollum would just give them general names or what he hears they're called.
Unbelievable, I could never. Great video!!!!
Thank you man! 🙂
Trophies that don’t pop are the bane of my existence!
Congrats on beating this pile of garbage, i salut you!
Thank you! I agree, the unpoppable trophies really flip my mood upside-down 😅
jesus christ. I was burnt out after watching the 30 mins you condensed the playthroughs into. I cannot imagine doing multiple playthroughs of this crappy game. kudos to you for sticking with it
I think they named the characters how Gollum would call them and that’s why the names are so simple and descriptive
If I were apart of the development team, I would make sure I had no association with this game (if you can even call it that)
You know, I can see a universe where they decided to make a 2D Point & Click adventure game about Gollum and that actually being an alright game.
I love this game. I’ve never played it, had to cancel my pre order bc bills and was upset at the time and now feel lucky I didn’t pay for it. I love it for the hours of content on TH-cam watching people completely destroy it. Pretty entertaining.
You couldn’t pay me to play this game hats off to you man for completing it, and doing all the trophies
So I just realized, the intro to Gollum has a lightning sound effect. I remember that exact sound effect from the Scooby Doo tv series.
This game will never be anything other than The Lord of Ring: Gollum™ to me
I still laugh at the part in Angry Joe's rant about this game where the literal end credits were frame-dropping and lagging XD
Gollum’s mouth looks like that guy that lost his lips to sepsis and got reconstructive surgery.
It seems so counterintuitive that killing the Riddlemaster is a Smeagol option. Is it just because Gollum is more likely to throttle the orc? Like why does he have to throw a rock down there and kill him? What good does that do?
Sorry I may of left that part out of the video 😬
I think smeagol wants to be mells only friend and the riddlemaster will take her away so he wants to get rid of him basically :)
@@Satiire Ah. I suppose that makes more sense. Still though, sucks you had to cheese it to get the right course of actions for your achievements.
I first and only saw the trailer for this video game in a movie theatre preview. I kept expecting it to be the a fake video game in some movie or something (gave me Enders Game video game vibes).
My jaw dropped when the release date showed.
the platinum trophy isn't called my precious? that already says enough
Player models turning invisible proves that they can't even deal with existing in the game too. 😢
This has to be one of the weirdest ways of masochism I've ever seen. Great video, dude, can't wait to see more.
Yeah shout out to Broome Stella for the music, it's pretty good. I'd give the environments as a pro to though I thought the game looked nice in a lot of areas, I assume the complaints about graphics are centered around the character models?
Unfortunately the no-death achievement didn't unlock for me, so third playthrough awaits!
Yeah that was a big worry of mine with the no death run, the only other thing I could suggest is cloud saving after every section and see if that works? I'd hate to keep redoing playthroughs so hopefully it unlocks for you soon!
Why did they make him look like a child? Smeagol was already an adult when he found the ring.
The "now convince gollum" mechanic is a very nice idea for a game... Trying to get the character to do what you want by arguing with them is very interesting
Maybe someone could make a good dramatic game with this idea
Truly a unique platinum. No-one else in the world would be bold enough to try it
The first time i heard about Gollum i went: Who whould want that? Who would make his main character Gollum?
I love how all the characters seem like oblivion NPCs
I would not wish this on my worst enemy
Yeah you know I was curious and the library had it. Worst mistake I’ve made in a couple months
My guess is they had the idea of using those simple names to reflect how Gollum would see them, he wouldn't see Bob Bradock the beastmaster, he would see the beastmaster. But since the game is just bad, the naming doesn't really help, if it had been a good game it would've fit perfectly
This game made Rings Of Power look good, and I literally feel sick saying that.
Lmao
Mom can we have "Styx: Shards of Darkness"?
"No honey, we have Styx at home"
Styx at home:
The generic names for characters was probably the devs imagining what gollum in universe might come up with to remember people
I salute you for playing this game to Platinum. It's done, it's documented, and now no one ever needs to do it again. We can let it burn in the fires of Mount Doom, to a failure of a crisp.
I can't believe you finished this game bro but we need to get the plat
Those options at 0:24 are wild lol
"Graphics are worst than what was shown."
*proceeds to show a pre-rendered CGI trailer
Not now babe, I'm Golluming
😭😭
I will never unsee my comparison saying that Golem looks like goddamn Dream
kind of feels like someone fucked up and formatted all the drives containing the game's assets 6 months before shipping and the publishers refused to push the release date back.
9:23 It ain't easy bein' Smeagol.
💀💀
I express my gratitude to you, valiant soldier, for your sacrificial act in engaging with such a wretched game.
*"GOLLUM, TO THE BREEDING HALLS"*
Probably the most absurd thing about this game was the fact that they expected you to pay $60 for a game that feels like it should have been priced at least $20, especially in the buggy condition it was released in. Not to mention that they had the gall to make a book accurate language option into a purchasable DLC, making you pay even more money than you really should for this aborted fetus of a game.
To be fair about the names. Gollum doesn’t care about what their actual names are. He calls them what he remembers them as. So “cruel orc” “cruel woman” “frail man” are all in character
I can't wait to play the GBA port of this game.
You have a spot on the higher echelon of heaven for platinum-ing this.
Godspeed man... Godspeed.
5:01 that beard moving while the frail man talking is fully worth $70
27:17 why did Gollum become black xD