Mr Viral
Please sir, can I have some Mordor?
by Jim Norman Yesterday, 3pm
Image: Nintendo LifeThe year is 2025 and Lord of the Rings feels very much like it’s “a thing” again. We’re not sure that it ever really went away, to be honest, but we’ve got The Rings of Power on TV (and it’s actually rather good now), the War of the Rohirrim hit cinemas, a ‘Hunt for Gollum’ movie is planned, and, perhaps most importantly for us, more Middle Earth games are on the horizon.
Gollum launched on multiple consoles in 2023 — though the Switch version is still in limbo (something we’re sure you were all devastated about) after Daedalic shut down its internal development team. But Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game — surely a shoo-in for 2025’s Clunkiest Title Award — is right around the corner, bringing a slice of Hobbit life to Switch in March. And, with Embracer Group now legally behind the IP’s wheel, we’d be surprised if things are stopping there.
The future is full, but what about the past? In all honesty, the franchise has hardly been starved of game representation (two blockbuster film trilogies will do that) and the ‘Mordor’ games with their beloved Nemesis System make it easy to forget that not every attempt to bring J.R.R. Tolkien’s world to the gaming space has been a success. “All that is gold does not glitter,” as the man himself wrote.
In case you needed reminding, we Nintendo faithful have never been blessed with a port of either Shadow of Mordor or Shadow of War, something that still stings like a wound from a Morgul blade. What we do have is enough movie tie-ins to last a lifetime (the early 2000s were a crazy time, lest we forget), a peppering of LEGO games and the odd Arkenstone in the rough that dares to break the tie-in formula — shout out to the Fire Emblem-esque GBA tactics entry, The Third Age.
Quantity clearly isn’t a problem, but what about quality? We’ve bemoaned the lack of Lord of the Rings RPGs on Nintendo consoles before, but now we want to cast the net wider. Are there any good Lord of the Rings games on a Nintendo system, and which are the most precious of them all?
“Pity? It was pity that stayed Daedalic’s port” — Image: Daedalic Entertainment
You can rate each and every Lord of the Rings game you’ve played on a Nintendo console below — who knows, we might even be forging One ranking to rule them all based on your decisions. The list includes all 19 Middle Earth-based games available on Nintendo consoles, divided into individual platforms where necessary (because let’s not pretend that Aragorn’s Quest on DS is the same game you’ll find on Wii).
We’ve lit the beacons, now it’s time for you to answer!
Rate each Lord of the Rings game you’ve played:
Click the stars below to rate out of 10 each Lord of the Rings game you’ve played:
Thanks for rating your favourites and give us a shout if you think there’s anything missing. We’ll be revealing the results very soon, but remember: much like our platform Top 50s, the list will be fluid, so even if you miss out on voting before the results are revealed, you can still influence the ranking after publication.
