Elliott Coffman

Beautiful art style and great music. I think I partially ruined the game for myself because I didn't know that the Run N' Gun levels were optional, so immediately after loading in I went and tried about 15-20 times to beat the first RNG level. When a game starts out that hard/lacks critical early direction like that, it's really difficult for me as a player to recover from that. Maybe if I hadn't tried so hard to beat the RNG level, I'd be happier with the game, but now it just feels spoiled. Oh, and I only realized they were optional levels after the third attempt at playing spread throughout the past six months. So really it was more like 50 times I tried and failed. The last section after the acorn machine is just cruel, as I always only had one or two HP left, and those fly traps would get me every time. Died five times with my character's hand on the finish line. Extremely frustrating.

I really wanted to like it, but unfortunately it's all style without substance. The timeline of the greater silmarilion is glossed over, to the point where I'm confused as to when exactly the story is happening. At first I thought that the story kicked off shortly after the elves reached middle earth and bested Morgoth for the first time. Then I find out no, it's actually shortly before the last alliance of men and elves that fought Sauron 3,000 years before the events of the Fellowship. So that realization gave me some timeline whiplash. Everybody looks inconceivably clean, and when they don't, they look dirty in an intentional kind of way. I couldn't help but think about this in contrast with House of the Dragon, Game of Thrones, or even the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, where most characters look realistically clean or dirty. It sounds small, but it's a real immersion breaker. This carries over to wardrobe concerns. It feels overly costumey. Interior sets also look and feel largely like sets, with the exception of the peasant woman's house. The dialogue is also really stilted. Light and dark, good and evil, etc... and while that can definitely be made to work, it feels like they didn't really try to make these concepts or the characters pontificating on them interesting. Other than Galadriel and Elrond, I dont remember a single name. There were also some plot beats that didn't make sense. I know Elrond is younger here, but he just feels like an entirely different character, whereas in Galadriel I can see a through-line between her younger and older selves. His going to the dwarves and engaging with them in a contest of brute strength is just silly. Elrond is thousands of years old by now - he's smart enough to hedge his bets better. And though the story tries to establish his friendship with the dwarf king (and there is a good back and forth about immortals not putting in the work to remain close to their mortal friends), I just don't see Elrond carrying himself is such a gregarious, flippant manner. If there was some nod as to his current immaturity by another major character, I could see how we might have a coming-of-2000-year-age, but we don't have that setup established. Also, I just dont care about the hobbits. Or rather, the story doesn't get me to care about them. We had, what, five or so scenes with them by the end of episode 2? I can’t remember any names, nor does their story seem to relate to anything that's currently going on in the other stories. If the series producers had focused on Galadriel, Elrond, and Archer-elf in episode 1, then introduced the Hobbits in a meaningful way in episode 2, that would have possibly worked better. I could go on, but needless to say there are several glaring flaws and very few redeeming qualities regarding this money pit. I just sincerely hope it gets dramatically better.