By ALEXANDER PECHA
Arts Editor
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Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate. I love Monolith Productions latest game, Shadow of Mordor. The combat is fun, the sneaking intense and the nemesis system is practically genius. No, what I’m here to talk about is the story of Shadow of Mordor; if all you care about is stabbing orcs and playing with the nemesis system then just go buy this game because gameplay wise the game is beyond amazing, but if you want to talk about the story, stick around.
One of the first things I noticed was how hard the game distances itself from The Lord of the Rings trilogy of books and movies and instead rebrands itself under the title “Middle Earth” despite the game basically being 100 percent related to The Lord of the Rings and having very little to do with the Hobbit movies. Money and branding is money and branding though, I suppose. While this seems like a small detail at first it shows off a bigger flaw of the game’s writing and universe, that being that I don’t think the game developers really know what they wanted to do with their story.
In case you haven’t played the game, Shadow of Mordor follows the Gondorian Ranger Talion as he and his family are brutally murdered by attacking orcs but is cursed to never-ending life due to being bound with an Elven wraith. From there Talion spends his time killing lots of orcs, monsters, and basically being a typical brooding white guy.
Despite Talion being about as interesting as soggy cardboard the game’s story does start off somewhat interesting. The idea of a dead second-age elf dealing with the fact that the most evil thing in the universe, Sauron, is still kicking around 3000 years later could be really cool. When it is later revealed that the elf is no other than Celebrimbor, the elf that forged the rings of power, my interest level began to soar. I was quickly let down, however, as the plot took a turn into bad fan-fiction territory.
The story goes onto explain how instead of being killed at the fall of Eregion, Celebrimbor was actually taken prisoner and had a hand in creating the One Ring. Not only that, however, but he actually made the ring obey him, causing a brief civil war between Sauron and Celebrimbor in Mordor during the second age. This is all explained in flashbacks, in the common day that the game takes place. Talion and Celebrimbor wind up facing some sort of physical embodiment of Sauron and leave the game on a cliffhanger by deciding that it’s time to “Forge a new ring” which builds off the idea of Talion and Celebrimbor creating their own orc army to take on Sauron …What?
There is so much wrong here it’s hard to cover it all. Let’s just start off with the small problem I have, and that’s the part where Talion and Celebrimbor take on a physical manifestation of Sauron. If you don’t remember, Sauron consists of a big burning eye in the movies and books. This is because he is utterly incapable of taking physical form. This is said several times and pretty much makes up the plot of The Lord of the Rings. However, even ignoring that fact, Sauron is basically a demi-god. He used to be the lieutenant of Morgoth, essentially The Lord of the Rings version of the devil. That’d be like Donald Trump punching Jesus in the face.
Then there’s the bigger issue: The complete abandonment of one of the central themes of The Lord of the Rings. In the books and movies it’s stated several times, both specifically and unspecifically, that trying to fight evil with evil is a bad idea that will never work. This is shown when Saruman tries to build an Orc army to out-Orc army Sauron and basically becomes his puppet; this is shown when everyone says that using the One Ring against Sauron would never work.
The idea that in order for good to triumph against evil it must stay good is a very prominent idea in the books and movies of Tolkien’s universe. Shadow of Mordor not only ignores that huge idea but actively argues against it, using very little grace and bad writing to boot.
If you’re going to challenge the grandfather of fantasy’s writing, at least try and do it well.
