Traveler's Tales thinks the slapstick humor of LEGO Adventure games will work fine with LEGO Lord of the Rings.
Sometimes experiments could lead to amazing results. Gearbox software decided to combine simple RPG elements with a first-person shooter to get some pretty amazing results. Other times there is trying to combine the slapstick humor found in cartoons with the 'emotional' or 'cinematic' experience of films, which might not work out so well. Traveler's Tales, developers of the LEGO Adventure games (LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Harry Potter), believes they can mix the two elements together with LEGO Lord of the Rings.
The good news is that, like the previous games, Traveler's Tales is going to preserve most of the content from the Peter Jackson film in LEGO Lord of the Rings. The original map for Middle-Earth and all of its locations can be explored, with hints of fetch quests and side missions being available. Plus with all three books/films being included in the game, you should be able to encounter all of your favorite characters and familiar locations. What seems promising is the possibility of RPG elements in LEGO Lord of the Rings.
However, like the true nature of Gollum, there are features which question the respect LEGO Lord of the Rings has to its source material. The voice sound effects for every actor role in the films is used in this game, to add a 'cinematic' effect to the LEGO Adventure series for the first time. Plus Jonathan Smith, head of production for LEGO Lord of the Rings, believes that they could bring in the light-hearted, slapstick humor of the previous games while preserving the emotional, action-packed drama of the Peter Jackson films.
I'm not sure if such a mixture of theme will work so well with LEGO Lord of the Rings. The Peter Jackson films and even Tolkien's books did have their own humor, but that kind of humor is also kept in tone to the atmosphere of the world to be considered dark comedy. The "counting game" between Gimli and Legolas is a good example of this, which shows their friendly rivalry on how many orcs, goblins, and Uruk-hai they can kill. Could LEGO Lord of the Rings approach this kind of dark humor, especially for a game that is meant for children?
LEGO Lord of the Rings will be available October 30, 2012 on the PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and Nintendo 3DS.
