The Lord of the Rings and Middle-earth have been adapted to many video games over the years, each one redesigning one of Tolkien’s most beloved characters: Gandalf. The original high fantasy wizard to reach pop culture, Gandalf is perhaps LOTR’s most iconic character, appearing in most Middle-earth games. Below are Gandalf’s top ten designs from Lord of the Rings video games, from the worst of the best, to the best of the best.
With the recent release of The Lord of the Rings:Gollum, Gandalf makes yet another debut. But the wizened wizard has had nearly as many iterations as there have been games in the long-running franchise. Gandalf’s new design in Gollum ranks among his best in LOTR gaming history, but it doesn’t quite take the number one spot.
Gandalf’s first appearance in the rankings is also his first appearance on home consoles in The Fellowship of the Ring, first released on Xbox in 2002. This design captures the character well enough that he’s recognizable, but its downfall is its lack of detail. The flat textures of Gandalf’s robe and remarkably polygonal face and beard stick out when comparing this iteration of Gandalf to others across the series, but also other games released around the same time. The game itself is far more focused on exploration and questing than later titles, which might explain the lack of close-up character detail.
With a jump in console generations to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era, comes a jump in expectations for The Lord of the Rings: Conquest. The wrinkles of Gandalf’s robe are a bit more pronounced here, and his staff has great definition in the branches around the crystal on top of it. However, LOTR: Conquest was Middle-earth’s answer to the widely beloved Star Wars: Battlefront, meaning control of storied heroes like Gandalf was a rare treat. The game was designed to capture large-scale battlefields from the books and films through the eyes of a common soldier, not revered characters, and it shows when models like Gandalf occasionally look at the camera.
2003’s The Return of the King might be a surprising inclusion, but it has to do with how developer EA focused on capturing the essence of the films. As beloved as Tolkien’s novels are, there is no denying that it was The Lord of the Rings films that brought Middle-earth to the public eye. Where the texture of Gandalf’s white robe might be flat, his face has a few extra lines and wrinkles to represent his movie appearance. For many, Sir Ian McKellen is the one who brought life to Gandalf’s character in the films, which makes this game design for Gandalf more widely appealing.
2023-06-19 11:00:04
Source from screenrant.com
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