Critical Corner: The Lord of the Rings – A Musical Tale, Ys X

As ever, if reviews of fairly niche musicals and semi-obscure games from long-running Japanese franchises don’t interest you, there are still recommendations and reads further down.

When I went to Tokyo eight years ago, me and my best friend ended up in a strange bar in a part of town. It was all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink, and you got to watch a show. As far as I could tell, the show was based on Mitsuhide Akechi’s betrayal and murder of warlord Oda Nobunaga, told with a nu metal soundtrack, plenty of rising and descending platforms, and some bonkers singing. It was nobody’s idea of art. It was a very specific person’s idea of a good time: a familiar moment from history, performed in an entertaining way.

Lord of the Rings – A Musical Tale, currently playing at The Civic, is comparable to that show. It’s a piece of entertainment that is only, at a glance, close in spirit to its source material. In this case, that source material is not the beloved trilogy of novels by JRR Tolkien, for better or worse the blueprint and the ur-text for 20th century fantasy. No, it’s the beloved trilogy of films by Peter Jackson, for better or worse the blueprint and the ur-text for 21st century fantasy.

That’s because the show, especially the first half, is essentially a truncated recreation of the films. The Hobbits leaving The Shire, the Fellowship forming in Rivendell, Gandalf yelling a conspicuously rewritten version of “You shall not pass!” while fighting the Balrog, they’re all there. They also quite explicitly take from Jackson’s now canonical interpretation of Tolkien rather than Tolkien itself. This carries through to some performance choices, with the most recognisable characters, Gandalf and Gollum, essentially being Disneyland-esque impressions of Ian McKellen and Andy Serkis’ performances.

This isn’t inherently bad. Peter Jackson did a pretty great job adapting the trilogy! However, it doesn’t necessarily make for a cohesive show. Much of the beauty of Jackson’s adaptation is not in the big moments; it’s in the small little connecting scenes between the big moments, and watching a true ensemble build chemistry. Anything that isn’t pure exposition is thrown out here, as we race from plot point to plot point – I’m far from a Tolkien loyalist, but most of The Two Towers is contained to a single scene between the Hobbits and the Ents (who, sadly, appear in voice only).

Frankly, it’s a show that makes no sense if you haven’t seen the films it draws from. It cannot stand on its own, and it doesn’t seem to want to. It is a three hour reference. It’s also barely a musical, with long, long stretches between songs, and little cohesion amongst the songs that are in there. (This is probably the reason for the “A Musical Tale” label; musical enough to pull those fans, not musical enough to turn off those fans.)

The production has charm, however. The ensemble is appealing, the moments that have had time and money spent on them really sing even when the actual music doesn’t, and it proves that even if the preceding three hours might meander, it’s really hard to screw up Tolkien’s gorgeous parting shot. However, a weird bum note is the costuming of the orcs; dressed in black hoodies and marked up jeans they closer resemble the ensemble of Stomp rather than abominations created through consistent torture.

There is craft at work here, a lot of it. As the show races through the second half, it is less a work of adaptation and more a work of ticking boxes for the audience. In that way, it is similar to the live-action Disney remakes plaguing culture for the past two decades, and frankly more than a few Disney films that have been adapted into stage musicals themselves. It serves up what is expected and nothing more.

But let’s be real here: it’s not art. It’s entertainment. It’s cosplay. It’s recreation. It is a hollow reference where a meaningful statement should be.

Culture exists in fascinating silos that occasionally break containment. If I mentioned Chappell Roan to anybody back in 2020, when “Pink Pony Club” descended into my brain, I would’ve probably been met with blank stares (especially because I was saying it wrong). Now, everybody knows who Chappell Roan is, and all of those people have entirely normal relationships to her, her music and her fame.

Gaming exists in its own cultural silo. A bunch of people (including subscribers of this newsletter, I’m sure) who are connected and invested in pretty much every other artform will glaze over when very popular games are mentioned. I could go on and on about how this is a failing of the media, and the complete lack of both interest and capability to cover the sector in any meaningful way, be it through a culture lens, a tech lens, a business lens or some overlap of all three. But I won’t.

Instead, I will go on a bit about a silo within a silo.

Nihon Falcom are one of the biggest producers of JRPGs – broadly Japanese-made RPGs, which have their own tropes and flavours – and yet their games rarely break containment. Their two big series are Legend of Heroes, an unfortunately bland title for a ridiculously fascinating and engrossing series and Ys, which I guarantee you are saying wrong, even in your head.

Legend of Heroes is the series I come closest to stanning, half of which is because of the quality of the series and how it rewards my insane investment with hundreds of hours of gameplay, dozens of characters, and high stakes drama mixed with low stakes comedy. Even beginning to describe the series is a waste of my time, so I won’t start now.

Their other series, Ys, is a lot less dense. It has been running since 1987, with the same core concept: Protagonist Adol, distinctive from his red hair and general muteness, finds himself in some unfamiliar civilisation that is in dire need of a hero and he ends up being that hero. Rinse and repeat. (There is a canon, but as with most canons that have been running for so many years, it’s best ignored. Looking at you, Zelda.)

The Ys series, even though it predates the current Legend of Heroes franchise by about fifteen years, feels like the more accessible younger brother. You can jump in at pretty much any game, the gameplay is more action-driven, the colours are brighter, the narratives far less dense. Each Legend of Heroes entry builds on the last, whereas Ys games are meant to be picked up, played, enjoyed, put down, and forgotten about until the next one.

The latest in the series, Ys X: Nordics, dropped a month ago, and is the most accessible yet. The same base premise remains: Adol finds himself in an unfamiliar place, this time an archipelago stewarded/harassed by a tribe, The Normans, loosely based on Vikings. After about an hour of gameplay, he finds himself bound to Karja, a warrior princess, and exterminating demons, the Griegr. That’s a lot of nouns but basically, Adol has to save the islands, and it involves exploring, adventuring and swashbuckling.

If there’s one thing that Nihon Falcom has nailed across both series, it is making it easy to play the games. While there’s a certain lack of friction – it’s so easy to play that it sometimes feel as though the game might as well be playing itself – it does mean that things that plagued previous games like labyrinthian menus and senseless backtracking are more or less eliminated here. 

I can't help but return to the idea of a silo. If you're in the silo, you've probably already bought Ys X. You've played it. You've clocked it. But if you're not, you probably won't even know it exists. In the interest of opening that silo up a bit, if you're looking for a bright, action-forward, narratively light, game to play, try it out.

Other Things I’ve Consumed

• I held off on reading Yuval Noah Hariri’s Sapiens because I felt like I’ve had to forget more about human beings than I’m comfortable with, but Nexus felt like essential reading and more fascinating to me. It’s one of the best things I’ve read this year, maybe, reframing the way I think about civilisation, communication, and everything in between. It sounds heavy and academic, but it’s the best summation of the whole “AI thing” I’ve ever read.
• Dave the Diver ended up on a lot of “game of the year” lists last year, and for good reason. It is highly playable, relentlessly charming, and soothing. If you’re looking for a game to dump twenty-or-so non-committal hours into, look no further. It helps that it’s available on pretty much every modern platform, too.
• I reviewed it in last week’s Critical Corner, but I really couldn’t recommend Una Cruickshank’s essay collection The Chthonic Cycle, more highly.

Things I’ve Read

• I’m going to be a bit vulnerable here and give y’all some insights into my daily routine. After my morning drink - an unholy mixture of Milo, instant coffee and Calci-Trim milk - I check a few news sites and then immediately log onto Ask a Manager, Alison Green’s blog where she gives advice to workers. Is any of this advice applicable to me? Absolutely not. Do I love reading about other people’s problems and hearing solutions to them? Absolutely yes. If that’s your thing, check it out.
• This interview by Dan Kois (for Slate) with Vincenzo Barney, the dude who wrote the… Grimace-level purple profile of Augusta Britt that went viral last week, is fascinating. I’ve been around long enough to encounter a lot of people who know plenty of words, read plenty of books but are nevertheless not well suited to writing, and this guy falls straight into that category.
• On the flipside, this interview with Anthony Jeselnik, a comedian I’ve generally stayed away from because I thought he was empty provocation. I was wrong, as I often am!

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