Loaded with spoilers for the game. So, I finished the story mode in Shadow of Mordor yesterday. While I loved the gameplay and the visuals, the story didn’t really click for me. The characters were mostly wooden cutouts (except for the orcs, which were fun wooden cutouts). It was also oppressively grim and broody, which was extra grating when combined with the highfalutin prose of Lord of the Rings.
I also felt that it really fell apart at the end, making the last two fights with the big bads into quicktime sequences. I also wasn’t a fan of how the wraith turned out to be Celebrimbor. That seemed like a huge liberty to take with the canon.
However, I have some questions about the story ending:
Is there any canon support of Celebrimbor’s involvement in Shadow of Mordor? It seemed to me like they were careful to only use him in gaps in the canon, but I don’t know the extended canon that well.
What actually happened at the end? From what I could tell, the Black Hand committed suicide as part of a ritual to bind Celebrimbor to his body so Sauron could inhabit it. Then Celebrimbor disables Sauron long enough for Talion to “kill” him. Then Celebrimbor goes on to the afterlife, and Talion stays in Mordor, still alive, talking about how he needs to make another ring? So what happened there? Did Talion become corrupted and continue working towards Sauron’s rise for the War of the Ring? Does this fit into the actual canon in any way?
Nothing in Shadows of Mordor is canon in any way, and the game’s writers & devs acknowledged that. They never tried to build a canon story, just a fun game. There are no human rebels in Mordor, nor quaint little fishing villages with battle maidens and such. It makes fuck all sense for Gollum to be there at all considering the Black Gates of Mordor where Talion was originally stationed fell to disrepair and the orcs long before Bilbo nicked the Precious (somewhere around TA 1980. For reference, LotR takes place circa TA 3018)- so unless Talion spent like a thousand years in limbo Gollum should still be chilling in his cave, and he can’t have spent a thousand years in limbo because the people he knew when he was alive are still kicking. The Black Hand appears nowhere in the books. Celebrimbor is long dead and gone. And so on.
With that out of the way :
I don’t really remember the ending of the game (I spent way too much time playing orc politics :] ) but I found it pretty ironic, or possibly foreshadowy, that the symbol Talion leaves on the orcs he controls is a glowing blue-white hand print. You know, like Saruman. I think with Celebrimbor gone, he might just have tried to find a new ally to play orc politics with…
Before the Celebrimbor reveal (and even a little while after it), I was thinking the wraith was actually Sauron, who was manipulating and corrupting Talion for his own ends (wiping out the rebels, slaughtering orcs and pitting them against the other in a sort of survival of the fittest thing, corrupting Talion by trying to convince him that in order to defeat Sauron, Talion would have to learn to be as brutal as Sauron was, etc.)
I think I would have liked that a bit more than it being Celebrimbor, which felt more like shitting on the canon. It would also have tracked more closely with the ending, which I felt came a bit out of left field. Still, I recognize that my fanboy glands are working overtime when I get that worked up over a game that the developers clearly said was not meant to be canonical.