Interesting! Never got a snes growing up; my parents thought we played the nes too much, so it eventually went into the closet, and I transitioned to pc games. Looking at the screenshots, it seems to be a completely different game.

I think the pc version is still worth playing, for Tolkien fans that are willing to put up with a bit of jank.

I recently started replaying the 1990 Interplay LotR game, which I have fond memories of playing as a kid. I also discovered they made a sequel which I never played, but intend to!

It’s a top-down, party-based rpg with turn-based combat, and a fairly robust keyword-based dialogue system. Pretty clunky by today’s standard, but it’s chock full of loving detail. There are a number of deviations from the books for the sake of gameplay, but it’s quite faithful to the spirit of the text.

You can find it on various abandonware sites, and apparently someone’s also rewritten the engine!