The 2002 game had it's plaudits, but aside from the 2d6 roll and package based character generation, it carries a lot of mechanical tropes over from D20. There are classes, races and a spell-based magic system. There is no broad theme to the game that differs in anyway to a typical game of D&D, but some of the setting material is nicely written. The art is taken from the LotR movie stills, mostly.
The One Ring has mechanics that are loosely based on the D6 dice-pool system, but uses a D12 as a core 'wild dice' that has positive/negative symbols in place of '1' and '12'. Thematically, it focusses a lot on travel, cultures and fellowship and provides mechanics for these things. Some may find this fiddly at start, but it's more distinct and 'Tolkien' in it's gameplay feel than other games. The geographical area of the core game is a lot narrower, and the intention is to build slowly on this through supplements. These supplements have been released quite slowly to date. That said, the core game is all class in presentation (arguably the strongest art direction of any game released in the last few years). I'd recommend it.
