The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Retrospective

If I were ever on the run from the law, and one of the straight and narrow gents chasing me yelled "stop right there, criminal scum!" I think I would likely stop and give myself in out of respect alone. I'd 'go to jail,' and I'd nod fervently at the notion of serving my time peaceably and paying my debt to society. Then, obviously, I'd pull out that one lock pick I stashed away (god knows where, and he isn't terribly fond of the knowledge) before committing a daring escape from my prison for around 5 minutes before coming to the conclusion that what I'm doing is folly when every lawman in the universe is either a hive mind or an advanced practitioner of telepathy, seeing as they all know instinctively not only where I am but also the world-ending ramifications that could come to pass if they don't manage to pry the accidentally stolen stone goblet from my cold dead hands after I've been given a totally justified slashing. Should have paid the fine!

So, another day, another Septim Elder Scrolls game. And, he says after a gruelling ten minutes of wondering whether or not it's totally okay to put 'and' at the start of a sentence seeing as this is only a blog, with the gaming world stood upon the cusp of Dive Rock Skyrim tasting a terrible tension that can only be compared to watching a Dark Brotherhood member devour every last piece of fruit other than the bloody apple I just put on the table. For God's sake, Ocheeva, eat the damned app-
Ahem. On that note, I've decided to run through all the things I loved and loved to hate in Oblivion for the general reading of me, the two people I'll tell about this blog post and the occasional visitor who misspelled the name of a far more interesting blog featuring fan art of that one game that you used to love that doesn't seem to have any rule 34. Yes, you. Bugger off.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas. After growing up faster than a child soldier, being healed by the most hideous doctor seen in any video game outside of Silent Hill and cutting off The Overseer's head before placing it before a crying Amata and daring her to love again (just me?) the character emerges into the wastes. The camera flares, the drums roll, the vast wasteland spreads out before you as a lone piece of tumbleweed floats by like a lesser armed metaphor for the next 30 hours of your life. None of that occurs in Oblivion. There's no flare, no sudden influx of vast epic music. After being asked for one last time if that huge nose was really such a great idea you're kicked from the sewers into an area not unlike any other spot of Tamriel with no greeting other than a mudcrab eyeing you up from the nearby embankment, claws raised in the universal 'come at me, bro!' I'm certainly not trying to say that Oblivion wouldn't benefit from such an epic entrance (I can guarantee Skyrim will have one), I'm simply saying that it does not need it. Why, you ask? Is it because you suddenly know you can go in any direction you want and no one's going to stop you? Is it because that angry looking mudcrab with the overly-epic battle theme is one of the many little things in this game you'll find incredibly funny? Is it because you'll probably be back here again in an hour or so after restarting because making Alchemy one of your major skills didn't let you click blasts of fire into existence or seal your brother's soul in a washing machine? It is, of course, all of these things and more. Incidentally, if you're having trouble spotting where my vast amount of compliments toward this game become one of my few criticisms then simply scroll down to the bottom of this post for my shortened synoptic point based scoring for the game. Then, after you've spotted that such a score system isn't actually there, go to IGN's review, you sap.

Somewhere in the marsh of words I literally mashed out without review or afterthought that is the above paragraph lies one of the reasons I love Oblivion so very much. And that reason is that even when the game does something wrong, it does it so right. From the lone pissed off tiny goblin trying to beat me to death with his dinner spoon to the chorus of One Winged Angel. From the times an enemy suddenly realises their planet needs them so much more than this place and rockets into space, limbs flailing like a badly executed Rufio caught in a closing door. From Guard Captain Burd, who charged valiantly into the teeth of Oblivion by my side only to run off, get lost, and eventually get stuck on a rock in a huge pool of lava patiently awaiting rescue. From its glitches to its hiccups to its habit of not letting you fast travel because somewhere, out there in big old Tamriel, a farmer is chasing you across miles of land for accidentally electrocuting his favourite dog. Through all that Oblivion rises like a huge, clunky, clumsy Phoenix made of mismatched armour and all those Grand Soul gems that were never at the end of that one 'abandoned' fort, before letting out a stifled snort and bursting into teary-eyed laughter.

A recent titbit of news I read on Skyrim stated the writer's confusion and disdain at the designers choice to leave in some of the glitches they had found. I don't know why, I understood completely. In this day and age of hugging against walls assuming a more realistic pose because simply crouching behind cover would look silly, of perfectly streamlined buildings it's impossible to jump up to the roof of using nooks and crannies the game developers never intended to be used, of vast amounts of cutscenes to stop NPCs talking to one another through walls or solid objects, it's brilliant to see games that understand these accidental quirks for what they are: a good bit of fun. Give a gamer a limit, something they're not supposed to be able to do and they'll immediately want to do it. See level one playthroughs of RPGs, glitching through walls in Zelda to skip whole chunks of the game, impossible speed runs utilizing every trick in the book. Show them one clear, spotless path with a dragon and a tied up princess at the end and they'll be seized with a deep desire to shoot a hole in the roof before running off into an infinity of grey. Bugger that princess. Mine's in another castle. Oblivion, whether completely accidentally or, as I suspect, with something akin to a mild case of reckless abandon, made us love it for what was there, and love it more for what wasn't fully meant to be there.

Oh, you can bring up immersion. You can complain that this blew a hole in any chance of Oblivion being a game that zoned you entirely from reality like a good game should (right up until I start wondering around my local streets touching strangers faces with cries of "it's so realistic!"), but there are two types of immersion when it comes to games. There's the kind that keeps you awake at night, lay in your bed, turning the plot over and over in your mind, wondering why on Earth you didn't notice he was the killer sooner (killers eat cabbage), pondering how things would have gone if Snake had never made it down that irradiated corridor, tears rolling down your face every time you think about how touching that ending to that game really was. Then there's the other type of immersion, the type that keeps you up at night shivering or giggling into your pillow, the sort that leads to loud, laughter filled conversations containing "Oh yeah, that happened to me, but I _______", the sort of immersion that brings up a dozen personal stories by the mere mention of a phrase related to the game. For example, remember back in paragraph one, when I said Dive Rock? Remember when you threw the Adoring Fan off that? Course you do, and remember that other time when that Yeti-thing chased you up there and you...

And so we wait for the 11th. I know this seemed like a strange thing to talk about for a retrospective. I probably should have brought up the games graphics or storylines or the gameplay that actually took up most of your time. Let's face it though, I don't need to. You already know how much fun you had in Oblivion, waltzing into some town or another, ignoring the guard by the door as he spouts the same line you've heard everywhere else, heading to that one house your current quest is telling you to go after about an hour of looking for it amidst all the other little shanties, having that conversation with the woman that ends your current quest, gives you free reign to pick from the quest you had intended to do before this one or the four that popped up over the course of your trip here, and gives you that shiny piece of loot you'll probably just sell to buy that house in the Waterfront District because frankly, you thought it was quaint, while all the while fighting down the constant urge to kill her when she isn't looking directly at you so you can steal all her nice silverware (but not that iron shit) and sell it your fenc- Stop right there, criminal scum.


About the author: metutials sits night after night at his PC, too terrified to go to bed due to the goblin living in his wardrobe that only eats pencils. The other night he ran out and was forced to try feeding it a pen. When he awoke, all his socks were gone.

Yakuza 4 Review

I've always been a fan of J-RPGs. So much so that I was shocked playing Dragon Age: Origins when Leliana invited me to her side of the camp and announced indignantly that she was less than happy with the fact that I was cheating on her with the Swamp Witch. What? You saw me go into her tent? No, no, haha, nothing like that, I was merely showing her the wonderous support provided by a bra whilst the two of us played a jolly good game of chess, Leliana, my dear. I'd never even think of becoming romantically involved with a woman dragging around a 3000 year old umbilical cord smelling like a Chasind wench... This point's getting away from me, isn't it? What I'm trying to say is that it's good to play a game that takes the J-RPG stance on how to treat women. I like to imagine the expressions on the hostesses I've repeatedly told I would stay away from hostess clubs while the two of us are going out as I walk into the club and designate a different hostess, the bubbling rage they feel when I rescue this different hostess from whatever peril her endearing character traits have brought about this time around, her nail-biting horror when I drag the new hostess to the privacy of the hotel district, presumably to show her the wonderous support provided by a bra and for a jolly good game of chess.

Yes, from the institutional ingrained sexism to the food with the consistency of snot, from the hideously cute cartoon animals to the men who roll their R's when angry, from the overly bouncy 'punks' to the statuesque, stoic 'cool guys' whose main tactic in winning a fight is standing as stock still as possible in an attempt to fend off Japan's natural T-rex: Godzilla, from Tokyo to Osaka this game is as Japanese as it possibly can be without selling its underwear and dressing as Lelouch. And I love it.

One of the things I love most about Yakuza 4 is, in true Hideo Kojima fashion, the game isn't afraid to stop for five seconds and to tell the story at a proper pace. Cutscenes are long in places but only because they need to be, if the story wasn't any good it would be a real pain, but the game far from disappoints there, with the story being one of its strongest points. I won't try and explain it fully, there are so many double-crossers, triple-crossers and ulterior motives that I'd be in very real danger of going cross-eyed, and what little gaming skill I have at the moment couldn't take such a blow. Just trust me when I say it's worth every yen and more.

Gameplay on the other hand is a double edged sword. Not literally, Akiyama does not at any point in the game pull a Darth Maul and decide that sometimes one light-saber just isn't enough compensation for all those bald jokes he got as a kid. No, what I mean by that is that the battle system can unfortunately begin to grate on the nerves after several hours of using it. The game fixes this by giving each of the characters their own fighting style but toward the end of each 12 or 13 hour segment (assuming you did a fair bit of star trekkin' and side questin' across the universe) you'll find yourself mashing one button every battle with a bored look on your face. Still, this isn't so bad, it fixes itself toward the second half of the game when strategy breaks down a door and makes you acknowledge it through force and hey, at least it's not the 50 hours of pressing X that was FFXIII. Never again. Ever. ...Until FFXIII-2.

That was the bad end, the other end of that double edged gameplay sword (the end that goes where you want it to, assuming you aren't a hardcore masochist or an ad hoc suicide attempt) is the sheer volume of game that there is to play. This is without a doubt my favourite thing about the game. As you'll see if you take the time out to watch some of a video walkthrough of the game there will often be 4 or 5 hour breaks from the storyline simply to dip into the games substories, the various minigames, the aforementioned Hostess clubs (a Japanese phenomenon I will never understand or see the allure in) and the incredible... well, I'm going to call them side-quests since they seem too grand in scale to fit into the minigame section (such as one side-quest involving the training of several rookie fighters Karate Kid style, I have never caught myself singing the Rocky soundtrack as much as I did playing that side-quest.) Now, I made a lot of complaints about Final Fantasy XII (until FFXIII came out, whereupon I realised how bad Final Fantasy XII could have been) but one thing I loved about that game was the sheer amount of side-questing and extra content outside of the main storyline. The same can be said for Yakuza 4. What game designers don't seem to grasp is that when I say "replay value" what I mean is an excellent story and lots of fun things to do along the way, what I do not mean is an unlokable outfit and infinite ammo, nor do I mean a different ending. Here, Yakuza 4 stands with my other favourite games.

Finally, the characters. I absolutely love the characters, that's why the lucky bastards have gotten their own paragraph. I'm even going to go through the main characters and describe why they're so fantastically designed. I know, I know, get a room... First off, Akiyama. Good old Aki-Yamaha reminds me a lot of Nathan Drake from the Uncharted games, the only difference being that he feels like a real person and you don't get the Nathan Drake impression that if you pulled on his arm like a crank cogs would turn and he would churn out some random piece of dry sarcasm... and he's Japanese... and he doesn't fight fishmen... seriously though, fishmen? What were they thinking? ...anyway. Next up is Saejima Taiga, a man so angry his brow is permanently attempting to attack his eyes. Tenori Taiga is a stone cold killer understandably pissed off with the world, seeing as everyone seems to have sold him out. However, we see a few of his soft spots for people who remind him of his sister and for other tough guys who go in for all that honour stuff, bless their little hearts... not that Saejima's heart is likely small, the man doesn't look like he watches his health. Tanimura is next, a corrupt cop. What's that? "How origional," you cry? Well, he's actually giving the money he coerces from people to the poverty-stricken Chinese immigrants in Japan. This extra layer helps me see the characters of Yakuza 4 as deeper than those of your average game, take it from someone who made a Code Geass reference 4 paragraphs ago when I say I love a character who gets a good job done through seemingly evil means. No one likes a white knight. And by no one, I mean me. So yeah, no one likes a white knight. Finally, there's Kiryu, the muscle-bound demon from a circle of hell so deep they don't tell new arrivals about it for fear it'll scare them off. Kiryu, while being a nice sort of guy, has the dark past that comes with the territory of organised crime. He also has a daughter that compliments his character and makes him look like a big teddy bear armed to the teeth with muscles that can take about 4 magazines of ammo, not to mention she must have stirred up a storm with the Humbert Humberts of the world. I'd put an emoticon here, but I'm doing so well without them.

To conclude, says the one who spends their life writing exams in continuous prose, Yakuza 4 skyrocketed from the moment I bought it from a good opening cutscene to an absolutely fantastic game chock-full of extra content and acceptably subtle hilarity. For example, at one point a hostess complains that she doesn't enjoy the company of other women as they always want your approval of their opinion, rather than your own opinion. She asks you what you think and, for full hostess marks, you say "I couldn't agree more." She thanks you with implied sex and 10,000 experience before you throw her away in the style of Persona 4. True, the city of Kamurocho may seem a little daunting to those playing Yakuza 4 for the first time, but take time to explore shops at random and have fun with the games many activities while learning your way around. Yakuza 4 currently stands proudly (I've got it leaning against one of my speakers, game cases don't have legs so they can't really stand up well) as one of my favourite games. Definitely worth a try, a playthrough and then another playthrough.

Total Score: 176% out of 49 stars.
And that's what I think about score systems.

 About the author: metutials is a talking windmill who lives exactly on the magnetic north pole. Aside from asking riddles through the medium of rhyme to the few people who pass by he enjoys scaring the local wildlife and devouring lost children.