The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Member Review for the Xbox360

The Good: Huge rich detailed world, astounding musical score and voice work, deep deep combat and magic, deep character customization is beyond anything, massive campaign length, tons of expansions add re playability, being able to direct the story yourself is rewarding

The Bad: Lots of technical glitches such as texture pop up, frame rate hitches, and annoying load times

By now everyone with a 360 has either played or owned this game. There's so much about Oblivion that it would pages and pages to describe it all in detail. The main story is you have to restore the Dragonfires so the realm of Oblivion can't come back to Cyrodiil. The story is very interesting and the sidequests add to this. To start with you make your character with an absurd amount of detail and you can even name and customize your own race, abilities etc. In each city in Cyrodiil you can choose to join guilds such as mage, fighter, thief etc. You complete tasks for the guild leader and you get a recommendation to the head place of that guild. You can train there to raise attributes and rest. Now when it comes to talking to people the game uses facial expressions to show you what the NPC is feeling. You can persuade people via a little mini-game that takes awhile to master. Now let's talk about combat. The combat is very deep and simple at the same time. You block with LT and attack with RT. You can use magic, sword, bows, katanas, staffs etc. As you use your weapons they deteriorate and you can repair them with hammers or at weapon shops. Some weapons can have attributes like causing your foe to be paralyzed for 30 secs or something like that. You can use scrolls which are magic attacks for defense and offense that can be used once. When you level up you have to sleep to you can meditate on everything you learned. It takes a long while to level up in this game but it's well worth it. The vastness of attributes is insane in Oblivion. The combinations of alchemy spells and everything combined just, literally, makes it infinite. Now lets talk about vastness. The game is huge...bigger than all the GTAs put together. Anything that you see you can walk on or climb. You can ride a horse there or just go there for the hell of it and discover something new. You can pick plants for alchemy, you can find new weapons...or just completely useless stuff like bones, cups, vases, quills, mops, shovels etc. Some stuff is worth thousands some stuff is worth nothing at all. You're probably wondering how you travel such as HUGE amount of land? Well the map lets you warp...thank God for that. Of course you can't warp inside a building but you can get the idea. Now the game can let you go good or evil depending on if you steal peoples' stuff, pickpocket, murder etc. Or you can choose to be rude to people during conversations. Technically there are some flaws. The graphics are still pretty good to today's standards but show some age just a tad compared to recent next-gen games. The music is outstanding and the voice acting is superb. There is some texture pop up here and there and hitches. The constant loading is also annoying but with recent software updates that's remedied this some. You just have to get this game...it's so big and so deep you'll play this for hours and hours...also with all the expansions out there I wonder if there is an end. A note to casual players...stay away. The vastness and depth will turn some players off and will turn JRPG fans off.