Elder Scrolls- Skyrim (XB360/PS3): What the hell is wrong with you people?

I didn't want to write this one. 

I REALLY didn't want to write this one.

But I had a number people clamoring to me about this game telling me that its going to get game of the year nods and stands one of the best releases this fall. But god damn it, I knew how I was going to feel about it going in. Western RPGS and I have never gotten along. We have a very Love/Hate relationship. They love to suck, and I hate playing them. I didn't care of the games that have come before it, specifically: Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3. But people kept asking, and kept asking, and kept asking for me to do this one. So I said to myself if I was going to review this game, I have 3 rules to follow: 

1.) Try to be as objective as possible.
2.) Do not compare it to Dark Souls at every given opportunity.

3.) Give it at least 3 days of play before I write anything.

So here we go. Remember readers: you asked me to do this. I didn't want to.

ELDER SCROLLS: SKYRIM(XB360)

The story starts off with my character waking up in a wagon with shackles on. Apparently he was caught and knocked out on the border of Skyrim, and is being carted away for execution because they assume you are part of a rebel resistance against their empire. This is where you create your character. Typically when I play an RPG of any kind where I get to create a character, I tend to fall into the archetype of either the area of effect mage, or the damage soaking damage dealing tank character.  So since I was playing something outside of my comfort spectrum, I decided to play a character type I usually never do. So Thus I used Skyrim's terrible create-a-character to create "Bainan Elvendrez" who was going to specialize in stealth and thievery. While the character creation did provide me with a myriad of options, I tend to find that all the options didn't seem remarkably different from each other besides the races. All the character designs looks rough, and despite giving me a number of slider options, all the characters still looked like shit. So after settling on a wood elf with some light scruff and a stupid Mohawk, my character is brought up to the execution block and just before the axe comes down, a dragon appears on a tower and wrecks havoc. My character bolts off to follow and you take control of the game. You can chose to follow either your captor or your fellow prisoner, but it was so clusterfucky that I just followed who it was I saw.

After a brief escape segment where it somewhat explains the buttons and directions and gives you some introductory equipment and some minimal direction, you enter the world of Skyrim. The open world map, much like it predecessors, is friggen massive. It doesn't give very much in the way of a linear path so it is easy to get lost just exploring things. Or if you are like me and have a poor sense of direction, just easy to get lost. After I escaped the first town from the dragon attack, my partner said I could find a small town just north of where I was. Instead of following him down the path I fiddled with the buttons a bit  to familiarize myself and lost him. So I tried to follow what seemed to be an obvious path, but where it ended up being a very narrow path on the side of mountain, not being a great first person player I misstepped and fell off the side of the mountain into a chasmy area. Basically a hole around steep walls. There was no where to walk and unable to climb. In a matter of minutes of starting the game, I got myself glitch locked in the side of a mountain. Not a great start for a game I had severe trepidation about playing to begin with.

But after cussing a bit, getting a drink, and reloading my save I figured out that I could take the game out of First person mode and instead play third person. This was a billion times more comfortable to me and this is what I stuck with the whole time with the game. So now I followed the guy down and found the town of my own accord. Helyen or whatever if was called. First thing I see when I walk into town is a chicken on the ground, so for shits and giggles I take a swing at it. Suddenly, the entire hamlet of Derpingsburg grabbed the torches and pitchforks and proceeded to lynch and gut my elven ass in a matter of seconds. Seemed like a simple "Don't do that or we are are calling the guards" would have been more and sufficient in this situation. The next time around I go around town and try to get a room at the Inn, I wanted to get a feel for the thievery aspects my character would be doing. For locked doors and chests, there is a small lock picking mini game, that's difficulty decreases the better you get at it. I was actually a big fan of this because it reminded me of a very old Nintendo game by the name of Hillsfar were you would you would have to pick locks with actual pick tools. However any fun I would have with this was effectively dashed by Delphie, the innkeeper. This bitch would stand in the doorway of the room I was in, and WOULD NOT FUCKING MOVE. I would walk around the room and try to duck or do ANYTHING to get her leave. Sometimes she would take a few steps away, I would dart to the door only to have her step back in the way. It took me me almost 20 minutes to get out of the damn Inn. Finally after talking to some of the villiage idiots and spending what little money I had on heath potions, I decided to do some quests.

Is Bainan Elvendrez gonna have ta cut a bitch?

The maps are too big, and the way points are not clear. This has always been a massive complaint of mine for this series. Traveling through the Skyrim countryside is picturesque and impressive. While the character models I felt look like shit, they really do a pretty good job with their landscapes. Everything that I saw from a distance was very serene and I also liked how the game appeared to move in real time between light and dark, and perhaps I'm remember wrong but I thought there were weather changes as well. My problem is without any major guide to let me know if I was on the right path or not, I continued to find myself wandering around, trying to find what specific path or road or cave I was trying to find to get my side quest started. I can't tell you how many times I was walking straight towards a way point marker and found myself circling a fucking mountain trying to figure out how to get up. More often than not I would start climbing areas I was not supposed to be and getting myself perched on ledges with no means of going higher but too steep a drop to get back down. If not that, I found myself getting bored just walking around. Sometimes eating up more than 30 or 40 minutes of time just trying to get to a destination. Occasionally I would get attacked by a wolf or try to kill some wild game. But that's not enough for me. This is a complaint I have made before in games like Borderlands, Dead Island, Oblivion, or even the Assassin's Creed franchise. If you are going to give me a stupidly large map to wander then you better give me some means to traverse it fast, or have shit happen while I'm walking into it. I never have this problem in like Red Dead Redemption, Saint's Row, or GTA because they provide fast modes of travel or things to do along the way. But no, In the Elder Scrolls franchise its just walk walk walk walk walk. It gets incredibly boring to me. Many people immediately shoot to me "Oh but you can fast travel." Which is true. But you can only use after you have already visited a location. And trust me, once I have I fast traveled constantly, but the over world travel is just boring as hell for me.

Yo Dawg, I herd you liek Trees and Mountains. So we put in like
10 billion of them between you and the destination. Enjoy.

So finally getting to some crypts for a quest I was doing, I finally got into the some combat. I think the first major one I did was trying to find a gold claw or something. The combat has a slightly similar button configuration to that of Demon's/Dark Souls in way that the shoulders are needed to swing the weapon or raise my shield. So because of those familiar buttons I didn't have much trouble getting used to that. What DID bother me, was the location of the jump and menu buttons. Perhaps I've played too many JRPGs but from the SNES on, the Top button (Y, Triangle, etc) is always the menu and B/O button is always jump. So in the heat of fights, I would try to quickly get to the menu so I can used my potions and instead I would jump in place and get killed. After a few cheap deaths, I finally had to switch those around. I still did it as I was learning to adjust to the new button locations but I finally did it less after the fact. The combat seems to be very loose as this games combat takes more of an action RPG route. It requires your reticle to be on target or the attack might miss. This is something that will happen often if you are trying to do a power swing, as the animation will usually have you swing right past the enemy. This to me is in desperate need of a lock on of some type, it would make the third person combat a bit more precise, Demon's/Dark Souls has pretty good example of how this kind of combat works, and while I am pining on about this, a couple of hit or stun animations would have been nice to signify when I hit or am getting hit. The life bars drop yeah, but if I am fighting two or more enemies I am not looking at the life bars. If its going to be like that then the least they can do is give me more of a window for my strikes to land, something comparable to Dragon Age might have helped too where you need to be somewhat within range. Much like the over world, the caves and dungeons seemed incredibly long and I would often find myself wondering how much longer before I found the end of it. They were never so long that I wanted to put the game down though, and some of them did keep playing a few hours longer than I wanted to for a session.

I suppose my biggest complaint, and this is probably more of just me being a snooty English major (not a good one, mind you), in the regard that I felt no weight for the story. I knew I was captured and that I was a "Dragonborne", and that I needed to meet the Grey Beards. But after that point I got so lost and distracted by side quests I didn't even remember where it was I was supposed to be going. A lot of times when I am trying to follow the story, some other asshole NPC will shout some dialogue over what I'm listening to and then I miss something important. I never felt like there was any weight behind my actions, and everything had an annoying fetch quest MMO feel to it. I was starting to get interested in the werewolf story lines, (and for exploration the beast form was a necessity for me) but even those got bogged down by massively far destinations, which would usually result in me starting up closer quests.

All the werewolf stuff was the most fun I had. Coolest looking characters too.

I've been told that the monsters in the game level up with your character, but a particularly infuriating moment of the game is when I actually needed to seek out these grey beards. I had a very difficult time finding where I needed to go specifically to get up to the top of the mountain they were on, climbing up on the wrong sides of them on more than one occasion, but after several hours I did eventually find the "7000 steps" I was supposed to take to get there. On the climb up I'd kill some baddies and then would be greeted at the top by a Frost Troll. This fucker wiped me out in a single hit. So I had to figure out were I went to get back up there. Eventually I found a path and kept getting crushed by it. I then had the brainstorm to save just before so I wouldn't have to keep climbing that fucking mountain. This thing was unbeatable for me. I couldn't take more than 2 or 3 hits tops from it, my spells were so piss weak I could barely register damage, my shouts did nothing to help me. This fight was a total wash, so my only recourse was to try to out run it to my destination. This eventually worked but not without multiple reloads.

Fuck these stupid things right up their hairy assholes. 

It was after that point I had a greater comfort level to the game, fast traveling to towns, ripping through dungeons, looting peoples stuff and trying to create new equipment. But during all of this, during the numerous hours I played it I could not once register any boss battle, enemy, dungeon or story plot that made me reflect that I was having fun. I just wasn't. Yeah some of it was interesting enough to keep me going, but I just was not enjoying this game.

I just don't get it. I'm a pretty savvy gamer. Ive played several games and pretty much will give everything a shot. I know that a number of the things that I said are the reasons people love these games. I argued with a number of my friends about my complaints and they stared at me baffled, like I was speaking another language. One friend said to me "You have a unique personality, You just look at things differently." and I suppose that makes sense, different people register different fun. I love bowling, but the template for whom Bainan Elvendrez was created has told me constantly he hates bowling. Different Tastes.

I really tried, people. I really did.  I really tried to give this game a shot, and try to take it for what it is, and tried to figure out what is that makes these games so goddamn popular.I didn't want to write some hate speech to be shocking, and did my best give an honest review with an honest opinion. But I am just not seeing it. Maybe I was just too late to the party to join in now. Maybe I'm too ingrained on the traditional JRPG systems that I grew up with. Maybe I just hate excessively long walks. I don't know. But what I do is this: I don't think I will ever enjoy the Elder Scrolls Series. Every single one of them leaves more bored and disappointed. I feel like I'm being left out of some club and everyone else is having a great time. But when I got in, I didn't feel right. I felt happier at the smaller club that was more to my taste and played the music I liked. I don't know how anyone could play a game like Dark Souls and then play Skyrim and then think Skyrim was better. It just baffles me. Making the map 300 times bigger than ridiculous doesn't make a game a epic, it makes it tedious. Having unresponsive combat doesn't make a game challenging, It makes it annoying. Having a multitude of different story options may deepen a game, but it can also distract. The VGA's (the biggest fucking Non-Award show in history) gave Skyrim game of the year, and nobody seemed bothered or surprised by it. Just met with a lukewarm acceptance that a game that's been out for about a month now is being mentioned as the best game of the year. It just stuns me. Look, if you are a fan of this series you will probably be a fan of this game.

But I think you people are friggen insane. Fuck this game.

PS: I put out a Gag Video for my friends before I started playing. Kinda wish I used the real stuff now.