Video Game Review: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

"Fus Ro Dah!" - best spell ever

One of the best virtues of video games is that they transport the player into a whole new world, plants that player into a character's shoes, and let them live as that character.  Of all the role-playing games I've played, none has been more captivating, more beautiful, and more open-ended than Skyrim.  The game's first chapter lets you build your character, offering a fair amount of options to shape the look and race of the character, before throwing you into the heat of battle.  Then, you're pretty much free to run off into the wild blue yonder and do whatever your heart desires.  Follow the main story path, and you'll become a wicked dragon slayer and hero.  Or, explore the hundreds of locations on the map, pursuing potential careers as a thief, a wizard, an assassin, a bard, treasure hunter, demon hunter, or you could just wander around aimlessly.  You can get married, or not.  You can be an upstanding citizen, or not.  You could become a vampire or a werewolf if you wanted.  The possibilities of this game are amazingly endless, and playing it feels like living a second life in the shoes of an adventurer.  With the game's gorgeous locales and intricate level designs, I've blown well over a hundred hours in exploring, fighting, customizing, and experiencing the stories this game embodies.

Gameplay is quite intuitive with practice.  It ingenuously gives the player the power to go anywhere and do most anything with the mere push of a few buttons.  It may require a little patience to wait through some of the loading screens and to wade through the menus, but for the most part, the game runs smoothly and sublimely.

The story is pretty fun to play through.  It builds your character up as a mythic hero of sorts and has you doing a fair amount of exploring and fighting.  There are quite a few cool bits of folklore, myth, and ideas that pop up to make the story stand out.  As noted above, one of the key benefits of this game is that the story is not a requisite for playing; you could ditch it altogether and do your own thing.  What matters here is that the world is built up with incredible precision and detail.  It goes to prove that it's not the destination that matters, but the journey.

The one real negative about this game is that it is prone to frequent freezing on the PS3, and glitches are common.  The game will strain resources, largely because the autosave feature makes the save file bigger and bigger until the console gets stuck.  Patches, and maybe turning the autosave off, will help the issue a bit, but it hasn't stopped many gamers from bashing on this game, calling it an inferior product that should have never seen the light of day.  Frankly, even though the problem has been frequent for me, it's never been enough to dissuade me from playing.  Nor has it stopped me from admiring the awe-inspiring graphics.  AI can be pretty nutty, but it's still pretty amazing how the programmers set up the NPCs to live and work like real people.  This game spared no expense in designing and incorporating thousands of usable props, weapons, armor, artifacts, reagents, characters, and everything else.  Voice-acting can be cheesy.  The music score for this game is one of the best.

Despite some technical issues, I've found the game addicting, gripping, and alluring in every good way.  It's become my top favorite game of this generation (outclassing my last favorite game, Fallout 3).  Every serious gamer should give Skyrim a playthrough.

5/5 (Entertainment:  Perfect | Story:  Perfect | Game:  Very Good)