…and by “just beat” I mean I completed the main quest the other night. Let’s just say it was beyond lame. I have many reasons to back this up, but first, some backstory.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is one of the games that led me to get an Xbox 360 (other key games include Fable II and Fallout 3), and I quickly immersed myself in Cyrodiil, honing my archery skills and sneaking through caves and ancient ruins alike to loot, loot, and loot some more. Upon first playing, I did the main quest up to the part where you return from Camoran’s paradise where I then gleefully wandered off to do sidequests and just explore. This was fun…for some time, but then my collection started to grow and I kind of forgot about Martin and Daedra and shutting down Oblivion gates. On occasion, I’d pop Oblivion back in and poke about for an hour or two. The last time I played the game before this past weekend was back in August. Er…yeah.

So yeah, I got motivated and figured I could complete the main quest at the very least if I buckled down and focused. Little did I know that it would involved little-to-none buckling down and zero focus. Ah, Oblivion, you lazy bastard. Grabbing Martin by his Sean Bean neck, I headed over to the Imperial City to re-light the Dragonfires and save Cyrodiil. This took less than 10 minutes. Here, I will give you a step by step:

1. Introduce Martin to some dude
2. Fight off a few Daedra that interrupt us
3. Move to the next zone
4. Fight off a few Daedra that interrupt us
5. Move to the next zone
6. Run past the Daedric Prince Mehrunes Dagon without incident
7. Control is taken away from the player and you watch as Martin turns into a dragon-bird to destroy Mehrunes

LESS THAN TEN MINUTES.

Probably the lamest aspect of this final main quest is that you are not playing at the end. You are watching. Or maybe you are not and you got up to pee or something. That is reasonable. The fact still remains; just when something large and epic is finally happening in Oblivion, you are put on pause, you are asked to stop role-playing, and you are forced to watch a stilted, turn-based battle between bird and demon-beast. It’s so anticlimactic that I can’t even imagine what other possibilities they threw away before going with this one.

I dunno if I’ll go back again and finish up the different guilds and expansion packs any time soon. It just seems kind of fruitless, especially after all the Fallout 3 I’ve been playing. Those quests offer both awards and gold, something severely lacking in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and even though each game had problematic endings, at least Fallout 3 was able to undo it and move on.