There are many things not to like about Oblivion. The yam-faced NPCs. The boring main questline. The oratory minigame. The leveling system that punishes you for not improving secondary skills. While the latter is unavoidable without mods, the other issues are no longer a problem – or at least recede far into the background – when you head to the Shivering Isles.
WHY I LOVE
In “Why I Love,” PC Gamer writers pick an aspect of PC gaming they love and write about why it’s so brilliant. This week, Jody celebrates Fallout 3 at its craziest.
There’s a portal in Niben Bay that lets you escape the traditional fantasy land of Cyrodiil. Walk past the guard who tells you that only madmen go in (and come out even crazier), and on the other side you’ll find a modest waiting room with a ticking metronome and a man with a monotone voice waiting at a table. Does his bald head look like it’s growing out of a flower because of his collar? Yes, but everything else about him and this room is profoundly ordinary. Then you sit down, and in the tone of an overzealous immigration officer, he tells you that you’re about to enter a land sacred to Sheogorath, Prince of Madness.
Then the walls dissolve into light and butterflies that swarm past, revealing a landscape of giant mushrooms beneath clouds like dancing fireflies.
The Shivering Isles are split in two. Mania is a glowing wonderland full of iridescent bug monsters whose blood gets you high. Dementia is a faded swamp full of morose people who would probably be better off drinking medicinal bug juice. Prince Sheogorath is as bipolar as his kingdom, and his inane ramblings usually end with a grim threat. It’s not a country to be taken seriously.
This helps a lot. It’s difficult to create a character in Oblivion that doesn’t look like they’ve just been dug out of the ground, and Bethesda has done this in creating the grimacing, long-faced Goobers of The Shivering Isles. Their twisted grins and wide eyes take the cheek-pushers to ominous extremes.
Sheogorath rarely has two sides to his personality. Almost every other NPC is so focused on a single trait that calling them two-dimensional would be an insult to the paper. Jayred Ice-Veins talks incessantly about bones. Duchess Syl is paranoid about assassins and spies. The amiable Fanriene is afraid of walls falling on him in his sleep.
They’re all extreme stereotypes with absurd vocal tics, and Bethesda’s in-house voice actors clearly have a lot of fun with them. A cast that struggled to portray the common folk of Oblivion proves better suited to the cartoon exaggeration of The Shivering Isles, where everyone speaks like the “Where’s my fish?” scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.
That’s why it’s difficult to get upset about the portrayal of mental illness. There’s a blacksmith who self-harms, which you can tell because her name is Cutter and every line of dialogue she has refers to cutting. Drug addiction and suicidal tendencies are portrayed with as much sensitivity as the guy who’s obsessed with a certain fork. They’re as subtle as Muppets and as difficult to take seriously. You might as well criticize Miss Piggy for being an insensitive portrayal of narcissism.
Side quests are the best thing about Oblivion, and The Shivering Isles consists entirely of side quests. In the ruins of Vitharn, you’ll find ghosts fighting an endless siege, replaying the battle that led to their deaths. Work your way into the fortress and you’ll meet ghosts who explain how their mistakes led to Vitharn’s fall, condemning them to that repetition. To free them, you must break the cycle. Find arrows for the archer on the wall, find a power source for the wizard, find the doll the warrior is convinced he’s married to – even here the characters are ridiculous – and eventually they’ll change their fate and earn their freedom.
That’s hidden in a corner of Dementia that you’ll probably find just by exploring, which is amply rewarded in The Shivering Isles. Work your way up to the rooftops of Crucible, the Dementia half of the city of New Sheoth, and you’ll find hidden stashes of jewelry there, as well as a fight club that meets at night to beat the hell out of each other. You may also stumble upon Split, a city where everyone has a doppelgänger – a wizard did it, they explain – and everyone wants you to murder the other.
In case you missed the bizarre fantasy of Morrowind, she and her giant mushrooms have been hiding in this corner of Oblivion this whole time.
