The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is the current zenith of the American role-playing game, which is only now possible with the potency of this new generation’s hardware, dropping the player into a vast and sumptuous world (that is, once you grind your way out of the initial and annoying rat-infested sewer to emerge onto a placid flower-lined riverbank, overlooking a decaying elven shrine), where you can ride your horse through snowy mountain passes, along flowered river valleys, and down toward the warm sea, delving dozens of dungeons, destroying their dastardly denizens, not to mention traveling to the fiery lava-encrusted netherplanes of Oblivion from whence the game takes is moniker, constantly offered new quests and petitioned for aid. Traveling overland brings you past dozens of plants of alchemic significance which can be harvested and sold or made into potions. The sense of freedom and possibility is where the game excels: freedom to play the quintessential fantasy paladin, celebrated for questing with honor and virtue to save the world from destruction, or to choose infamy, a darker path of robbery, murder, necromancy and mayhem, or any in-between, and to wreak it by axe and by sword or by devastating magic, or even, if you are the visceral type, by your hardened bare hands; and of course you can do all as human, ogre, elf, lizardman/woman…

The main quest, for all of its tough-to-stomach, hackneyed patriarchal fantasy drivel (oh horrors, the emperor has been assassinated and unless the escaped prisoner can find his illegitimate son to sit on the throne all hell will break loose, replete with demons and little yellow dinosaurs), seems important enough to push you forward, feeling guilty for dallying too long picking mushrooms or seeking wealth while the fires of Oblivion threaten the towns you are shopping in. Meanwhile, you are likely to have been bitten by a vampire and finding a cure so you can go out in the sun again without melting and feeling the guilt—or relish depending on your perspective—of biting necks and infecting other innocents, and have spent six hours of your real life scouring this digital world for a lousy clove of garlic.

The game world itself, so expansive and interesting and living (there is a very real sense of towns going on with or without you, with people stopping to chat in the streets and goblins and skeletons fighting in the dungeons, not to mention the consequences of your choices such as jail time if you are caught stealing) has never before been created (this is much grander than Grand Theft Auto's much celebrated sense of player freedom, because it is so much bigger and because of the consequences that accompany the freedom to choose in this world) outside of the massively multiplayer online RPGs.

Saving the world from the ravages of Oblivion doesn't come close to exhausting the exploration, which is all the fun of this game. Incredibly gripping and enjoyable is the sense of exploring a far-away, fantastical world, finding things no one else has found, discovering dungeons and magical items or creating your own, buying a house, cleaning out the dungeons and robbers, or, conversely robbing every person of everything they own, trying out new spells, learning new skills; all of these things will keep you engaged in the world for many, many hours--hence it's a poor rental unless you're talking weeklong marathon rent. The bigger question, though, and not so clear, is if the actual gameplay is really any fun.

Basically, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion plays like an effective if somewhat clumsy first-person, or even clumsier third-person, melee combat game, unless you prefer bows or magic in which case it plays as a very slow-paced first or third-person shooter, and the experience is constantly hampered by constant loading screens and frame-rate stutter as the rich textures and physics details of the current area load. You'll begin to dread opening doors because of the loading screen, and are likely to save the game three hundred times in order to complete the main quest successfully, many of them attempting to exploit your way around the game system by doing things like saving before trying to pick a difficult lock and reloading fifty times until you manage to succeed. It's a lot of interface breaking you out of the experience, not to mention the already mentioned fact that all of the possibilities of the world encourage a player to experiment and try everything possible: combat with swords, with two-handed war hammers, with bows, with magic, testing out alchemy and picking locks, and persuasion, and so on, which advancing in the game severely punishes. You need to specialize to be able to defeat dread zombies and other later enemies in the game. Many of these factors add up to wear on the experience over time, but never to pull you right out. Oblivion isn't always fun, but it is constantly, strongly, compelling.

The sheer joy of exploration in this beautiful and interesting world, the sense of possibility, the drive for upward mobility to own a house on the river and a beautiful horse (maybe with armor which you can make a micro-payment for on XBLA), not to mention the developer's seeming intention to continue releasing downloadable content (for a small fee, naturally) to extend the possibilities, make this the game to really show the promise of the current generation of game hardware, if not quite to fully realize it.

• TIP: After completing the quest for a cure for vampirism, the count who requested the cure rewards you with 2500 gold. Don't be satisfied with that. Keep asking him about the reward as many times as you want and he keeps forking over the reward money. Exploit this bug 100 times and walk away 250,000 gold, enough to buy a lovely house in every town and anything else your cheating little heart desires.