Why?

Slimebeast would have a heart attack if he saw some of the responses in this thread. Wait a second... Slimebeast? SLIMEBEAST!?!?! ARE YOU OKAY?!?!

...

:O

because we're saying that a mediocre game is mediocre?  he's likely the kind of person who feels it's great. 

That said, this is one of the few games that I see both sides to the argument.  it is mediocre and repetitive, but it's also remarkably deep and vast.  Depends on play styles, really. 

I want to like it.

But the leveling system is so bad, and hand-to-hand combat damage scales so damn poorly as you level...

He's either 1: Laying on the floor in shock at the thread replies. 2: He ran to get his Oblivion disc and whisper "it's all right" to it over and over whilst rocking back and forth in the fetal position or 3. He raged when he saw the comments and proceeded to destroy his computer so he never has to visit Vgchartz again.

Yeah that's what I was kinda thinking.

it's one of those games (like Halo) that gathers a lot of strong opinions in either direction, best to just brush it under the rug and ignore the comments. 

The world is nice to explore, although you only find 4 types of re-used dungeons. The towns look good and the side quests are fun. The main story and combat are pretty bad however.

I'm glad I played it on pc where you can set the world level yourself. I didn't do the first story mission until I leveled quite a bit, thus the enemies had leveled too, but not my allies?! They were dead in 2 seconds. Good thing I could reset the world level instead of having to start over.
After cleaning out 2 portals I only used god mode and noclip to float straight to the exit instead of bothering with the rest of the dumb portal worlds. It was also fun to spawn hundreds of shields and other crap and let them rain out of the sky. Or fill a room with stuff and blast fireballs into it.

It was a good game at the time, but for todays standards it's only okay.

I beat Oblivion and got all the achievements (including DLC). I can tell you it's probably one of the first well made games for the 360/PS3. It's also very long (my play time is 80 hours). So considering that 360 in 2006 really only had a handful of great, but generally short, games, this was a great game at the time.

Story - 8

Gameplay - 7

Value - 10

Overall I'd give it an 8.5/10