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Staff
System:
Windows
UPC: 93155106604

Released: 9-10-07

Game Genre:
Other

Price Guide (USD):
Loose:  $50.00
Complete:  $19.97
New:  $500.00
Rarity: Pending Data

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The Elder Scrolls: Arena (PC) - Windows

The Elder Scrolls: Arena is an Other game released in 1992 for the Windows.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena

The Elder Scrolls: Arena Title ScreenThe Elder Scrolls: Arena Screenshot 1
Rating: 5.9 (3 votes)

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The Elder Scrolls: Arena Featured Review

The Elder Scrolls: Arena Review by: Zircron Swift - 4.2/10

Elder Scrolls: Arena Review
Bethesda Softworks have held quite a repeated reputation with open sandbox simulators, and one of their more known successes is the Elder Scrolls series. Not too long ago, they released an anthology which I with glee gladly brought a few years later when the price had plummeted to an affordable price. Then a year later I realised I haven't actually touched this box set at all save for the initial purchase where I rummaged through the maps and thought how awesome this is. It was an odd thing or me to buy seeing as I hate games like Fallout and Grand Theft Auto, which can have gameplays as nonlinear as a tied up shoelace. These sorts of games are often too big for me and often these would fall into countless and unrelenting Guide Dang It moments where I have no clue where to go next. However, recently I felt brave and decided to go through all of them while I take a break from trying to complete all the Final Fantasy games. Oh the gamers life...

The first thing I notice is that part of this anthology, both Elder Scrolls: Arena and it's squeal, Daggerfall, actually free downloads from the Elder Scrolls website. So you can either get the anthology with real life money and experience the disk edition, where you load up the files from the disk and then just pretend the disk just never existed, since there isn't any copy protected nonsense about having to use the CD to play the game (Neverwinter Nights, this thumbs up is for you), or you can imagine you have a lot of money in your hand and throw it at your screen as you "purchase" the free download of Arena and Daggerfall as a joint gift and get exactly the same thing in return. Yay!

As much as I appreciate the disks and the authenticity they behold, the anthology is really paying for Elder Scrolls III, IV and V with the first two for free, if you want to look at it like that. The book-like case in itself was really what caught my eye since I am a sap for collectors items constantly clogging up my inventory of a room. Seriously, it's hard for me to resist some kind of video game collectable. So after the files had installed, it was time to discover what kind of classic I had been neglecting myself for all these past minutes.

Not being the worlds fastest reader, I had to reload the game a few times to read the whole scroll written opening of an introduction, and again when I had made my character, which was annoying. Apparently the land of Tamriel was constantly under petty little wars until Tiber Septim came along and was like "Hey yeah, stop that." and proclaimed himself emperor of all the land.That quite literally all you get on how he did it, that and a small fact that he was able to crush all opposing forces and such. It really was very brief on what happened in the beginning, like, super mega paraphrasing. His rein created the Imperial Guard, which, 700 odd years later, still lasts to this day.

Upon starting a new game, you get a story in a similar sense, in which on the emperor Uriel Septim's birthday, he is betrayed by Tham Jagers, one of his wizards. This guy banishes the emperor to another dimension, and takes his identity so he looks like the emperor himself. Ria, an apprentice, tries to warn the Elder council but she gets killed in the process. Tham then quite literally turns of the imperial guards into hell spawn to do his bidding. All, apart from you, whom he sends to the dungeon, not thinking you as a threat. You may now start playi-

Ah, nope, sorry You have to make a character first! Breaking the flow of story telling is this choice of how to make your character, which really would have been better suited to before the prologue happened. You can either be asked a bunch of questions about hypothetical situations that would reflect your character, or you can select the stuff yourself and roll your own stats. I decided to go with the formal for the role-playing experience, and see if I could do a little LARPing along the way. I got SpellSword as my class, and I decided to be a sort of elf character. after all this, Rai talks to you in your sleep (apparently holding herself off from the spiritual world to be your guide to make Tham pay for his misdeeds) and tells you a few things. You then wake up and you are in a dungeon cell. *Gasp!*

She has told you that there is a key waiting for you, though I forget how it got there if Rai is technically dead in body. The first thing I noticed is that you have to use the arrow keys to move, instead of the WASD keys, which can be really awkward as first. It's also weird as you rotate by pressing the left and right arrow keys and only move forward and backwards with that. Anyway, at first, the new game experience is quite exciting. You exit your cell and have to find your way out. You find some equipment straight after that and you use that to fight the goblins and rats that will come your way. I was so happy, running along through the dark scenery of the simple graphics of a 2 decade old PC game, until I ran into a goblin. Then I died.

Why didn't I kill it you ask? Well, I was clicking my mouse button with as much vigor and determination as a a football fan staring at his favourite player a inch from the screen as he passes it to another player with no exciting consequence, but the truth was that nothing happened. My character just held his sword as he was repeatedly bashed by the sorry excuse for a club that the Goblin had in its hand, probably wondering as much as he looked as his sword and thought "How the heck do I use this thing?" And after looking online, since the anthology did not come with instructions (for any of the games), it seems that the game takes an odd, but interesting way at combat. You need to hold down the left mouse click, and then swipe the mouse from left to right, right to left, down to up or up to down to execute one of four attacks, each with a different strength and accuracy. So with this, I set off and found a goblin and smite him with my awesome skills. Then I died.

Why? There was a rat behind me, and was attacking me as I fought the goblin. It's a first person perspective game, so you have to turn around every now and then to check you aren't being ganked by some lowly rat or thief. So, I decided to go again, saving after the intro again and set off. I willed off some goblins and rats, which seemed to be the populous of the first dungeon. I was running low on health, and decided to rest, which restores health. However, I started to rest, then a message came up saying that I cannot rest because enemies are near by. Then I died.

A recurring issue in Arena, and be sure of it. To be successful at this game you must learn to save every 3 seconds least you die and lose all your sweet sweet loot. Did you kill a rat? Save the game. Found 2 gold coins on the ground? Save the game. Facing a closed door? Save, save, save! Save before you rest and then again after if you got back a sizable chunk. Save after resting for the night at a tavern. And for the love of God, save before you level up. It is impeccable that you do so.

When you level up, you get to put points into your skill attributes. This is great! However, the amount of points you add are completely random, ranging from 3 to 6, with four being the norm. By save scumming and reloading a save just before you level up, you can constantly get 5 points a level. It may seem a little cheap, but then again, give you just three points to add to your total after a couple hours of grinding with no clear way of increasing the maximum you can gain without a little help from R N Jesus can be equally cheap.

So here is the formula for the game. Once you escape from the dungeons and sleep, Rai will tell you where to go to look for a section of the Staff of Chaos, an item Tham used to seal the emperor away and broke because of its evil use. You need to go to the province that holds a piece, (don't worry you'll visit them all during the course of the game), and ask around for X place, where the staff piece is held. Said person will direct you to another person who knows of this place, whom will ask of a favour of you (which every time just so happens to be a missing piece of a puzzle that can actually find this place on the Elder Scrolls, yeah, it's in this game!). This leads to a dungeon crawl. Find the item, escape, return to previous person and you have the location of this place that holds a piece of the staff. This leads to another dungeon crawl. Find the staff piece, escape and rest at a tavern, and Rai will tell you to do exactly the same thing 7 times over until the staff is complete. Does that sound like fun? News flash, breaking news coming in, fresh and live from journalist Abor bor; it's not.

Well, in all honesty the game isn't completely boring. It's just....mostly boring. You honestly don't need to look around for side quests, since the main quests take about 2-3 hours a dungeon (and there are literally 1 million dungeons in the main quest), in which you'll find all the gold you could ever ask for and more, to the point where loot becomes worthless and it would just save you a few years of game time actually not picking up the loot you find, because you honestly have the best stuff you could ever ask for. Doing side quests and exploring outside the city leads to.....yep, more dungeon crawls, which, surprise surprise, are boring and a waste of your time since you could be getting the same thing done and progress with the story as well.

"But what about level grinding? I like my level grinding." Hey, I do too! But you really don't need to level grind in dungeons. You can just break into someones house, rest on the floor, and be interrupted by skeletons that were living peacefully in the house. Kill them, rest properly on a ledge, and then repeat until you get a few levels. If you're a true hardcore role player Paladin that refuses to resort to that sort of chaotic nature, then you gain my respect.#, but honestly, the game is more dragged out than a bad pun by only the forth staff piece, AKA half way through the game, that this is really unnecessary. I have nearly fallen asleep on countless occasions when running through the countless stretches of land of a dungeon. At least the map function is helpful and easy to use, albeit annoying to constantly have to switch back and forth between the games dated loading sequence.

Now, to be fair, the game keeps it varied. There are riddles to solve when you enter a door to test your wit, and it's refreshing to not have to use the internet for answers, since this is really the only difficulty there is to the game. Some dungeons require you to collect keys, which as I recall was actually quite fun to do, and a few had an interesting quirk, like climbing a tower or going though a dungeon of several different enemies. It's important not to try and rush this game, otherwise you'll find yourself wanting to stab your eyes out with a baseball.

Now, the difficulty is at a 6 for a reason, and this is because the game was actually so easy for me, it was what made it so boring an experience to me. However, this was because I was a SpellSword, which means I can use magic. In the ye olden days, wizards and mages were the load of the party, they had a limited number of spells, of which were weak to use, they took most of their damage because the gentle breeze was too much for them, and generally they were useless after they used their last spell until they rested. Reach a certain point however, and these pityful, weak, degrading excuse for a user of the arcane suddenly becomes a literal God, annihilate anything and everything with a bat of an eye lid.

The early game was tough for me, but I found out that at the Mage's Guild you can make your own spells. This scales with your level, and spells cost less mana to use the higher level you are. So, reach a certain point, and you have a very cheap spell that can one hit anything in the game. Your spell just needs to do 750 damage, which is very achievable around level 15-16. You'll run out of mana, but thankfully you can just drain the mana of other enemies attacks using a spell absorption spell, which not only negates the enemies attack, but also gives you mana. This makes you essentially a glass cannon. Reach your spellbook before they can hit you, and you are God. Suddenly, all the enemies are a friendly bunch of people giving you free mana and exploding from your reflective spell in arrays of confetti to celebrate your awesome powers. How nice of them!

Now, if you were a warrior, the game would be harder, but after completing this game, I decided that I would never touch this game again. Apparently there are secret quests here and there for awesome items, but those appear randomly, and most likely the item you get from the obvious dungeon crawl you need to do to obtain it will not be that great compared to your spell book. I don't know I've never tried. The game technically is big, with literally hundreds of towns with hundreds of shops and pubs in each town, with endless exploration when exiting the towns and stuff. It's all randomised, and it just gets so big you kinda just want to get on with the main story.

Overall, I give this game a 4.2/10       It was an interesting experience for me. To say I wish I never played this game would be harsh. I did enjoy it, even if most of it was a complete bore. I got in tune with my roleplaying side, and discovered how my character can be developed more. But even then that got boring when nothing happened. I wouldn't recommend playing it for fun. It's more like a walking simulator more than anything. However, if you want to really get into the Elder Scrolls series, then I found that it's best to start from the start instead of jumping straight to Skyrim, as to ease yourself into the mechanisms of the series. It also would make you appreciate how far the series has come in terms of quality. Then again, it was the first of the series. Maybe Daggerfall will be a finely polished version of Arena.
  Graphics 6   Sound 8   Addictive 4   Depth 9   Story 3   Difficulty 6

The Elder Scrolls: Arena Reviews

Overall 5.9    Graphics 6    Sound 8    Addictive 4    Story 3    Depth 9    Difficulty 6


4.2
Elder Scrolls: Arena Review   Zircron Swift
Bethesda Softworks have held quite a repeated reputation with open sandbox simulators, and one of th...
  Graphics 6   Sound 8   Addictive 4   Story 3   Depth 9   Difficulty 6

      Review Rating: 5/5     Submitted: 05-12-15     Review Replies: 2

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