User blog comment:Nostalgia of Iran/What great RPGs stand as equals to the Mass Effect games?/@comment-903543-20130504203523/@comment-4721065-20130506075041

Oblivion is anything but an equal, and I say that as a former fan. Describing the main storyline and the characters as bland would be giving them credit, and you have absolutely no input into the story; the situations where you actually have a choice of any kind in a quest can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and were all in the sidequests, which tended to be a lot more interesting than the main storyline.

The game's balancing is also virtually non-existent; lockpicking skill is useless when it's much easier to buy a ton of lockpicks and auto-attempt (at least in ME hacking/repair proceedings you actually lost the gel regardless, and certain repairs were completely locked out if the skill wasn't high enough) and high Alteration skill is a much better substitute. It was even worse with Speechcraft (Illusion is virtually the easiest magic to grind, and bribing is even easier than auto-attempting) and with races and the Zodiacs; stat boosts from Mage, Stallion and Warrior were infinitely more helpful than one-use spells of Tower or Snake (not to mention fire vulnerability of Lord), while Revenant essentially makes healing potions unnessessary until level 15 or 20. When combined with auto-levelling, certain character paths were completely cut off.

So, all in all, even Borderlands 1 would be a better candidate than Oblivion. That, and can you elaborate in regards to Final Fantasy, given that the quality level is really uneven throughout the series (sometimes, the only constant is the need to spend hours grinding in each game! :)