Episode 1: “The North Remembers”

These Westerosi knights need to learn to stop fucking dueling in places they can fall off.

The episode opens with Joffrey’s nameday tournament. Rather than trying to do another outdoors, traditional joust scene, they opted for a large physical set that shows off the show’s increased budget and ramped up sense of scale. That the tourney scene from season 1 was arguably the most nitpicked in the whole show by both the viewers who’d read the books and those who hadn’t is precisely why this is the opening scene of the second season. It’s a statement, one that will ring through the entirety of the season and potentially the rest of the show as it seems HBO will continue to increase budgets as long as Game of Thrones continues to be a huge fucking success.

“Fus! Ro! Dah!”

Sort of the quintessential image of this game.

Special note: I play Skyrim on the PC via Steam but with an Xbox Controller.

So first, a preamble: I am going to have to take my time on this review and it may run fairly long, longer than some of my really long shit that you may have read. Well, maybe not longer than that “How to Film Mass Effect” thing. I’m not going to split this review into fucking parts unless I absolutely have to. What I will do is break it down into sections if only to help me concentrate on the specific things I want to talk about, all in good order. But hey, you may not be interested in every shred of whatever I happen to conjure up for this and are maybe more into just knowing (if only in advance) what I, in general, thought of this game.

How to put it?

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is simply one of the best games ever made. More than that, it’s got some serious clout toward the elevation of games as a medium that deserves to be regarded shoulder-to-shoulder with other commercial art media like movies, comic books, and novels. Every now and then an example of x media comes on which is not only a milestone in its own territory, and Skyrim is certainly a milestone game in whatever context, but also a cultural touchstone. There’s a lot of rocks in Skyrim, mountains and so on, so maybe I have stones on the mind. Anyways, what I’m getting at is that Skyrim is one of those games that should cross entertainment boundaries irrespective of whether people like video games and simply be one of those experiences that everybody should be. Not all that dissimilar from how Watchmen is a graphic novel that transcends the limitations of its own context to become just the same type of cultural touchstone. Every medium has its examples of such works and Skyrim belongs among them.

So yeah, this is going to be a glowing review.