YMMV / The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard

• Complete Monster: Admiral Amiel Richton is the self-imposed Governor of Stros M'Kai, tasked to bring Imperial control upon the island. Waging a bloody war in which he killed Prince A'Tor and wiped out Stros M'Kai's fleets, Richton cruelly burned the entire Old Quarter to ash just to eliminate any stragglers. Overseeing routine imprisonment, torture, and execution of citizens to further subjugate the populace, Richton threatens even his own minions with death or fates worse than if they fail him. In his unending greed for power, Richton made a deal with the necromancer N'Gasta to cast a "soul snare" over Stros M'Kai, resulting in the countless souls murdered by Richton's reign being enslaved and experimented upon by N'Gasta, in exchange for supplying Richton with magical trinkets. In his quest to eliminate the Restless League entirely, Richton dispatches his assassins to kill many of their number, and when he faces seeming defeat, he feigns surrender simply so he may more easily stab his enemies in the back.
• Crosses the Line Twice: There's an in-game option to use the torch to light Mariah—commonly agreed to essentially be the game's equivalent of Nazeem or the Adoring Fan—upon which she spontaneously combusts and the PC remarks "Magnificent!" The PC suffers no repercussions whatsoever for doing this. Apparently this was included because even the developers realized how annoying she was.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Many consider the story and world-building of Redguard to be the most interesting and well-remembered aspects of it. The fact that the game was written by Michael Kirkbride certainly helps.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Two years later, Jeff Baker and Jonathan Bryce would be in another pirate-themed PC game published by Bethesda.
  • The first quest you receive upon arriving at Stros M'Kai involves delivering an amulet, just like the first main quest in Oblivion after leaving the tutorial dungeon. Worth noting is that Redguard was the fourth TES game ever made, while Oblivion was the fourth TES game in the main series.
  • Redguard also shares a lot in common with Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. Both are the fourth game in an RPG series currently owned by Bethesda Softworks, the second non-roleplaying spinoff in a row (and one that deviates even more from the core gameplay than the first spinoff did), emulates the gameplay style of another game that was popular at the time, and proved to be a commercial failure that resulted in further sequels to said spinoff being cancelled in favor of taking the series back to its RPG roots (though with significant changes). Oh, and both games have a black man named Cyrus as a playable protagonist. But unlike Brotherhood of Steel, Redguard managed to avert Canon Discontinuity, and actually expands on the series lore instead of flat-out contradicting everything we know about it.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Cyrus the Restless is amongst the most legendary heroes of the Redguard race and responsible for ensuring his people a position of power in the Cyrodiilic Empire. Once a noble son of Hammerfell, Cyrus gladly turned to the life of brutal piracy after killing his brother-in-law in a duel. Cyrus returns home when he hears of his sister Iszara's disappearance and uses trickery and guile to track down the rebel Restless League she was apart of. Learning she was a captive of the necromancer N'Gasta, Cyrus uses a magic artifact to turn the sorcerer's magic against him and outwits the Daedric Prince Clavicus Vile in a game of riddles to save his sister's soul. The unwitting hero sparks a rebellion against the Imperial occupation after slaying the enemy's dragon to save the dead prince's soul and infuse it into a sword. While the League makes a distraction, Cyrus slays the corrupt Governor Richton to free Hammerfell and turns down an offer to be king to resume his life of freedom and debauchery.
  • Dram is a dark elf assassin loyal to rising conqueror Tiber Septim tasked with aiding Governor Richton and the Imperials in securing their conquest over the Redguards of Hammerfell. When Prince A'tor led a fleet against the Empire, Dram assassinated the Prince with a poisoned arrow while the Imperials' allied dragon distracted the fleet. Dram soon set his eyes on the pirates of the Restless League acting as rebels and overwhelms and captures the hero Cyrus when he comes to find his sister. As Cyrus escapes to aid the Restless League, Dram nearly kills him in an ambush and allows him to escape so he can track him and find the Restless League headquarters. Dram is on the verge of ending the rebels with an advanced airship until Cyrus comes to kill Richton, and he nearly ambushes and kills Cyrus a final time before a sword possessed by A'tor cleaves him in half.
• Narm: Redguard was one of the first Elder Scrolls games to be fully-voiced, and features a lot of really cheesy voiceovers among the cast.
• Once Original, Now Common: Even though Redguard established much of the lore that later games in The Elder Scrolls would follow and was fairly received by fans and critics on its initial release, many agree that the game itself hasn't aged too well two decades later, due to the choppy framerate (especially if played in software rendering mode), crude graphics, and especially the clunky Tomb Raider-style controls.

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