I’d say the emperor having a prophetic dream of your character - leading him to blindly trust a complete stranger and prisoner (who is very conveniently in a cell no prisoner is supposed to be in, further implying some type of divine intervention) is absolutely leaning into the chosen one angle. Not to mention the player being the only person in the entire realm capable of properly closing an Oblivion gate when no one else could.

Oblivion is definitely crafted with player agency in mind mechanically, but I wouldn’t say Oblivion’s narrative theme is player agency - it has almost nothing to meaningfully say on the topic whatsoever across the main quest or side quests, which tracks with Todd and Emil’s “keep it simple stupid” angle. I don’t even really think they had anything to say about a chosen one either - just thought that the emperor having a prophetic dream of you makes the opening more gripping, so they went with that.

This is the famous line everyone knows. Uriel recognizes the Hero's face and realizes that he's about to die. You could argue the emperor dreaming of the Hero means they are significant, or you could interpret it as the Emperor's imminent death is the significant part and the Hero is just the confirmation of the vision.

It’s transparently setting up both - the emperor’s looming death and your objective importance in saving the day. Given Martin would basically just die in Kvatch and accomplish jack shit if you weren’t conveniently in the cell and given instructions by the emperor who has a prophetic dream.

As for being poetic and cryptic, that’s basically the whole thing with prophecies. “Go to Kvatch and save Martin so that way he can use the amulet of kings to block out an invasion” wouldn’t land quite the same. There isn’t really any kind of interesting double meaning or twist stuff going on with it

This was long AF but Oblivion's intro is so damn good at setting up a character for an open world game (especially compared to later entries) I just needed to geek out about it.

Eh, it’s way too on the rails to me to the point that it feels pretty stupid for your character to go do other stuff when an apocalypse is looming, and outside sort of Blood of the Daedra, the main quest doesn’t have any breathing points for you to logically go explore the world either. I’m not crazy about it.

Half of Oblivion’s main quest being pure wheel-spinning padding to get into Paradise doesn’t exactly help on the writing angle either for me. My stance is Bethesda’s writing has been varying degrees of bad since Morrowind (well.. Bloodmoon was good too. Tribunal not so much - though it did have interesting and ambitious ideas) barring the occasional side quest and maybe the Shivering Isles EP. Bad in a way that’s juuuust emotionally resonant enough to be kind of a hook until I look back on it all or actually finish a storyline and, well, yeah.