Fable II

Fable 2 : An action/RPG hybrid from a developer best known for not really keeping promises. Fable 2 gets off easy as the only broken promise here is the lackluster co-op play.

Story : A revenge plot involving an evil man who killed your sister trying to summon evil magic for a grand scheme. Nothing we haven’t seen before in these kinds of RPGs, though the solid voice-acting makes up for it in part. Fable 2 works best when it’s relishing in its decidedly British sense of humour, which you’ll pick up on right away with the opening cutscene of an incredibly well done, computer generated and extremely cinematic clip of a bird dropping.

There’s a new epidemic in video games. I’d like for it to be referred to as the Bioshock’s Disease. The most common symptom of this ailment includes immortality, to a point where one has the utmost disrespect for the mere notion of death. To be more exact, Bioshock’s Disease refers to games where the punishment for the player running out of health is meaningless. Instead of having to start from a checkpoint or even a quick-saved location to retry the previous challenge to correct your mistakes, the game merely slaps you on the wrist and throws you right back into the thick of things, even going so far as to not heal your enemies from your previous encounter. Hence, skill is unnecessary so long as you can grind through every battle, and actually beating the game is more of a formality than an accomplishment. I know Lego Star Wars did this first but Lego Star Wars is meant to be played by kids and their game skill-impaired parents. Bioshock is a shooter/RPG, a hybrid of the two chief nerd-driven genres, what’s that game’s excuse?

The latest victim of Bioshock’s Disease is Fable 2. Here, the game punishes your death with a paltry loss of experience points and some scarring on your character’s body, before your character springs back to his or her feet to exact revenge on those pesky bandits. Now, for awhile I actually thought this was pretty clever, to scar your character and dampen his or her attractiveness rating. But the game has the gall to force me to deal with this issue instead of letting me load a previous save (well I guess you can reboot the system but man does this game take a good long time to load up,) so I have to deal with the slight disfigurement. This presented a problem back when my character was intended to be an angelic gun-slinging thing of beauty, but after complete 180 in beliefs and a hearty dose of defeat, she was transformed her into a hideous, evil Oprah monster.

But unlike its hospital roommate, Fable 2 presents more diversity in the combat than Bioshock. As evident by my frequent visits with cruel and soft death, it takes awhile to develop a personal strategy, but the game does succeed in letting you create a style to match your character as opposed to being forced to use a mishmash of everything (ala Bioshock) or letting dice rolls determine battle (ala every other Western RPG.) There’s a decent system for combat, ranged attacks and magic (perhaps the most satisfying to use as the game has no sort of mana/MP system to limit use), or you can create a combination of sorts. What fields you specialize in will affect your character’s appearance, as does your alignment to good or evil, the foods you eat (and you’ll find yourself eating fatty foods once you run out of potions during the initial period of time in which you’re afraid of dying) as well as many other factors that will change your character’s appearance. In a refreshing change of pace from The World Ends With You and it’s need to reward following fashion trends with stat boosts, there’s no tactical benefit to any of the clothes you choose to purchase, meaning that your character’s attire is more about preference. In Fable 2, your character becomes a reflection of how you choose to play the game, and I admire that.

It makes me wish I could use my character instead of a generic henchman when I play online co-op with a friend, but alas, that remains a missed opportunity.

Lets be honest here, most RPGs (and most games in general) that claim to let the player create either a good or evil character only let the player paint their adventure with the most broad of brush strokes. Either you’re a righteous Jesus-figure with sparkling white teeth who will either save the world from evil or sacrifice himself to save the world from evil, or a tyrannous, murderous thief with black armour who’ll probably use the villain’s evil scheme himself to enslave the world. Fable 2 stretches things out, and has fun with both ends of the spectrum. As a good guy, citizens will love and adore you, giving you gifts and discounts. Meanwhile, an antagonist will be feared and loathed by his people. The game also gives a solid variety of ways to boost your morality meter in either direction, stretching beyond either helping the homeless man or murdering everyone in town. Want to be the politically correct hero? Buy some shops and lower prices. Marry and have a kid. Rescue slaves and fight bandits. Work a job and improve the town’s economy. Or, if you have a change of heart, you can jack prices on your stores and sacrifice your husband to an evil cult. I was surprised by how much content in the villages that the game gives the player to toy with.

I’ve heard the complaint that certain aspects of the game are too easy. All you need to do to make a lot of money is grind a job for awhile and then purchase a few houses and businesses, as they’ll generate revenue even when you’re not playing. Likewise, all that’s needed to have a spouse is to do a few expressions and then give him/her a ring that matches their caste; perhaps a commentary on the lost sanctity of marriage in modern society. I’m never a big fan of grinding in general, so these aspects didn’t bother me at all. Rather, that these aspects are so easy to access simply means that you can toy with them sooner. I found that there’s a strong sandbox element in how you fiddle with the game, whether it’s pillaging every household, getting drunk and setting up an orgy with some prostitutes, or just throwing around expressions like the ones from Fable 1, the game gives plenty of chances to toy with the citizens of Albion, and at least get some good laughs out of it.

A small complaint; every job and pose is performed by the exact same mini-game of trying to position of a moving dot within a green area. I don’t like how most of the regular jobs are dictated by this mini-game. But I do find it funny that expressions are also dictated by this. It’s obscene, yet humourous that there’s the presence of a mini-game for pumping your fist, burping, flirting, farting and telling people to kiss your backside.

Now, getting to the actual video game aspect of Fable 2, what appealed to me about Fable 2 is that there’s a decisive lack of filler. Except for perhaps the single coliseum sequence, I never felt like the game was trying to stretch certain aspects out or grind enemy battles in a vague attempt to lengthen the number of gameplay hours. I never felt annoyed whenever the game told me I didn’t have enough “renown points” to continue the main storyline, as that simply meant I could indulge myself in some of the game’s surprisingly well-done sidequests. For the most part, these aren’t like the typical RPG sidequest of “go to the middle of nowhere and kill X number of randomly placed enemies”, but rather they have their own elaborate, entertaining subplots and twists.

I firmly believe that the people who will dislike Fable 2 the most will be any player that’s looking for a hearty challenge, or has the mentality that you need to finish a game ASAP and move on to the next one. I rarely felt compelled to progress through the main quest, and that’s only a slight insult about the main quest. Rather, Fable 2 provided me with a toy chest of curious items that I wanted to sit down and play with, you know, just like the play sex you made your cousin’s Barbie and Ken had. I guess the best way to describe the game would be a smaller, more intimate version of Oblivion; much less virtual content, but what you get is unique, interesting, and fun instead of just rearranged versions of the same single village, dungeon, cave and wide-open space. It’s one of the few games of this console generation that you’ll find yourself yearning to play through multiple times over, and score considering, I think that’s one of the highest compliments I can give a game in 2008. Now, if only this game learned to fear the reaper...

Pros : This game is decidedly British. As opposed to the small, confined spaces of Fable 1 that came complete with invisible walls and long load times, this game has large, wide-open spaces that encourage exploration and…well still have long load times but still. A handy menu that displays available quests and sales (!) and lets you quick-travel to them.

Cons : The magic hotkeying system is a little weird, making you assign certain spells to charge levels.

4 stars

And I do think that far too many gamers will miss out on Fable 2, if just because they’ll try to finish it before Fallout 3 is released. What’s even more frightening is the prospect of gamers trying to power-finish Fallout 3 before Gears of War 2 comes out. And there’s an assortment of games coming out that’ll encourage THOSE gamers to plow through Gears 2. And at the end of the day, most people are just going to go back to online Call of Duty 4 deathmatches or their World of Warcraft addictions anyways (Embarrassingly, I’m heading back to Mario Galaxy when it’s all said and done.)