Fable II Review

It's alive!
by Brian

I wanted to enter the Temple of Shadows. Who wouldn't? The guard at the gate tried to warn me that this would be a road to evil, but isn't being bad much more fun than being good? Sure, you can do the speed limit and stop at all the traffic lights in Grand Theft Auto, but how can you resist revving your motorcycle over the edge of a parking garage and landing atop an old lady with a bag full of groceries? And then slice at her corpse with a samurai sword? Nobody, that's who. (For the record, don't try this at home. Unless you live in a parking garage.) Anyway, I was expecting to be sent on some sort of kill/fetch quest. Fable II is an action RPG after all. In those games, it's tough to get anywhere without collecting some amount of something or other and/or killing some amount of someone or other. But in many wonderful ways, Fable II is unlike any other action RPG. The guard simply handed me a bunch of baby chicks. You know, the little fluffy yellow kind. And then he made me eat them. I didn't have to go anywhere. I didn't have to do anything other than access my inventory, press a button, and listen to the chirpy crunch. And instead of cackling maniacally with every swallow, the guard was taken aback at my callousness. Maybe I should have felt bad that my dietary fortitude was enough to make the guard at the Temple of Shadows lose his lunch, but I didn't. I laughed. And then I explored the Temple of Shadows.

Fable II is really the fulfillment of the promises made by legendary game designer Peter Molyneux back with the original Xbox game. He said it would be the game to end all games. The greatest roleplaying experience known to man. He suggested (but didn't overtly claim) that if you boiled the game disc in a tincture of newt blood, it would cure you of both cancer and voodoo curses. But it ended up being just a really good game. The world was all bloomy beauty and charmingly fableish, the characters were vivid and funny, and you could play dress up with a wealth of customizable clothes. But the story was a little spare, and it ended way too quickly. And then you still had all your voodoo curses.

This is the night the lights went out in Albion.

Okay, so maybe Fable II isn't a fulfillment of all those promises, but it's at least a hefty truckload of improvements. You begin the game as a lowly street urchin, and the story of revenge and redemption spans nearly a lifetime. It's not the kind of epic stuff you might expect from a Final Fantasy (and, thankfully, there's no trace of sexually ambiguous homicidal maniacs sporting whale tails either, so score), but it's emotionally involving--particularly the revenge aspect. While scrounging the Dickensian streets for cash with your big sister at the beginning of the game, you can really feel a bond start to grow. Which makes it all the more motivating when she's killed by--

Hold on. Spoiler alert.

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When she's killed by the game's main baddie. The rest of the game is spent becoming the hero you're destined to become so you can buff up and go all Uma Thurman. The only problem with the story is paradoxically what makes Fable II a much greater game than the original. While you're slicing through goblins, racking up enough experience to fight the Big Boss in style, there's so much other crap to do in this world that the main storyline can start to sink. But it's all this stuff that makes the game so incredibly immersive.

This begins with the art style. Fable II is slightly exaggerated and a little cartoonish, but everything fits the universe perfectly. The first game looked like a Grimm's fairy tale come to life, and this one has just turned the clock forward a couple of centuries. Mixed in with your sparkling caves and water mill villages are cobblestone cities and smoky wooden firearms. Fable II is less sandals and armor, more top hats and buccaneer boots. It's a welcome change from the standard brown/gray murkiness of most next-gen games.

Added to this beautifully designed world are layers upon layers of life. You're constantly bumping into people, whether in the crowded city squares or jogging along a country road. And everyone has a place. It's not hard to imagine that a passing stranger is on his way to work at the fruit stand or just walking dangerous roads looking for bandits to kill. This world breathes, and you can lose yourself breathing right along with it. You can take a job forging swords at the blacksmith's or pulling drinks at the tavern. You can hire a prostitute or try and woo a spouse. You can buy instructional manuals at the bookstore and use them to teach your dog new tricks. You can scour the countryside looking for passive-aggressive Demon Doors and coaxing them to open. You can use your fame to pose for statues or hire yourself out as a freelance mercenary. Fable II is huge.

If it's skeletal and glowing, it probably wants to kill you.

One of the main criticisms of the game is the length of the main quest, and I admit it can be blown through pretty quickly is that's all you set your sights on. But if you take the time to explore, this is a fulfilling experience that doesn't intimidate with its possibilities in the way that a ludicrously dense game like Fallout 3 or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion does. Fortunately, the mechanics of Fable II make participating in the life of the game all the more enjoyable. All combat is mapped to three buttons--one for melee weapons, one for ranged weapons, and one for magic. By collecting experience orbs after defeating enemies, you can upgrade all three combat areas and learn new tricks. Mostly, different moves are controlled with timed button presses. A certain rhythm on the melee button will allow you to slash quickly, for example, while another rhythm will let you build up a slower, more powerful attack. The same principal goes for your ranged and magic buttons. Combat frustration is nearly destroyed by the fact that you don't have to worry about ammo or some arbitrary magic meter. If you have a musket, you can always shoot it, and if you know a fireball spell, you can always cast it. Maybe this makes combat too easy, but it also frees you to worry about nothing much more than having fun. Personally, I'll take the trade-off.

Most other activities in the game are built around that same foundation of simplicity. If you take a job cutting firewood for some lazy farmer, the activity itself it really nothing more than a timed, single-button minigame. But even these menial tasks become surprisingly addictive when you can then take the money you've earned and buy a house to rent out or a barbershop to manage or a new outfit to embarrass yourself in. Character customization is a major part of the game, and you can waste endless hours changing your hairstyle, losing and gaining weight, or seeing how convincing you look as a crossdresser.

One of the only areas where Fable II comes up short is in the morality department. One of Molyneux's unfulfilled promises about the Fable series (aside from the voodoo curse thing) is that you will be presented with a moral reality that forces you to not only make choices between good and evil but also to feel the consequences of those choices emotionally. This was never the case in the first Fable, and it's still a shortcoming in Fable II. Take the aforementioned Temple of Shadows, for example. Sure, it can be a little stomach churning to eat live baby chicks, but it's also hilarious. Same goes for sacrificing your new wife to the gods of darkness. You'll rack up a ton of "evil" points, but you won't lose any sleep over it. Partly because there's no lasting consequence in the game, and partly because your wife was only some floozy you picked up with a tacky diamond ring in a bar one night. You can have children in Fable II, but the problem is that you aren't forced to love them. Really, there is only one point in the entirety of the game where I really had a moral quandary, and it came so late that it couldn't impact the entirety of the experience. For the most part, the only motivation I had to be good or evil came from how I felt about my looks. If you're too evil, your eyes glow red, your skin loses color, and you start to grow a set of devil horns. I was fine with this until I couldn't go anywhere without a swarm of flies buzzing around my evil head, so I slashed the prices at all the shops I owned in order to gain some good mojo. This, by the way, is the only reason the owners of Walmart don't have devil horns.

In the art of fencing, this move is called le stabbe.

My only other gripe with Fable II has to do with multiplayer, but even that's couched in a compliment. You can only play with other humans in co-op, and it's the same online or off. At any time, a friend (or an enemy you want to keep close...) can join your game as your henchperson. They choose some generic body and follow you around, helping you murder and/or save people. It's just not very fun. There's nothing about the game that benefits from the extra help, and when you're playing online, you don't even get the cheap thrill of allowing your henchperson to enter your game with the same appearance and clothes from their own game. But, I do recommend that everyone play Fable II while online. As you're playing your game, you'll see little glowing orbs that represent other people playing their game. In other words, if you see an orb in a blacksmith's shop, that player is currently in the same blacksmith's shop in his or her game. It's no MMO, but it's almost as if there are thousands of alternate universes existing at once. Plus, you can talk to and exchange items with other players. Nothing makes the time slinging drinks for cash go by like chatting up some other hopelessly addicted soul who's doing the same thing. And there's nothing more amusing than wandering into a cave to hear a glowing orb begging you in the voice of a 12-year-old boy to tell him how to find a treasure chest. When the in-game sun goes down, I occasionally climb to the highest point I can find and just look out at all the orbs flitting about the world below. It's a little bit incredible.

The Game

Fable II is on my best of the year list for good reason. It's thoughtful, artful, detailed, and simply fun to play. This review is approaching novella length, and I haven't even mentioned several of the game's best qualities. The writing is superb, and the voice acting does it more than justice. With the bread crumb trail that can guide you from objective to objective, you can feel free to explore without ever fearing getting lost. Peter Molyneux isn't interested in making you like a game. He wants you to love it. And although all his promises have yet to be fulfilled, there's plenty to love about Fable II. Unless your voodoo curse has robbed you of the ability to love. In which case, there's always Fable III. (9/10)

The Time

Even though there's more than enough to keep you busy as long as you want, everything's partitioned enough for the short-on-time gamer to still feel included. Very few quests take an inordinate amount of time to complete, and you can always save whenever you want. And one advantage to a comparatively short main storyline is that you will eventually finish this game, and it's almost as satisfying as finishing a good book. (8/10)

The Verdict

Fable II surprised me. Not that I didn't expect to enjoy it so much, but because of the aspects of the game I enjoyed the most. This is the kind of game you keep playing over and over simply because you start to miss the world it's created. Plus, I hear if you grind up the disc and mix the powder with unicorn extract, you can create a paste that grants you the power of flight. I've yet to try that, though.