Fable II

"A relaxing and fun RPG experience."

Fable 2 is an action RPG game that was developed by Lionhead Studios and published by Microsoft. Fable 2 is the sequel to the original Fable, and much like the original, it received plenty of hype before its release, which is what I believe contributed to how poorly many people perceive these two games. Fortunately, I've never played the original Fable, nor have I followed this game's release to any extent, I simply rented the game and hoped for the best, so I'll judge the game on it's own merits rather than any sort of expectations I had before playing.

Story
The game starts you off in a medium sized town, set in a period of time long ago in the medieval ages, in the body of a little sized boy, that is standing by his sister. The little boy(you), and the girl(Rose), dream of being able to live in a castle they're gazing at off in the distance – Castle Fairfax. They walk around the town, and they notice a traveling salesman trying to pitch a bunch of garbage as magical items, and sell them. They dismiss the items, but a mysterious woman named Theresa nearby tells them that they should believe it, and thus they seek to buy the magical music box for 5 gold coins. For the next 10 or 15 minutes you are basically involved in a type of tutorial gameplay as you run around the town doing odd jobs like whacking beetles upside the head and chasing down lost papers for gold. Eventually you buy the magic box, and you go to the cliffside and turn the music box, make your wish, and the wish is granted. Once there, the King of the Castle figures out that you both are “heros” and decides to shoot you both to avoid having you ruin his great plan for world domination. Your sister dies and you go flying out of a window and plummet twenty stories down, where Theresa saves you. Ten years later, you wake up all of a sudden and swear your revenge, Theresa shows you how to get special hero powers, and thus the story begins. Altogether, I found it rather enchanting.

Gameplay
The gameplay tends to be very straightforward. Theresa guides you and gives you quests, and so do other people. Once you have these quests, a glowing trail magically appears below your feet, and you can follow it all the way to where you want to go(or fast travel to that location if you've been there before). On the way you'll encounter enemies such as thugs, beetles, a rip off version of a wolverine, hobbes, and etc. Once there, you'll do whatever you're supposed to do, going through the automated dialogue the game presents, and then follow the glowing trail back to where you came from. In some quests there will be ‘choices' you have to make, be they good or evil, but while those were nice, I felt like there wasn't any ‘real' choice. It seems like for the whole game, I am really just doing whatever the quest vendors would like me to do. There are no real consequences to anything you do in this game, which is a good or bad things, depending on who you are. If you kill an entire town full of people(which the game will actually allow you to do), there will be new store owners, citizens, and etc. If you die repeatedly, you spring right back to life with little to no penalty, which makes the game very arcade like. Despite the linear aspects of the game, the parts near the end are simply brilliantly orchestrated and fun to play.

The battle system is all real time, and you have three different skills to use at your disposal – Strength, Skill, Will. When you kill things, experience points pop out and you have to collect them by holding the right trigger. If it's experience from a kill, it's ‘general' experience, and can be used for anything. If it's experience for damaging it, it's the type of experience points that you used to do the damage, and can only be put in that skill. Basically, learning Strength skills help you hack things up with swords, Skill skills help you shoot things with crossbows, pistols, rifles, whatever, and Will skills help you blast things with giant balls of fire, lighting, etc, as well as slow time, or raise dead minions. The game can be rather challenging at first, as you scrounge around with the lowest possible health, with the worst weaponry, and none of the high end skills, which makes it rather fun. The fun starts to dissolve a bit once you're able to destroy an entire town full of people with a sneeze.

While most of the harder battles in this game are really fun to do, when they pit you against many enemies, the boss fights in this game are generally really frustrating. Instead of any genuine creativity with the boss fights, the developers of this game had the genius idea of “Let's give the bosses enormous amounts of health to hack at for a quarter of an hour”. Toss that in with the inability to actually die, and you have a boss fight that is no more than a mediocre grind.

Fable 2 can be beaten from start to finish in around 15 hours, if you play at a casual pace and don't screw around too much with sidequests and other things, or faster if you really are driving to the finish. When you finish the story, you're given three choices to make a “wish”, and then you're sent back to the main world to do whatever you please, such as finish side quests. One part of the game that I never particularly delved into, but is present in this game, is the life simulation aspect. The game allows you to interact with other people in the game via “expressions”, divided into categories such as rude, social, scary, flirty, and etc, to either make the citizens of the game like you, hate you, attracted to you, or whatever. If people like you, they'll be inclined to give you gifts, sell things cheaper, or even marry you. If you choose to get married in the game, you can have kids, however, I don't really see the point in any of it. You can also buy, rent out, and sell houses to make gold, but personally I never needed any extra gold to beat the game, so what exactly am I going to use this gold for? Buying more houses? I didn't see the point of expanding my wealth and fame after I already beat the game, just for the sake of it, so I played for around 10 minutes afterwards and then turned it off. If you enjoy sandbox games, then you may think differently, however, I didn't like it, though I'm not going to hold it against the game for trying to incorporate these things.

Presentation, graphics, sound
One of the strongest points of Fable 2 is it's stellar presentation, and amazing amount of charm that it has. The game's colorful graphics are amazingly well done, and really make the game enjoyable to play. I doubt I've seen more enjoyable scenery in a video game than what you will see in Fable 2. The sound is rather brilliant as well, being nearly flawless for the entirety of my playtime. The dialogue in the game is all fully voiced over, and well done, and you can see people milling around the streets that will say things to you. Altogether, it sets the scene very well. Everything in the game is easy to use, easy to access, and just brilliantly designed altogether, which is what makes some of the poorer aspects of the game worthwhile.

Multiplayer

The game has a multiplayer mode which allows a friend to join you in your world, or you to go to a friend's world. You can trade/give each other items/gold during this, also. You'll be able to run around with each other and do whatever you like, do quests, or anything that you could in normal single player. However, the camera view is quite abysmal and it's just not very fun to play with someone else in general. Fable 2 seems like a game meant for one player, so I steered away from the two-player aspect after my first encounter with it.

Conclusion

Altogether, Fable 2 offered around a week or so of gameplay(at a casual pace), for me, and I found it enjoyable. The story, setting, and gameplay were all rather charming, and the ending portions of the game were all very exciting. No parts of the game are either lacking, or overbearing, which makes for relaxing and fun game. It's certainly not perfect, and it could be improved in some ways, such as better boss fights.
If you're a hardcore RPG fan, you may dislike this game's easy-going nature, which caters to mostly gamers that are just in it for some casual fun. You may say the game is not deep enough, or long enough, but for me it was just the right length, and just the right amount of complexity. So, if you're looking for a casual action-RPG game to play, this is it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/04/08

Game Release: Fable II (US, 10/21/08)