[X360] Fable II - 9NineBreaker9

*Sigh* I think writing this took longer than it took me to actually play Fable... >.<

Fable II​

​

"And you thought vampires had it bad..."​

Developer: Lionhead Studios
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Genre: Action RPG​

If there’s anything that games allow us to do, its that we can sink away, at least for a moment, into a world where we can be something greater than what we normally would be – an armor-clad scientist armed with a crow bar, an androgynous teenage amnesiac who needs to save the world, or… well, just some average Joe with a job. Perhaps the genre or type of game that best exemplifies this is the RPG, but not just every RPG – a role-playing game with a lot of choices and a system wherein your actions actually have an impact on what you do. Games do try this from time to time, and they usually don’t ever reach the expectations that they set out to break, but Fable II does something different. It actually gets pretty close.

As poor children in the slums of a great kingdom city, you don’t have a lot to do but dream – dream of what life could possibly be like inside that towering castle in the background. But when a trader comes to town with an assortment of strange goodies, things start to move in a better direction. You buy a trinket that grants one wish, and with that wish, you find yourself whisked away to the castle that dominates the skyline. Things, however, are not as they seem – it would appear as though you are Heroes, fantastical warriors and legends from days past, and Lord Lucien, the seemingly nice ruler of Bowerstone, cannot have that happen.

What sets out from this is a story that you can’t help but feel as if its trying to be the best it can. While it certainly doesn’t ever stretch into some sort of grandiose epic that leaves you in tears, Fable II attempts to do that at just about every turn. While it starts out as endearing and gives you a nice revenge-based plot that everyone can get behind. But, much as things that try so very hard to do something that they obviously are not (my attempt at epic reviewing notwithstanding), it eventually just gets annoying and off-putting unless you’ve already gotten in the roller coaster cart that is the attempt at toying with human emotions.

WHAT!? BUT THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE! ...and very stupid, to boot.​

At every turn, something bad is going to happen. Not just forgetting where your keys are bad, but suspiciously mundane events that you can see are trying to get you to be moved. Death seems to be a underlying cause of motivation in the land of Albion, but it’s hard to get moved when characters seem completely flat and unmemorable. It doesn’t help that everything is in no way surprising and the outcome of the entire story is more or less predictable if you have so much as an inkling as where your morality generally ends up in any type of medium.

Still though, with all of this seriousness, one would expect there to be a lack of humor. Well, Fable II is anything but laugh out loud funny – almost every single aspect of the game is driven to make you laugh somehow, if it’s from the only slightly blunt sexual advancements of people, the over-the-top expressions you can perform, or just the random musings of characters as you pass by them. From the intro onwards, Albion remains one of the most humorous worlds I’ve ventured, if oftentimes for the wrong reason.

Perhaps the most important aspect of both the story and the entire game is the that of the morality of your character. Even on the box art, it’s apparent that you’re going to make the choice to be either good or evil (with the possibility of “neutral” coming down to switching up your evil/good actions). Are you going to sell those slaves or free them? Are you going to enact someone’s revenge or provide them calm? Are you going to turn down some of the more entertaining aspects of the game or throw caution to the wind and do whatever comes to mind? These questions and many more must be answered by you, the player, as you complete the story.

Playing the Lute makes you good. Being dressed as Master Chief makes you a fanboy.​

I’ll say it simply – being a good character is really quite boring. Abiding by every single law and coming to the aid of anyone works out to be extremely slow and without obvious reward other than a possible warm and/or fuzzy feeling from being the good guy. In being good, you get to turn down easy financial gain, do things the hard and lengthy way, and get to have a spouse. Beyond this, I couldn’t see any benefits of doing thing the “nice” way. I tried the first time around, and it wasn’t all that enjoyable. Prancing about like a hippie-type is only fun for so long.

Being evil, however, is unanimously and ridiculously entertaining. Well, I at least believe so, having found not a soul (and I’ve tempted a lot of souls) who found the virtuous, divine route to be better. In being evil, you get to make easy money, do whatever you want and come to control basically everything by roaring for minutes at a time. And the sad thing is that it’s a hell of a lot easier to be demonic than it is to be good – everyone is scientifically engineered to be as annoying as possible, all outcomes from your evil actions tend to outweigh their good counterpart (except the lack of a spouse), and it’s fun in an extremely sinister way to waltz into town and, well, go to town.

What is not entertaining is the cost at which you may or may not be having all of your fun in Albion. This time around, you don’t earn money from slain enemies, or from most of the quests you finish – you must instead take up a job. An actual, factual, manual labor job. Three of these are timing minigames, while the rest are simple combat exercises. While this sounds really cool in theory, making the world more realistic, it doesn’t make it in any, way, shape or form enjoyable – it’s really quite a pain in my rear section to have to literally put my nose to the grindstone, or more aptly, the anvil, to make money. It wasn’t as if you made all too much money in the first game, so I see no reason as to why making money is so difficult.

There are also pub games, but those seriously suck. And some of the best stuff in the game comes from these stupid little games. I <3 Lionhead.​

Oh, wait, making money still remains quite easy. Thanks to a stroke of brilliance, every single piece of property, from simple stands to entire castles, can be purchased by yours truly. What makes this brilliant is that you make money off of this property – not every real day, not every virtual day, but every five minutes of actual time, meaning that you can really start to rake in the dough, even if you aren’t actually playing the game. Once you start to buy up property, it becomes a landslide, defeating the entire “scarcity” of money. But I must say that owning castles is a great deal of fun.

Still though, in opposition to the first Fable title, the actions you take have a greater impact on the world as a whole. Actions within the tutorial stage of the game can transform the slums you grew up in into a prosperous sect of the village or an even greater slum, which is actually quite nice – it forces you to actually think about how you could change the world by making choices that, at the time, seem minute. But, as ten years pass between the tutorial and the outcome of the slums, anything that you do now won’t have any extremely obvious outcomes, unless you chose the “RAZE THE VILLAGE” option.

However, both similar to the first game and unlike this review, Fable II is short. Really. Really. Short. You can simply blow through the main campaign in less than a day if you wanted to, and finishing up most of the side quests (treasure hunting and jobs aside) doesn’t take much more than a week or so – I’ve finished up a vast majority of quests in just a simple rental. There’s always more to see in the game world, and I’m sure a plethora of downloadable content will extend playing time, but, as it stands now for someone who’s just playing the game for the fun of it and not looking to become completely obsessed with owning everything or having the best family, you’ll see most of what Fable II has to offer within a week of heavy play.

I don’t think this has anything to do with the story, but I’m pressed for pictures. You'd think that there'd be better pictures for this game. There are not.​

This is another rather mute complaint, but also something that I feel needs to be raised – everything is entirely black and white. There are good people, then there are bad people. There is no gray areas, which I would love to have (I’m neutral), but it also means that you can’t ever expand upon your actions for some truly devious or devout moments. In other morality-based games, such as Jade Empire or Mass Effect, you can start out being good on a quest, but then turn around and completely screw everyone over – in Fable II, you either help someone or you don’t, kill someone or join in the killing. It doesn’t ever feel like you’re doing something miraculous or devious, but you’re just doing what you could probably already figure out simply by listening to the quest description.

The only good thing about the story is the fact that Fable II allows you to create your very own. There are a number of things you can do outside the main storyline to fashion your own character, chief of which is that of a family. You can find someone you like, woo them, marry them, and start to have children together. It’s endearing to have a little one running around your feet singing your praises, and it’s little moments like this that make everything melt away and let you become one with your character. That, however, is the extent of immersion, as most everything else is designed to bring any attempts at losing yourself to Albion’s vastness.

Perhaps the least immersive thing about the world is those who inhabit it. It would appear as if these people could be three-dimensional and dynamic when you first start playing the game – they can find you charming, cute, hideous or scary, depending on your actions, and everyone seems to have a sort of schedule that they follow about the day. If we weren’t for the fact that you can bend anything and anyone to your will within five minutes through your expressions, little actions that you can perform, such as “Dance” or “Bloodlust Roar” that can make people think about yourself, as they are of godlike usefulness. To make someone fall in love with you, all you have to do is dance three to four times. To make someone not like you, just yell at them. It doesn’t even matter that some people like serious or humorous expressions, as that just takes off a couple of points for whatever factor your expression is supposed to alter. The fact that every damn person in Bowerstone Market loves me and wants to sleep with me and/or marry me is just an example of how easy it is to make people think what you want them to.

(stupid big pictures) Look how easy is to make an ass out of yourself on Fable. Fall on your butt and everyone loves you. Oh, what a world…​

Hell, it’s not even hard to bring people to their doom. I spend an hour sacrificing people, and it was like sending lambs to the slaughter – just dance, ask to follow, warp, murder, rinse, repeat. The fact that I’m growing horns and wearing the robes of the cult that does knowingly kill everyone has no effect on their thoughts. These people aren’t dynamic, human, or in any way interesting – they’re random names attached to models that mock my sense of style.

While not related directly to the story, a great addition to the game as a whole is that of the glowing trail. Presented as “a trail of bread crumbs”, it is a light that leads you constantly on to your current objective. This is an excellent alternative to a compass, providing you with the route to where ever you want to go, as you can set this trail to quests, sales, jobs and most anywhere else, but also letting you explore elsewhere, always ensuring that you can find your way out. While it may freak out every once and a while, it’s a nice little element that you’ll come to enjoy, as it doesn’t just point through the mountains and wish you good luck.

Right – the story is largely filler and the people of Albion are cardboard-cutouts. What’s left for the world? Well, the entire world is at your fingertips, and this does not disappoint. It does everything but disappoint.

That day, John saw the true face of his god – it wasn’t pretty.​

Albion is a large place – while the world is partitioned into sections, each individual area is large in and of itself, meaning that areas are expansive enough without ever seeming too large, as Oblivion and Mass Effect often did, giving you the world and making exploring it a royal pain. There’s also a lot to be had in each area, ranging from buried goodies to hidden treasure chests, from traveling merchants to bandit ambushes – areas seem very alive, being full of activity and places to just run about. While not every area enjoys total freedom, with some places and dungeons being downright linear “Point A to Point B” affairs, roaming about these areas is pretty fun, just to see what lies beyond those hills or trees. Exploring is also made a lot more easy, as you can now vault over small ledges, jump from one ledge to another, or dive into the water below – this makes things feel even more open, especially when compared the original Fable, where getting stuck on tiny fences was a major pain.

That is, if you can see everything – the camera does a pretty good job as showing you the countryside, but it oftentimes does too good a job, getting stuck behind trees or other objects that hinder your view. Moving the camera is easy enough, but it oftentimes gets hitched at the most unfortunate of times, such as in battle, making things randomly disappear in favor of looking at those pretty rocks.

Another little creature that will show you Albion is your dog. Yes, your dog. Your lovable, immortal, eternal, pouch that will follow you until you die (and even then, he’ll follow you). Your dog does it’s best to not only show you the world, pointing out treasures (helpful), digging spot (annoying) and enemies (helpful), but also by being adorable. Some of the time. I’m not one to feel Sir Molyneux’s “unconditional love” that this dog is apparently supposed to impose, but I feel that it’s annoying, more than anything. It doesn’t actually help in combat and only rarely points out treasures that are not in plain sight, so it’s only there for some “fuzzy” factor. I’m more concerned as to how it lives for at least twenty years and can’t ever die than how much I love it.

Speaking of combat…

See spot run! Go spot, go! No, I don’t want to dig. Shut up, you pest. Start mauling foes. No, they’re not knocked down, do it anyways. What, you’ve been shot, slashed and blown up, and now you have a hurt paw? Sucks to be spot, you impervious, invincible, immortal piece of unconditional love.
​

There’s little else to call this but excellence. Fable the first was a buggy button mashing affair. Thankfully, Fable II completely ditches this old form to create a combat system that feels fluid, active, and just downright awesome. Killing beetles has never been this much fun.

Combat is mapped to three buttons, each attack form limited to just one single button – melee attacks are initiated with the X button, ranged attacks are volleyed with the Y button, and magic is flung about with the B button. While it takes a bit of getting used to, having all actions confined to just one tiny little press, once you do get in the groove of things, it becomes excellent, able to create impromptu combos and chains of slashes, shots and spells with no effort.

Not that combat takes little effort – Fable II is notably challenging. If you don’t spend the four types of experience you earn – Strength for melee, Skill for ranged, Will for magic, and general for general ownage – you’ll find yourself dying quite frequently, as if that were an actual punishment for being defeated. Death gives you one singular scar on your body (which I have yet to find) and lifts you right back up into the fray. Sure, you lose any experience you haven’t yet absorbed, but this is hardly a penalty for dying. Maybe it’s nice to not lose everything for losing, which you may make a habit of, but it also means that you can throw caution to the wind and just go to town on everything, which is the best aspect of Fable II.

Fable II – now with 34% more Internet, er, Earth Trolls!​

Combat is a blast. It’s fast paced, in-your-face action that leaves you constantly moving, constantly adapting, and constantly on the defensive as you wail away on your foes. Melee combat is fluid, especially once you learn the powerful flourish technique that can send foes flying, ranged combat is powerful fun (even more so with headshots), and magic becomes a useful mechanic for all characters, thanks to each spell being refined immensely over the hodgepodge of useful spells and idiotic ones found in the first Fable. I must say that the arena is the most fun I’ve had in a game in a long, long time, especially with a brand new repeating crossbow, cleaver, and magic spell to try out.

Unfortunately, the combat is not without its flaws – as everything is mapped to one button, it can become extremely difficult to do exactly what you want when you begin adding blocking, manual aiming, and new levels of spells into the mix. How long you hold X and where you point the control stick determines your actions, or it as at least supposed to – you’ll very oftentimes find yourself attacking once instead of charging a flourish or blocking, find your rifle aiming very slowly or shooting at nothingness as the targeting system struggles to keep up, move to change your spells when you just wanted to cast one, and run when you want to do a dodging role while dodging when you want to run. While it still does have its flaws, the combat of Fable II remains on of the most entertaining things about the entire game…

… entertainment that does not stop at parties. Thanks to both local and online multiplayer, you can have a friend jump into your game at literally any point you want, meaning that you can bring a buddy along if you ever feel things are getting to hard or too lonely. While, locally, created players are unbalanced and welcomed to any weapon they want (should they lack a Hero on their profile), and online friends might just be able to breeze you through the game, it’s a nice touch that allows everyone to see exactly the world you’ve created for yourself… to promptly wreak havoc upon your family.

Wait, this is Fable, right? Okay, thanks, I’m sure I was playing Oblivion there for a second…​

This combat is aided immensely, as is everything else, by Fable II’s downright amazing visuals. From the opening cutscene on, Lionhead creates an astounding visual masterpiece in almost every single aspect – the architecture is amazing, colorful and vivid; spells are bright and truly magical; weather effects are a sight to behold; the setting of the sun and the moon is simply beautiful, and the animation of everything remains fluid and lifelike throughout the entire game. There are moments where I’ve put down the controller and just looked at what has been created, gaping at just how magnificent of a world Fable II weaves – it may not be the most immersive world or the most finely tuned, but it certainly is one of the most detailed, diverse, and visually inspiring universes in the video game industry to date.

Well… when it goes right. The visuals of Fable II, as well as everything else, is glitch prone. No, it transcends prone – it’s glitch happy. Animation will sometimes skip up, momentarily dropping models through the ground or throwing them into walls and doors; characters, most notably yourself, are quite easy to get stuck somewhere; graphics will oftentimes not complete rendering entirely upon moving to an area, giving you an atrocious figure while the game struggles to finish everything, and, most notably, random spikes of atrocious, killer, game-halting lag that makes you look at the Xbox and ensure that it still exists and didn’t just explode. While all of these are not game-breaking, they’re extremely annoying and, seeing as how long the game has been in production, you might have thought that they would be gone. I could go on about more of these glitches, but just look at any forum on the game, and you’re sure to find people breaking the game in one way or another…

The audio of Fable II is done well enough. The voice acting, while entirely British, is very well done, and there certainly is a lot of it – people will comment on your looks, your actions, your magic, and most anything else that is possible. It’s actually pretty interesting to see just how many comments exist in the world, but as most of those are aimed at your dress, they grow annoying very quickly. Sound effects are nothing out of the ordinary, but they thankfully are not bad. As far as the soundtrack goes, it’s nothing that you haven’t seen before – while it is well done and will stick in your head, the entire music scene is filled with a chorus, so tunes can oftentimes grow annoying, though the annoyance thankfully comes after playing the game for a very long time.

Bad mustache and pointy nipple alert.​

All in all, Fable II is a hard one to let go – while it may keep on telling that same war story over and over again, what with the people dying all around and how fun it was at the same time, you can’t help but giggle at it, if only because it tries so hard. But when it really comes down to it, Fable II is an action-packed ride that leaves you wanting more… unfortunately, that “something more” is a longer, better story. But thanks to a really quite amazing combat system and the utterly magnificent visuals that can leave you literally amazed at how it’s even possible, Fable II is always welcomed back into our homes, even if it does throw up all over itself every now and again.

Presentation, 8/10: Menus still remain slow and clunky, but they’ve gotten a bit more streamlined over the first Fable. Everything is legible and explained in easy-to-understand terms, as it very well should be, though I’m still confused as to what exactly STDs do to my character.
Graphics, 9/10: While the world that Fable II exhibits is a masterful piece of work, ranging from amazing architecture, fantastic spells, and fluid animation, the chance for it to get completely messed up is so frequent that you’ll see people clipping through buildings and pillars, albeit very beautifully.
Sound, 8/10: The audio of Fable II is well done, giving you a variety of orchestral numbers and a large voice acting library. However, after you’ve heard an angelic chorus for the fifteenth time, they start to get on your nerves, and there are few to no acts that remain memorable.
Gameplay, 7/10: If I said it once, I’ll say it again – the story is not only short and black and white, but full of itself. The characters are not dynamic as one might think and events are in no way surprising or out of the ordinary. Combat, on the other hand, is a riveting experience that leaves you wanting of it.
Replay Value, 7/10: Seeing as how you must beat the story three times to see all three endings, the amount of replayability is high, at least in that regard. However, once you’ve beaten it as a character of opposite morality of your first, there really isn’t much to go back for – you might want to just play it again anyways, mostly to just be playing it, but doing something out of relative boredom doesn’t constitute another play in my book.

Total Score, 39/50: Fable II is in no way a bad game, just an underwhelming one. It doesn’t really feel as if it does anything new or particularly grand – I’d say the most fun I have is just unloading five shots into something in a second, in slow motion. I did not become attached to my character, to my family, or to the dog, even though that’s what the game set out to do. I’m glad that I’ve played this game, and it will always be welcomed in my library of games, but it might just be there not because it’s the BEST GAME EVAR, but if only because I simply needed to play one of the most anticipated games of the year.

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TRY AND GET YOUR COMBAT MULTIPLIER EVEN HIGHER. YOUR HEALTH IS LOW. YOUR HEALTH IS CRITICAL! COME BACK TO THE HEROES GUILD FOR MORE QUESTS.

We all love you, Peter. Please shut up now.​

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... my hands hurt...

 

Nice review, I can't wait to get Fable II now!

 

I dislike you 9NineBreaker9. Just kidding, amazing review as usual, can't wait to get a 360 to play this. Rough score for a game Microsoft was pumping up so hard.

 

Fun game! Was a shame it was so short though....
If anyone needs gold though let me know I have way more then I will ever need.
179,982 gold income over night. Just got on.
*Checks log book*
"Total Money Earned 4,314,076"
Worth at least a rental, I'm somewhat glad I didn't buy the game because money in real life is a bit tight, just have been borrowing it from my neighbor.

 

Wow, another amazing review. Good work. My reviews look terrible compared to yours. I'm serious when I say I can see you writing reviews professionally.

Game looks and sounds pretty fun, albeit the nuances you mentioned. I doubt I will get an XBOX but still have hopes it will eventually be ported to the PC. Just a question mate, which I didn't seem to get any clarity on whilst reading the section, the dog follows you and stays alive throughout the entire time you are playing? Is it designed that it is imortal or just something they didn't think through?

 

It's a "hero dog". So it somehow survives.

 

Yeah, I've been pretty excited about it ever since the first Fable was so "bad". Me, I though it was fun, but whatever XD

Always keep in mind that it's just one opinion in the huge expanse that is the Internet. It's still a very good game, but it certainly is not perfect, and I'll be the first one to call it out on that. I think that, at least from what I've seen, that my review is a bit more on the negative side of things, seeing as most everyone calls it a "9" or a "10". But that's not to say that it isn't a good game, it just has it's issues, as all games do. I've yet to find anything that's perfect.

That's what I did - I rented it. I returned it last night, and I don't think I'll be playing it for a while, now. If I ever wanted to pick it up, I'm sure that someone around me has it. But I have the advantage of going to a "nerd" school, too =3

Thanks for the compliment - I'm certainly considering doing reviews for a living, but I'm more so concerned about how I could actually ever get into that. My dream is to be a designer, the sort of job that Molynuex has, creating the backbone of the game but not exactly programming or doing the models and stuff. Anyways.

The dog stays alive for as long as your hero is alive, and as there are several story elements that span ten years each, that means that your dog, who is already fairly mature when you first see him as a child, stays alive for at least 20 years. It's not a complaint or anything, just a humorous note.

^ What he said. He can be attacked indefinitely and won't ever die entirely, but just becomes "wounded". You can heal him or just ignore him, but he'll find you.

He'll always find you.

 

I'm going to get this sooner or later. I think this is your longest review yet. Another topnotch quality game from Lionhead (Black and White etc.)

 

I think it's my longest yet, too 0.o

I haven't gotten my hands on Black and White yet, surprisingly, but I did play The Movies, and I thought that it was a lot of fun, if only because the movies that you make are so God awful... most of the time. There were a few that were patched up that were somewhat decent, but, even at that, seeing the strange sexual antics of submarine-bound people and the following mutiny never grows old.

... and on a completely unrelated note: OMG DEAD SPACE! YES~! SHE IS MINE~!~!

 

lol. Lucky bastard. You better review it

 

Great game but man, how did you get the master chief outfit. Was shocked when I saw it in that screenshot

 

Collectors edition gives you a code you enter to get that armor, a Spartan Laser Sword and an extra dungeon.

 

I would, but I'm too busy playing it =3 (beat it once, working on second playthrough)

What Loony and Rhith said - it's a part of the special/limited/collector's editon of the game... though, I do remember a few people being all up in arms over some of the stuff that was in that now being available to everyone. If that means that you can now buy it from the online store, download it as part of an update it, or get it from playing some of the flash games on Fable II's main website, I dunno, but, then again, I don't have a tendency to recall correctly very much XD

 

Thats odd mine is a collectors edition. All i got is a code for free fable pub games.

 

Huh. I dunno what all it was supposed to have come with, so I can't help you thar...

Oh, look, it's a Seph! *takes pictures like rabid tourist*

You very well could call Fable II an expansion pack - I mean, it pretty much is the same thing as Fable the First. But I think it improved over a lot of the things that the first game had wrong with it, chiefly the combat. I've gotten a tad addicted to the combat this time around, and, overall, I think that it's done well enough...

... but that's just me. One of my friends has beaten the game about five times now, while another one couldn't stand it at all. But, hey, people are reading, and, thankfully, on these wonderful forum things, people can leave comments, and that's something I enjoy. I write these things because I just like to, and if other people like them, cool beans. If people buy the game... well... cool beans for Lionhead.

 

im might be getting fable2 for xmas

nice review keep it up

 

I got Fable 2 and I hated it, personally I think it's sh-... shihizzle...

 

I also disliked Fable II, waste of my money.