Fable 2
Well, a new Fable game has been out in stores now for some time, and Peter Molyneux has been flapping his gums about all the fabulous things about Fable 3, so naturally my mind went back to the complete and utter wreckage of a series known as Fable 2, and I've decided to review it. Ironically, the Fable games have long been associated, much more with the personality of Mr Molyneux himself than with anything from, you know, the games themselves. His grandiose visions, obsession with AI systems and broken promises are notorious and intimately linked to the Fable games, to the point that his name is a common one for gamers (Seriously, you have 60 seconds to name three other game devs). And those visions, AI systems and broken promises are rife within Fable 2, creating an unappealing, messy, complete train wreck of a game.
In all seriousness, I consider Fable 2 as an example of a truly terrible game, a game that took a quirky setting and a promising idea and screwed it up, with little to nothing redeeming about it. It's not just a disinteresting game, it's not just a boring game, this is a game that makes me angry. It actually makes me angry playing it, seeing all trace of decency and promise washed away by the waves of poor decisions and terrible gameplay choices, made and directed by Peter Fucking Molyneux.
Be warned that this is going to be a very long review. If you want a tl;dr summary, you?ll find one at the bottom.
First off, in the interest of being a fair reviewer, I'll start this review proper with some of the things that Fable 2 managed to get right. The combat system is a unique, interesting, and simple way to kill your enemies. Having a single face button tied to your melee, ranged and magic attacks each was a unique idea, and having the different combat styles that you pull off tied to the timing and duration of the button presses, allowing you to switch quickly between all three combat types within a single encounter. It's a nifty idea, and while I was at first sceptical, playing it has really convinced me of its value. It is not, however, perfect (more on that later).
Another thing that I liked was the way the game creates an atmosphere. Events taking place in a graveyard overrun by spirit-possessed corpses are grey and foggy, with a spooky mist and leering cemetery architecture. A dangerous ocean highway is dark, bleak and rainy. The tomb of a notorious bandit is dark, claustrophobic and menacing, with ambient sounds of dripping water and mysterious noises, and a fertile town is bright and cheerful. Overall, the sound direction is pretty good generally, especially in the more spooky segments, and the battle music that plays doesn't break the mood at all, using tense, menacing pieces. The only real problem with the music is that it only has about one or two bright, happy themes, so if you spend much time in the happy cities, you'll quickly get sick of it. Mind you, having a halfway decent soundtrack and ambiance is expected these days, so this is more of an averted fail than a win.
You got that? I did think that some things were good, and I freely admit that. However, the few glimmers of competency in this swill bucket of a game are quickly swamped by the sheer mass of bullshit and failure. There is so much for me to be angry about.
Firstly and most importantly, the thing that takes all concept of pacing and adventure and breaks it over its knee, the thing that destroys all enjoyment in sustained gameplay, is the fucking loading. The loading times for Fable 2 are biblical. None of the environments of the game are streamed in any way, they are all loaded when you enter them. Now this is nothing new, and perfectly acceptable, but the problem is most of the stages are tiny. In the cities especially, you can run from one side of the map to the other in under twenty seconds. Bowerstone, the main town of the Fable universe, is comprised of four segments, all of them ridiculously small. And you know what the kicker is? From most of the entrance/exit paths, you can see where you just were! You actually have a sightline to the place where you exited the other map! You spend twenty or thirty seconds loading a new area that begins three feet from where the other one stopped! Some of the areas in the game are bigger (although not by much) so there is no reason why this town couldn't be a single area! Literally all you would have to do is stitch the entrances and exits together! Also, while most of the 'in between' stages between major towns are larger (improving somewhat at least from the original Fable's habit of creating literally one 50 meter corridor of forest after another) they are all depressingly narrow and linear.
Similarly, and probably the reason that the maps are all so small, is the fact that Fable 2 is probably the game with the poorest use of the Xbox 360's hardware ever. It's not graphically impressive for the time, (especially considering that the enormous landscapes of Assassin?s Creed had been out for a year by this point), there are never that many elements onscreen at any one time and some of the effects are pretty bad, but the game still often stutters and the amount of loading required for a tiny garden area is ludicrous. The use of the 360's power is so bad that there is even lag in the fucking menu screen! Yes, I can even ***** about the goddamn menu! For the first time that I have ever seen in any game, the menu screen actually lags for a significant amount of time from using an item to just scrolling down the menu! I have no idea how you manage to do that intentionally, much less as the product of trying to make a good game!
Actually, let's ***** about the menu some more. While it was a good idea to give 'Clothing' and 'Weapons' their own separate sub-menus, the 'Quests', 'Jobs', 'Sales' and 'Regions' sections (which control your currently selected destination as well as the fast-travel system) are all buried within separate submenus two layers down! Plus you can get a LOT of stuff in your 'Items' section, and having to scroll down through them all, slowly and with the aforementioned menu lag, is annoying as shit. There is no ability to create quick-use slots, and the contextual menu, while automatically selecting the potion or food that will get you closest to max health as possible, doesn't take into account your preferences as to what you eat. In fact, it seems to go out of its way to sabotage your eating style. Want to stay slim? Don't worry, the game will throw as many pies and fattening cheese at you as possible. Want to remain a pure eater? Have no fear, because the game will automatically send corrupting alcohol and meat your way.
Next, one of the biggest things that Mr Molyneux has a hard-on for, and one of the things that he trumpeted most strongly, was the artificial intelligence that maintained the social dynamics of the towns. The people go about their lives, react to your actions and appearance, can fall in love with you, be scared or repulsed by you, depending on the decisions you make throughout the game. This is without a doubt the biggest joke and most laughable feature of the game. People react to your every decision and treat you accordingly, eh Mr Molyneux? Bollocks. In my game, I played as a mass-murdering, selfish, exploitative, downright petty dick, and people were still madly in love with me, solely because my character was wearing a corset. Apparently cleavage forgives all sins.
What makes this even more laughable is that as you perform evil and corrupt acts, your character's appearance is corrupted as well, to the point that your skin cracks with black crevices and you grow demon horns. Plus, if you put much experience into magic, your character gains blue glowing lines all over their body, which gets REALLY noticeable. You can even almost light your own way through caves. Let me reiterate that. People were falling in love with my two-meter-tall, demonic, grey-skinned, glowing-eyed, devil woman with black demon horns no less, with an eldritch street map inexplicably emanating from her body because she was wearing a corset and a fancy hat!
Even after I slaughtered an entire village, people were still lining up to try to get into bed with me, men and women. So what, being evil automatically makes you into some sort of succubus or incubus? Ah whatever. Some people will comment about your evil deeds though, so this can lead to some actually pretty funny instances where people will overlap their voice loops, alternately damning me for my evil deeds and praising my snappy fashion sense.
Another thing about the AI society is how absolutely meaningless it all is. You do have some freedom with what you want to do. You can kill house owners to lower prices, you can marry almost anyone you want to, you can be straight, gay or bi, have children, spoil your kids, redecorate the house to make them happier, all sorts of things. The big question. Why do I care? Why should I bother? What point is there to this? What do I get for indulging in this exercise? The answer? Items. Occasionally useful items. Sometimes items that you'll just sell. Very rarely, you may even get a nice gem or something to sell for quite a bit of gold. Well ain't that just dandy Mr Molyneux. You know how else I can get a similar item?
By going outside and following my dog to dig a fucking hole!
Why by Satans trousers would I go through the whole process of romancing a person, no doubt spending a lot of money on gifts and a wedding ring, not to mention buying a fucking house, just to be pleasantly surprised when I occasionally get a gift from my fucking family that isn't a worthless piece of shit gift that's worth less than a haircut?
I cannot stress enough how pointless the social dynamic aspect of Fable 2 is. It's all for its own sake. Nothing you do has any consequences whatsoever. No action of yours, no matter how saccharine or foul, has any emotional connection or any sort of meaning whatsoever. There are only about three different character models for each gender of citizen in the entire game, so even if you do go around trying to sex up the local inhabitants, you're going to walk smack bang into three exact clones of your ludicrously accented husband or wife on your way to get the morning paper. The inhabitants of Albion are so literally cookie-cutter and meaningless they might as well not exist. At least then they might not get in my way or keep proposing my 7-foot, muscle-clad, mass-murdering, demonic ass. It's almost cute how hard the game tries to make you give two-tenths of a shit about its meaningless little inhabitants. For example:
There's a mission very early in the game that has you seduce and break the heart of a villager that had spurned their fiancé. Since I was playing a female character, the villager in question was a guy called Alex. Alex was a dopey fuck who passively stood there while I flexed my arms and whistled in his face, until he decided that I was, indeed, the perfect woman for him.
Leaving aside the fact that this took literally less than a minute because the citizens of Albion are more easily led than the Germans in the 1930s, he then went into a speech about all his regrets about spurning his last lover and his decision to love me forever, with an undying, unconditional love worthy of fucking Twilight. I was then given the option to instead marry Alex and not break his heart, since of course I was emotionally invested in a character who I had talked into marriage and undying love in the course of a single in-game lunch hour. Are you fucking kidding me? What did I have to look forward to? The rest of the game of Alex either gushing about his love for me or bitching about the furnishings of the house I'd bought, all the while expecting me to pay for his unemployed ass, not knowing my original plan was to curb-stomp his heart so badly that Satan would hi-five me? I could not hit that 'No' button fast enough.
What made this sequence even more awfully hilarious and hilariously awful was that much later in the game, long after I had shattered Alex's heart and caused him to jump off a cliff in despair (off-camera of course, because it's not like we wanted this game to have any sort of emotional resonance or anything) I encountered him again in Bowerstone! It was the exact same character model, same face, same hat, same clothes, and he even had the same voice! Way to completely obliterate whatever shallow pretences to player action consequences your shitty tech-demo of a game had, Mr Molyneux!
In short, the citizens of Albion are nonentities, metaphorical planks of wood with googly-eyes stuck on to get in your way or proposition you with business deals, quests or sex. Remember that village that I glossed over massacring? That's not actually an exaggeration. I literally went to town on the dopey fucks that populated that nonsensically laid-out place, putting men, women, monks and chickens to my axe, blasting them with fireballs and magically conjured blades and perforating them with my pistol. Sure, it was part of a mission, so that gave me the motivation to actually do something for a change, but I really had at them with a sadistic glee. And you know what? It was deeply satisfying. It was relaxing. It was fun. It was cathartic. It was stress relief. An act of horrific mass-murder, set up as a crowning act of evil was so emotionally detached that it was relaxing. It was a way to get back at the citizens of Albion, with their annoying ad nauseam repetitions and stupid accents. It was a permissible little pocket dimension that welcomed your efforts to brutalise innocent men and women as a way to relieve the stresses that the rest of the game gives you. I have never seen a game more emotionally bankrupt in my entire life.
Speaking of bankrupt, the economy of Albion must have regressed a bit since the original Fable. Where that game had a pretty complex supply/demand model of in-game economics, in Fable 2 prices are constant, changed only by the storekeepers? opinion of you and occasional sales and shortages, details of which are beamed straight to your map, stock market style. Sure, the original version wasn't perfect, and there were plenty of ways that an enterprising merchant could make theoretically unlimited money, but it gave a sense of a dynamic economy that you could have an effect on. Buy cheap, sell dear, find the merchant with the best prices. In Fable 2, you just hoard all the shit that you find until you're told about a shortage and fast travel there, where you flog it all.
Also adding to the simplified nature of the economy is the logic holes that exist within it. If a shopkeeper likes you, or is afraid of you, they give you a discount when you buy. Fair enough. If you buy the business, you get a discount when you buy. Makes sense. Why then do these discounts for being liked and for owning the place mean that when I try to sell my stuff, I get less money? If they like me, shouldn?t I get more?
And speaking of money, another addition is the ability to buy and rent out houses for extra income which is collected every five real-world minutes. Now in a normal adventure game, this would be an excellent feature. Earn money while questing? Great! The problem is that there?s fuck all to do with your money. Yes, you do have to buy your weapons, but you can buy the best weapons available within the first few hours, and after that there's no point to it at all, besides buying consumables like potions and the like. The only use I had for the ludicrous amount of money I was being given every few minutes was to buy more houses, but that only gave me more money! Also, the game actually counts time that passes outside the game, even when it?s switched off! So you can log back in tomorrow and get thousands upon thousands of gold for not playing the game! What sort of motivation is that, to be rewarded for not playing the game?
Also, the other (initial) way to earn money is to take jobs. While I can see this working in theory, they?re all just the same, tired, repetitive minigame that bores you out of your mind almost instantly. Added to that is the bizarre gaps of logic that went into the jobs system. Bartending is one of the best jobs, since it's easy and predictable and you can rack up a huge combo bonus. But that?s the thing. Successfully do the job for long enough, and you get rewarded with a gold multiplier. But then you manage to get paid insane amounts of money for very trivial things. Take bartending. Like I said, it?s easy to get a huge multiplier, so you often have instances where the barman is paying you 500 gold to pour a beer! What sort of insane business strategy is that?
A baffling omission from the last game is the lack of a map of any sort of map. There?s a 'Regions' section in your menu, but all it does is give you the option to fast travel. The graphic is so small and coloured so badly that it's impossible to use as a map. The lack of a mini-map in the interface is instead replaced by a golden 'bread crumb' trail that leads you to your destination. While this could work in theory, the lack of any supplementary map leaves you dependant on a system that bugs out constantly. It bugs by disappearing mysteriously while you're in an unexplored area (which might be more than an inconvenience if the maps weren?t so fucking linear), registers the destination of a quest to somewhere that is obviously not and stubbornly refuses to look for the actual destination, and leads straight through impassable terrain and winds bizarrely around in perfectly flat and straight places. It's a horrid game mechanic that constantly reminds you that you're playing a game that is not very well programmed.
Your dog, that furry little metal detector of yours, isn't much better. While he is very useful in helping you find treasure, his pathfinding is horrendous, even worse than the bread crumb trail. He will regularly get stuck in scenery and refuse to back out of it, or get stuck in a pathfinding loop and go in circles ad infinitum. Not a lot else to say about him though.
Also, the various monologues that get spoken to you (I can't call it dialogue, because just like in the last Fable game, your character can't fucking talk, for no reason whatsoever) suffer from poor programming, since gaps in between voice clips are huge yawning chasms of silence. I'm actually mystified about how no one thought that it would be a good idea to fix this. So you get hilarious instances of characters that stop speaking to be interrupted by characters that only start speaking several seconds later. It means you can't be immersed within this world at all, even assuming you could get over the comical look of the citizens of Albion.
Another thing is that the controls are not implemented very well. Walking is stiff and inexact, and while they don't come up very often, there are certain circumstances (mostly involving doorways) that make manoeuvring very difficult and clumsy. And this is where the problems with the combat system that I foreshadowed crop up. Because of the reliance in combat of holding buttons down and so on, there's often a problem where pressing a button during an animation won't be registered. It crops up often enough to be very noticeable, but infrequently enough not to break the combat experience. I can't think of a way to make this complaint funny, so let's move on.
Now, you?re probably thinking to yourself, "Well, he's bitched about this game for 6A4 pages now, the things he's bringing up after the major complaints of the loading and social AI are pretty minor, he must be getting ready to wrap up now."
Ooh, you underestimate the loathing I feel for this game.
Right now, I want to talk about the BIGGEST, shoddiest, most crap-tastic, utter failure of this game.
The story.
(Before I start, I do understand that story isn't an important aspect for some gamers, but for a game that really flouts how great its story is, a Role Playing Game no less, and something that Mr Molyneux kept ranting on about the story, one should expect . . . a fucking story!!!
Be warned, this section will be very long, and will contain some major story spoilers. I'll spoiler-box a few of them, but ultimately I?m going to rip the story open . . . and rip it a new one.)
The story for this game is a literary failure on so many levels. It is blighted with countless instances of convenience and coincidence stacked up on each other like the Leaning Tower of Pisa made out of jelly. It leaves gaping plot holes, the things that are explained are explained with bullshit, and it sucks all enjoyment out of the player, assuming they weren't already trying to figure out a way to hang themselves with a wireless controller. Let me explain:
So you start as a street urchin in Bowerstone with your sister. You buy a magic box and use it to make a wish, only to be taken up to Castle Fairfax to meet Lord Lucien, the stupidly evil antagonist for this evening. He discovers that you and your sister are Heroes (capital 'H' necessary for reasons to be explained later). So what does he do? He shoots you and your sister in the face, tosses you out a huge tower and disappears. And you survive. That is the exact chain of events. You are shot by a gun from point-blank range, fall out the window of a gigantic tower, crash into a roof with an impact that suggests that you break your fucking spine and hit the ground as a broken bag of bones. And you survive. But it's okay, because apparently Heroes can survive falls that would break the bones of lesser people. How do we know this? The fucking loading screen tells us as it was loading the castle. Oh, well that explains everything. Seriously? They wrote themselves into a plot hole, and the only way they could find a way around it was with a fucking loading screen text hint? Fuck this game.
Alright, now's about a good a time as any to talk about this. Apparently in Albion, Heroes are not normal people, but instead the ability to harness magic is within the blood of certain individuals that can be passed along genetically. So apparently Heroes in Albion are less characters who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self sacrifice for some greater good of all humanity, and more the Master Race. I've always had a problem with this notion of heroism, that it somehow only comes to certain people, regardless of effort or circumstance. It's a particularly lazy literary trope that seems to assume that only certain people can be the ones to change history, and it's because they're somehow inherently superior, rather than because of the efforts that they make or the struggle they endure. I've always preferred stories about the everyman thrust into a position of heroism because of circumstances and proving themselves through courage and determination and a just cause. To be fair, this is more of a personal preference, since this is consistent with the mythology of the Fable series (from what I've been told), but it still bugs me.
So then you're taken in by a gypsy woman called Theresa who nurses you back to health and sends you out to avenge your sister, right a wrong, save the world, blah blah blah, you get it.
Those of you who played the original Fable may remember Theresa from the first game. How bullshit is it that the wise seer you meet is the sister of the last Fable Hero? Why was it necessary to put her in this game? Why did they feel the need to link the two games together? A grand interconnected narrative . . . this ain't.
"I shall be your Gandalf for the evening." - Shamelessly stolen from the Nostalgia Critic
The plot after this can best be summed up as you searching for three other Heroes that encapsulate the ideals of Heroic combat of Strength, Skill and Will. This aspect is the least filled with holes, but it does throw into relief the stupidity of the various time-consuming sidequests that the idiotic inhabitants of Albion throw at you. I mean, at any one time, your support group (i.e. Theresa) is the one giving you directions and instructions, and she not only knows the locations of at least two of the three Heroes, but also has some glossed-over ability to track them using the power of the fucking Force or something. Why doesn't the Hero just get the fuck on with it and round them up post-haste? Admittedly there are relatively few instances where the game outright instructs you to go and do citizens' laundry or something, but the entire premise of the plot is totally at odds with what you're 'supposed' to do in a Fable game. Your mission is clear, your precise goals are known and available from the beginning, but you insist on dicking around doing pissy little favours for insipid townspeople. It makes no sense.
So you go to find the Hero of Strength, a big lumbering ox of a woman who actually looks fat rather than strong, named Hannah, but is nicknamed 'Hammer' for no adequately explained reason. Gee, I wonder if this is foreshadowing, or will come up again in an ironic way. Hannah (I refuse to call her Hammer, because it's as stupid and contrived as it sounds) is a stressed ball of tension and adventuring spirit locked within a monastic order of pacifists and holier-than-thou pricks. The question arises why this obviously violent and free-spirited woman with a world-view completely at odds with that of the order is part of it to begin with, but it's a fairly small niggle. So Hannah the Henna-Haired Harridan finds that adventuring is more her style (after obligatory personal tragedy of course. We had to find a way to insert clichés in here somewhere) and becomes (groan) Hammer, joining you, a person she's never met with a motivation she doesn't know, on your quest to avenge a personal tragedy she can't relate to, with a woman she can't trust, to fight a villain she's also never met, who wields a power she cannot fathom. Wait, why is she doing this again?
Moving on, you have to find the Hero of Will, the magic-using archaeologist called Garth. Again, Theresa knew exactly where he is, but because of the constant dicking around that went on, what with getting townspeople medicine for their sniffles and so on, you arrive only to witness his capture by agents unknown. Except that since this is a crappy story, everybody knows it's Lucien?s doing. Why the hell did he wait until now?
Then, for some badly explained reason, you have to find Lucien's diary, which is conveniently in the possession of his manservant. Coincidentally this servant is selling the diary to the highest bidder at that exact moment. You pay him and find the diary buried underneath a troll you have to fight (how the hell did the fucking butler get it there?), helpfully enough located about fifty feet from the fucking entrance to your goddamn hideout! You see what I mean about coincidence piled upon convenience piled upon bullshit? So, quick recap, Lucien keeps his personal diary on his butler for safekeeping, who keeps it buried underneath a troll for safekeeping . . . riiight.
So after getting the much sought after diary of a controversial madman that happened to contain the key to the fate of the world and everything from the Enlightenment equivalent of ebay, the shitty plot railroad lurches sickeningly into motion once again. Turns out you have to go and fight in the Crucible, an Arena-like place, because, you know, this game wasn't trying hard enough to be Fable 1 all over again, in order to get into the employ of Lucien, who has Garth. Turns out Lucien is rebuilding an ancient structure from the 'Old Kingdom' called The Spire that will grant him a wish. You become a guard in his service in order to infiltrate and save Garth.
You spend ten fucking years in the spire (even though it's not reflected at all in gameplay), which is stupid on many levels, but mainly because you find Garth in a cell in the second week of you being there. Apparently you were just twiddling your thumbs and hoping that someone else would do everything for you. What makes this even stupider is the fact that you're seen to be put in charge of prisoner cells, alone, with full access to the various systems of the cells within the first few months. You were never made to stand watch over the cell block that Garth was in? So we're meant to believe that the main character never attempted to proactively find a way to break Garth out? The guy who is needed to help save the world and exact your vengeance?
Eventually Garth frees himself and grudgingly asks your lazy ass for assistance in escaping, since he used all his power overcoming the anti-magic-field-generator-kit stuck to him and you. That raises another question too. As part of your guard's uniform, you?re instructed to wear a collar that you can't remove that tortures you if you disobey an order. Okay, fair enough. But this also has the effect of completely negating your magical abilities. Okay, I call bullshit on this. It's been established that Heroes are considered extinct, and that magic use is extraordinarily rare. Why then does Lord Lucien make all his guards wear a device, one of the primary functions of which is to suppress the use of magic? Did he think that this precise situation would happen? That his organisation would be infiltrated by the one magic-user he is aware of as a threat to him, so he makes every single person in his employ wear a prohibitively expensive and functionally specific device? Well if he was on the lookout for me, maybe he should have checked the new recruits for the eight-foot tall horned demon woman with blue glowing lines all over her skin!!!
So you free Garth, exact petty revenge on the people who exploited you and leave the spire, curiously not trying in any way to locate and kill Lucien, but whatever. You slice some dudes up, create havoc, blow up some shit, you get the picture.
So you escape, nobody wondering where you'd been the last ten years or anything, and you get right on to find the Hero of Skill, like nothing has happened. Well guess what? Nothing did fucking happen! Funnily enough though, the first thing that happened to me after getting back was that I was arrested for the aforementioned town slaughtering thing. Okay, it was a big deal, but after ten years the authorities are still eagerly pursuing the person who literally dropped off the face of the earth without a trace for ten whole years? Either this is the most watchful police authority ever, or this is a programming oversight. I'm going to guess the latter.
So you find out that the Hero of Skill is a ludicrously awesome pirate king called Reaver and he- Wait a minute. Wait a fucking minute. Is that- YES! Reaver is voiced by STEPHEN FRY!!! Holy shit! How awesome is that? It?s Stephen Fry, possibly one of the funniest, most wonderful men alive. Wow. Having him voice a complete asshole is also very strangely satisfying, hearing what that amazing voice of his could sound like voicing a totally amoral sociopathic monster.
. . . hmmm? Where was I? Oh, right, shitty game.
So Reaver gives you some sort of talisman that he wants you to deliver to a friend of his. Turns out that Reaver has made a pact with supernatural beings, and it's a trap designed to age you drastically so that Reaver can have eternal youth and beauty. Luckily a young woman was accidentally teleported to the exact same place, so you can foist the talisman off to her. So this encounter served only to establish a minor character point and create a gaping plot hole.
So Lucien double crosses Reaver for trying to double cross you (don't worry Mr Fry, I forgive you!) and Reaver leads you outside, where the other Heroes and Theresa teleport in. You fight a giant floating stalactite and Reaver reluctantly joins your party.
So now you use the power of the three Heroes to do . . . something. It's implied that they transfer their powers to you, but there's literally no indication of what the hell happened. The magical thingummy leaves everybody paralysed with pain. What, so being struck down repeatedly with an axe means that I just get back up again in a second, but this is what brings down the mighty heroes? So fucking stupid. So Lucien shows up with a handful of the guys that I've been beating up for about three hours by this point, and says that he's taking the other Heroes.
Then he shoots your dog. Apparently this was supposed to be a big deal. Up till now all he was was a big fuzzy metal detector who managed to severely annoy me with his fucking barking and consistently fail to navigate even the simplest path. Kill the fucking dog, I don't give a shit.
Lucien then shoots you in the fucking face at point blank range. This doesn't kill you, of course, but merely sends you into a dream world of a perfect environment where you're young again, your sister is alive, and apparently you have parents. Now, I?m a sucker for that sort of dream-world surrealism, but the game fucks it up by making you run around shooting bottles and kicking chickens. Why? It does get better when you leave the farmyard and the perfect environment morphs into a hellish vision of death and destruction. Unfortunately it isn't very confronting, because the game doesn?t 'play tricks' with your perception, but just dumps a few bodies and fires in your path. An unfortunate missed opportunity.
So going through this . . . vision thing . . . you find the magic box mcguffin from the start of the game. You then wake up again, alive, with the magic box in your possession. What the fuck?!
How the fuck did I get it? I was shot and in a hallucination wandered a peaceful farmyard before finding this thing among broken bodies and burned possessions, and woke up again with it? What, was it through the power of love or something? For that matter, how the fuck am I still alive? When it happened for the first time, I gave the game the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I was just shot in the shoulder and was healed by Theresa, and as for the fall, Heroes can survive drops that would kill lesser mortals dontcha know. But this? I was shot point blank in the face and was only dropped into unconsciousness. Not only that, the villain had ample opportunity to just shoot me again while I was lying unconscious, or chop my head off, or something of that nature. Didn't he learn anything from the last time he shot me?
Right, so anyway, now that you have the magic box you travel to the spire again to confront Lucien. The box then turns into a full blown dues ex machina, neutralising Lucien's powers, (I wasn?t aware that Gun and Henchmen were special powers) leaving him at your mercy. You can then kill him with a single blow. WHAT THE FUCK?! Oh, but it gets better. After you have him at your mercy he monologues to you about your actions blah blah blah. After he goes on for a bit though, up out of nowhere, Reaver shoots him and kills him instantly! I was waiting for him to finish his spiel so I could get to some end-boss goodness, but apparently not. Then there?s some trite dialogue, you get a choice of rewards (all of which are unbelievably pointless) and that?s it.
The game is over.
So wait, you mean that floating stalactite was the final boss? The thing that I fought like twenty minutes ago? That was the final enemy of the game? Yup. Fuck this game.
But you can keep playing the game of course, since the shittiness can't end there. "Just because you've completed the main story, that doesn?t mean that there?s any reason to stop playing" the loading screens tell us. Yes. Yes it is. It is in fact a wonderful place to stop playing. In fact, before you even started would be a good place to stop playing. Not only that, playing on doesn't make any sense from a narrative standpoint. If you were good, your ultimate goal was to stop the madman from destroying the world. You did that. Job done. If you were evil, your motivation was (I think) to take revenge for your sister and yourself. Not that there was ever much of a motivation for an evil character. You?ve done that. The man who killed your sister is dead. What else are you going to do?
Ultimately, Fable 2 is a terrible, terrible, foul, anticlimactic, irritating, disappointing, poorly programmed, sloppy, stupid, vapid, bullshit, wretched, blight of a game. It's not only not fun, it's a game that makes you angry playing it. It makes you suffer to play through it. Ultimately, however, the best way to sum up the game comes not from me, but from the game itself.
One of the enemies, the Banshee, demoralises you with words, calling you out on your biggest fears and inadequacies and failures, but if you spend long enough time around her, she'll offer this gem of wisdom.
"Think about all the endless hours you've wasted playing this game. And for what? Nothing!"
And that is the best way to sum up this game.
Well, a new Fable game has been out in stores now for some time, and Peter Molyneux has been flapping his gums about all the fabulous things about Fable 3, so naturally my mind went back to the complete and utter wreckage of a series known as Fable 2, and I've decided to review it. Ironically, the Fable games have long been associated, much more with the personality of Mr Molyneux himself than with anything from, you know, the games themselves. His grandiose visions, obsession with AI systems and broken promises are notorious and intimately linked to the Fable games, to the point that his name is a common one for gamers (Seriously, you have 60 seconds to name three other game devs). And those visions, AI systems and broken promises are rife within Fable 2, creating an unappealing, messy, complete train wreck of a game.
In all seriousness, I consider Fable 2 as an example of a truly terrible game, a game that took a quirky setting and a promising idea and screwed it up, with little to nothing redeeming about it. It's not just a disinteresting game, it's not just a boring game, this is a game that makes me angry. It actually makes me angry playing it, seeing all trace of decency and promise washed away by the waves of poor decisions and terrible gameplay choices, made and directed by Peter Fucking Molyneux.
Be warned that this is going to be a very long review. If you want a tl;dr summary, you?ll find one at the bottom.
First off, in the interest of being a fair reviewer, I'll start this review proper with some of the things that Fable 2 managed to get right. The combat system is a unique, interesting, and simple way to kill your enemies. Having a single face button tied to your melee, ranged and magic attacks each was a unique idea, and having the different combat styles that you pull off tied to the timing and duration of the button presses, allowing you to switch quickly between all three combat types within a single encounter. It's a nifty idea, and while I was at first sceptical, playing it has really convinced me of its value. It is not, however, perfect (more on that later).
Another thing that I liked was the way the game creates an atmosphere. Events taking place in a graveyard overrun by spirit-possessed corpses are grey and foggy, with a spooky mist and leering cemetery architecture. A dangerous ocean highway is dark, bleak and rainy. The tomb of a notorious bandit is dark, claustrophobic and menacing, with ambient sounds of dripping water and mysterious noises, and a fertile town is bright and cheerful. Overall, the sound direction is pretty good generally, especially in the more spooky segments, and the battle music that plays doesn't break the mood at all, using tense, menacing pieces. The only real problem with the music is that it only has about one or two bright, happy themes, so if you spend much time in the happy cities, you'll quickly get sick of it. Mind you, having a halfway decent soundtrack and ambiance is expected these days, so this is more of an averted fail than a win.
You got that? I did think that some things were good, and I freely admit that. However, the few glimmers of competency in this swill bucket of a game are quickly swamped by the sheer mass of bullshit and failure. There is so much for me to be angry about.
Firstly and most importantly, the thing that takes all concept of pacing and adventure and breaks it over its knee, the thing that destroys all enjoyment in sustained gameplay, is the fucking loading. The loading times for Fable 2 are biblical. None of the environments of the game are streamed in any way, they are all loaded when you enter them. Now this is nothing new, and perfectly acceptable, but the problem is most of the stages are tiny. In the cities especially, you can run from one side of the map to the other in under twenty seconds. Bowerstone, the main town of the Fable universe, is comprised of four segments, all of them ridiculously small. And you know what the kicker is? From most of the entrance/exit paths, you can see where you just were! You actually have a sightline to the place where you exited the other map! You spend twenty or thirty seconds loading a new area that begins three feet from where the other one stopped! Some of the areas in the game are bigger (although not by much) so there is no reason why this town couldn't be a single area! Literally all you would have to do is stitch the entrances and exits together! Also, while most of the 'in between' stages between major towns are larger (improving somewhat at least from the original Fable's habit of creating literally one 50 meter corridor of forest after another) they are all depressingly narrow and linear.
Similarly, and probably the reason that the maps are all so small, is the fact that Fable 2 is probably the game with the poorest use of the Xbox 360's hardware ever. It's not graphically impressive for the time, (especially considering that the enormous landscapes of Assassin?s Creed had been out for a year by this point), there are never that many elements onscreen at any one time and some of the effects are pretty bad, but the game still often stutters and the amount of loading required for a tiny garden area is ludicrous. The use of the 360's power is so bad that there is even lag in the fucking menu screen! Yes, I can even ***** about the goddamn menu! For the first time that I have ever seen in any game, the menu screen actually lags for a significant amount of time from using an item to just scrolling down the menu! I have no idea how you manage to do that intentionally, much less as the product of trying to make a good game!
Actually, let's ***** about the menu some more. While it was a good idea to give 'Clothing' and 'Weapons' their own separate sub-menus, the 'Quests', 'Jobs', 'Sales' and 'Regions' sections (which control your currently selected destination as well as the fast-travel system) are all buried within separate submenus two layers down! Plus you can get a LOT of stuff in your 'Items' section, and having to scroll down through them all, slowly and with the aforementioned menu lag, is annoying as shit. There is no ability to create quick-use slots, and the contextual menu, while automatically selecting the potion or food that will get you closest to max health as possible, doesn't take into account your preferences as to what you eat. In fact, it seems to go out of its way to sabotage your eating style. Want to stay slim? Don't worry, the game will throw as many pies and fattening cheese at you as possible. Want to remain a pure eater? Have no fear, because the game will automatically send corrupting alcohol and meat your way.
Next, one of the biggest things that Mr Molyneux has a hard-on for, and one of the things that he trumpeted most strongly, was the artificial intelligence that maintained the social dynamics of the towns. The people go about their lives, react to your actions and appearance, can fall in love with you, be scared or repulsed by you, depending on the decisions you make throughout the game. This is without a doubt the biggest joke and most laughable feature of the game. People react to your every decision and treat you accordingly, eh Mr Molyneux? Bollocks. In my game, I played as a mass-murdering, selfish, exploitative, downright petty dick, and people were still madly in love with me, solely because my character was wearing a corset. Apparently cleavage forgives all sins.
What makes this even more laughable is that as you perform evil and corrupt acts, your character's appearance is corrupted as well, to the point that your skin cracks with black crevices and you grow demon horns. Plus, if you put much experience into magic, your character gains blue glowing lines all over their body, which gets REALLY noticeable. You can even almost light your own way through caves. Let me reiterate that. People were falling in love with my two-meter-tall, demonic, grey-skinned, glowing-eyed, devil woman with black demon horns no less, with an eldritch street map inexplicably emanating from her body because she was wearing a corset and a fancy hat!
Even after I slaughtered an entire village, people were still lining up to try to get into bed with me, men and women. So what, being evil automatically makes you into some sort of succubus or incubus? Ah whatever. Some people will comment about your evil deeds though, so this can lead to some actually pretty funny instances where people will overlap their voice loops, alternately damning me for my evil deeds and praising my snappy fashion sense.
Another thing about the AI society is how absolutely meaningless it all is. You do have some freedom with what you want to do. You can kill house owners to lower prices, you can marry almost anyone you want to, you can be straight, gay or bi, have children, spoil your kids, redecorate the house to make them happier, all sorts of things. The big question. Why do I care? Why should I bother? What point is there to this? What do I get for indulging in this exercise? The answer? Items. Occasionally useful items. Sometimes items that you'll just sell. Very rarely, you may even get a nice gem or something to sell for quite a bit of gold. Well ain't that just dandy Mr Molyneux. You know how else I can get a similar item?
By going outside and following my dog to dig a fucking hole!
Why by Satans trousers would I go through the whole process of romancing a person, no doubt spending a lot of money on gifts and a wedding ring, not to mention buying a fucking house, just to be pleasantly surprised when I occasionally get a gift from my fucking family that isn't a worthless piece of shit gift that's worth less than a haircut?
I cannot stress enough how pointless the social dynamic aspect of Fable 2 is. It's all for its own sake. Nothing you do has any consequences whatsoever. No action of yours, no matter how saccharine or foul, has any emotional connection or any sort of meaning whatsoever. There are only about three different character models for each gender of citizen in the entire game, so even if you do go around trying to sex up the local inhabitants, you're going to walk smack bang into three exact clones of your ludicrously accented husband or wife on your way to get the morning paper. The inhabitants of Albion are so literally cookie-cutter and meaningless they might as well not exist. At least then they might not get in my way or keep proposing my 7-foot, muscle-clad, mass-murdering, demonic ass. It's almost cute how hard the game tries to make you give two-tenths of a shit about its meaningless little inhabitants. For example:
There's a mission very early in the game that has you seduce and break the heart of a villager that had spurned their fiancé. Since I was playing a female character, the villager in question was a guy called Alex. Alex was a dopey fuck who passively stood there while I flexed my arms and whistled in his face, until he decided that I was, indeed, the perfect woman for him.
Leaving aside the fact that this took literally less than a minute because the citizens of Albion are more easily led than the Germans in the 1930s, he then went into a speech about all his regrets about spurning his last lover and his decision to love me forever, with an undying, unconditional love worthy of fucking Twilight. I was then given the option to instead marry Alex and not break his heart, since of course I was emotionally invested in a character who I had talked into marriage and undying love in the course of a single in-game lunch hour. Are you fucking kidding me? What did I have to look forward to? The rest of the game of Alex either gushing about his love for me or bitching about the furnishings of the house I'd bought, all the while expecting me to pay for his unemployed ass, not knowing my original plan was to curb-stomp his heart so badly that Satan would hi-five me? I could not hit that 'No' button fast enough.
What made this sequence even more awfully hilarious and hilariously awful was that much later in the game, long after I had shattered Alex's heart and caused him to jump off a cliff in despair (off-camera of course, because it's not like we wanted this game to have any sort of emotional resonance or anything) I encountered him again in Bowerstone! It was the exact same character model, same face, same hat, same clothes, and he even had the same voice! Way to completely obliterate whatever shallow pretences to player action consequences your shitty tech-demo of a game had, Mr Molyneux!
In short, the citizens of Albion are nonentities, metaphorical planks of wood with googly-eyes stuck on to get in your way or proposition you with business deals, quests or sex. Remember that village that I glossed over massacring? That's not actually an exaggeration. I literally went to town on the dopey fucks that populated that nonsensically laid-out place, putting men, women, monks and chickens to my axe, blasting them with fireballs and magically conjured blades and perforating them with my pistol. Sure, it was part of a mission, so that gave me the motivation to actually do something for a change, but I really had at them with a sadistic glee. And you know what? It was deeply satisfying. It was relaxing. It was fun. It was cathartic. It was stress relief. An act of horrific mass-murder, set up as a crowning act of evil was so emotionally detached that it was relaxing. It was a way to get back at the citizens of Albion, with their annoying ad nauseam repetitions and stupid accents. It was a permissible little pocket dimension that welcomed your efforts to brutalise innocent men and women as a way to relieve the stresses that the rest of the game gives you. I have never seen a game more emotionally bankrupt in my entire life.
Speaking of bankrupt, the economy of Albion must have regressed a bit since the original Fable. Where that game had a pretty complex supply/demand model of in-game economics, in Fable 2 prices are constant, changed only by the storekeepers? opinion of you and occasional sales and shortages, details of which are beamed straight to your map, stock market style. Sure, the original version wasn't perfect, and there were plenty of ways that an enterprising merchant could make theoretically unlimited money, but it gave a sense of a dynamic economy that you could have an effect on. Buy cheap, sell dear, find the merchant with the best prices. In Fable 2, you just hoard all the shit that you find until you're told about a shortage and fast travel there, where you flog it all.
Also adding to the simplified nature of the economy is the logic holes that exist within it. If a shopkeeper likes you, or is afraid of you, they give you a discount when you buy. Fair enough. If you buy the business, you get a discount when you buy. Makes sense. Why then do these discounts for being liked and for owning the place mean that when I try to sell my stuff, I get less money? If they like me, shouldn?t I get more?
And speaking of money, another addition is the ability to buy and rent out houses for extra income which is collected every five real-world minutes. Now in a normal adventure game, this would be an excellent feature. Earn money while questing? Great! The problem is that there?s fuck all to do with your money. Yes, you do have to buy your weapons, but you can buy the best weapons available within the first few hours, and after that there's no point to it at all, besides buying consumables like potions and the like. The only use I had for the ludicrous amount of money I was being given every few minutes was to buy more houses, but that only gave me more money! Also, the game actually counts time that passes outside the game, even when it?s switched off! So you can log back in tomorrow and get thousands upon thousands of gold for not playing the game! What sort of motivation is that, to be rewarded for not playing the game?
Also, the other (initial) way to earn money is to take jobs. While I can see this working in theory, they?re all just the same, tired, repetitive minigame that bores you out of your mind almost instantly. Added to that is the bizarre gaps of logic that went into the jobs system. Bartending is one of the best jobs, since it's easy and predictable and you can rack up a huge combo bonus. But that?s the thing. Successfully do the job for long enough, and you get rewarded with a gold multiplier. But then you manage to get paid insane amounts of money for very trivial things. Take bartending. Like I said, it?s easy to get a huge multiplier, so you often have instances where the barman is paying you 500 gold to pour a beer! What sort of insane business strategy is that?
A baffling omission from the last game is the lack of a map of any sort of map. There?s a 'Regions' section in your menu, but all it does is give you the option to fast travel. The graphic is so small and coloured so badly that it's impossible to use as a map. The lack of a mini-map in the interface is instead replaced by a golden 'bread crumb' trail that leads you to your destination. While this could work in theory, the lack of any supplementary map leaves you dependant on a system that bugs out constantly. It bugs by disappearing mysteriously while you're in an unexplored area (which might be more than an inconvenience if the maps weren?t so fucking linear), registers the destination of a quest to somewhere that is obviously not and stubbornly refuses to look for the actual destination, and leads straight through impassable terrain and winds bizarrely around in perfectly flat and straight places. It's a horrid game mechanic that constantly reminds you that you're playing a game that is not very well programmed.
Your dog, that furry little metal detector of yours, isn't much better. While he is very useful in helping you find treasure, his pathfinding is horrendous, even worse than the bread crumb trail. He will regularly get stuck in scenery and refuse to back out of it, or get stuck in a pathfinding loop and go in circles ad infinitum. Not a lot else to say about him though.
Also, the various monologues that get spoken to you (I can't call it dialogue, because just like in the last Fable game, your character can't fucking talk, for no reason whatsoever) suffer from poor programming, since gaps in between voice clips are huge yawning chasms of silence. I'm actually mystified about how no one thought that it would be a good idea to fix this. So you get hilarious instances of characters that stop speaking to be interrupted by characters that only start speaking several seconds later. It means you can't be immersed within this world at all, even assuming you could get over the comical look of the citizens of Albion.
Another thing is that the controls are not implemented very well. Walking is stiff and inexact, and while they don't come up very often, there are certain circumstances (mostly involving doorways) that make manoeuvring very difficult and clumsy. And this is where the problems with the combat system that I foreshadowed crop up. Because of the reliance in combat of holding buttons down and so on, there's often a problem where pressing a button during an animation won't be registered. It crops up often enough to be very noticeable, but infrequently enough not to break the combat experience. I can't think of a way to make this complaint funny, so let's move on.
Now, you?re probably thinking to yourself, "Well, he's bitched about this game for 6A4 pages now, the things he's bringing up after the major complaints of the loading and social AI are pretty minor, he must be getting ready to wrap up now."
Ooh, you underestimate the loathing I feel for this game.
Right now, I want to talk about the BIGGEST, shoddiest, most crap-tastic, utter failure of this game.
The story.
(Before I start, I do understand that story isn't an important aspect for some gamers, but for a game that really flouts how great its story is, a Role Playing Game no less, and something that Mr Molyneux kept ranting on about the story, one should expect . . . a fucking story!!!
Be warned, this section will be very long, and will contain some major story spoilers. I'll spoiler-box a few of them, but ultimately I?m going to rip the story open . . . and rip it a new one.)
The story for this game is a literary failure on so many levels. It is blighted with countless instances of convenience and coincidence stacked up on each other like the Leaning Tower of Pisa made out of jelly. It leaves gaping plot holes, the things that are explained are explained with bullshit, and it sucks all enjoyment out of the player, assuming they weren't already trying to figure out a way to hang themselves with a wireless controller. Let me explain:
So you start as a street urchin in Bowerstone with your sister. You buy a magic box and use it to make a wish, only to be taken up to Castle Fairfax to meet Lord Lucien, the stupidly evil antagonist for this evening. He discovers that you and your sister are Heroes (capital 'H' necessary for reasons to be explained later). So what does he do? He shoots you and your sister in the face, tosses you out a huge tower and disappears. And you survive. That is the exact chain of events. You are shot by a gun from point-blank range, fall out the window of a gigantic tower, crash into a roof with an impact that suggests that you break your fucking spine and hit the ground as a broken bag of bones. And you survive. But it's okay, because apparently Heroes can survive falls that would break the bones of lesser people. How do we know this? The fucking loading screen tells us as it was loading the castle. Oh, well that explains everything. Seriously? They wrote themselves into a plot hole, and the only way they could find a way around it was with a fucking loading screen text hint? Fuck this game.
Alright, now's about a good a time as any to talk about this. Apparently in Albion, Heroes are not normal people, but instead the ability to harness magic is within the blood of certain individuals that can be passed along genetically. So apparently Heroes in Albion are less characters who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self sacrifice for some greater good of all humanity, and more the Master Race. I've always had a problem with this notion of heroism, that it somehow only comes to certain people, regardless of effort or circumstance. It's a particularly lazy literary trope that seems to assume that only certain people can be the ones to change history, and it's because they're somehow inherently superior, rather than because of the efforts that they make or the struggle they endure. I've always preferred stories about the everyman thrust into a position of heroism because of circumstances and proving themselves through courage and determination and a just cause. To be fair, this is more of a personal preference, since this is consistent with the mythology of the Fable series (from what I've been told), but it still bugs me.
So then you're taken in by a gypsy woman called Theresa who nurses you back to health and sends you out to avenge your sister, right a wrong, save the world, blah blah blah, you get it.
Those of you who played the original Fable may remember Theresa from the first game. How bullshit is it that the wise seer you meet is the sister of the last Fable Hero? Why was it necessary to put her in this game? Why did they feel the need to link the two games together? A grand interconnected narrative . . . this ain't.
"I shall be your Gandalf for the evening." - Shamelessly stolen from the Nostalgia Critic
The plot after this can best be summed up as you searching for three other Heroes that encapsulate the ideals of Heroic combat of Strength, Skill and Will. This aspect is the least filled with holes, but it does throw into relief the stupidity of the various time-consuming sidequests that the idiotic inhabitants of Albion throw at you. I mean, at any one time, your support group (i.e. Theresa) is the one giving you directions and instructions, and she not only knows the locations of at least two of the three Heroes, but also has some glossed-over ability to track them using the power of the fucking Force or something. Why doesn't the Hero just get the fuck on with it and round them up post-haste? Admittedly there are relatively few instances where the game outright instructs you to go and do citizens' laundry or something, but the entire premise of the plot is totally at odds with what you're 'supposed' to do in a Fable game. Your mission is clear, your precise goals are known and available from the beginning, but you insist on dicking around doing pissy little favours for insipid townspeople. It makes no sense.
So you go to find the Hero of Strength, a big lumbering ox of a woman who actually looks fat rather than strong, named Hannah, but is nicknamed 'Hammer' for no adequately explained reason. Gee, I wonder if this is foreshadowing, or will come up again in an ironic way. Hannah (I refuse to call her Hammer, because it's as stupid and contrived as it sounds) is a stressed ball of tension and adventuring spirit locked within a monastic order of pacifists and holier-than-thou pricks. The question arises why this obviously violent and free-spirited woman with a world-view completely at odds with that of the order is part of it to begin with, but it's a fairly small niggle. So Hannah the Henna-Haired Harridan finds that adventuring is more her style (after obligatory personal tragedy of course. We had to find a way to insert clichés in here somewhere) and becomes (groan) Hammer, joining you, a person she's never met with a motivation she doesn't know, on your quest to avenge a personal tragedy she can't relate to, with a woman she can't trust, to fight a villain she's also never met, who wields a power she cannot fathom. Wait, why is she doing this again?
Moving on, you have to find the Hero of Will, the magic-using archaeologist called Garth. Again, Theresa knew exactly where he is, but because of the constant dicking around that went on, what with getting townspeople medicine for their sniffles and so on, you arrive only to witness his capture by agents unknown. Except that since this is a crappy story, everybody knows it's Lucien?s doing. Why the hell did he wait until now?
Then, for some badly explained reason, you have to find Lucien's diary, which is conveniently in the possession of his manservant. Coincidentally this servant is selling the diary to the highest bidder at that exact moment. You pay him and find the diary buried underneath a troll you have to fight (how the hell did the fucking butler get it there?), helpfully enough located about fifty feet from the fucking entrance to your goddamn hideout! You see what I mean about coincidence piled upon convenience piled upon bullshit? So, quick recap, Lucien keeps his personal diary on his butler for safekeeping, who keeps it buried underneath a troll for safekeeping . . . riiight.
So after getting the much sought after diary of a controversial madman that happened to contain the key to the fate of the world and everything from the Enlightenment equivalent of ebay, the shitty plot railroad lurches sickeningly into motion once again. Turns out you have to go and fight in the Crucible, an Arena-like place, because, you know, this game wasn't trying hard enough to be Fable 1 all over again, in order to get into the employ of Lucien, who has Garth. Turns out Lucien is rebuilding an ancient structure from the 'Old Kingdom' called The Spire that will grant him a wish. You become a guard in his service in order to infiltrate and save Garth.
You spend ten fucking years in the spire (even though it's not reflected at all in gameplay), which is stupid on many levels, but mainly because you find Garth in a cell in the second week of you being there. Apparently you were just twiddling your thumbs and hoping that someone else would do everything for you. What makes this even stupider is the fact that you're seen to be put in charge of prisoner cells, alone, with full access to the various systems of the cells within the first few months. You were never made to stand watch over the cell block that Garth was in? So we're meant to believe that the main character never attempted to proactively find a way to break Garth out? The guy who is needed to help save the world and exact your vengeance?
Eventually Garth frees himself and grudgingly asks your lazy ass for assistance in escaping, since he used all his power overcoming the anti-magic-field-generator-kit stuck to him and you. That raises another question too. As part of your guard's uniform, you?re instructed to wear a collar that you can't remove that tortures you if you disobey an order. Okay, fair enough. But this also has the effect of completely negating your magical abilities. Okay, I call bullshit on this. It's been established that Heroes are considered extinct, and that magic use is extraordinarily rare. Why then does Lord Lucien make all his guards wear a device, one of the primary functions of which is to suppress the use of magic? Did he think that this precise situation would happen? That his organisation would be infiltrated by the one magic-user he is aware of as a threat to him, so he makes every single person in his employ wear a prohibitively expensive and functionally specific device? Well if he was on the lookout for me, maybe he should have checked the new recruits for the eight-foot tall horned demon woman with blue glowing lines all over her skin!!!
So you free Garth, exact petty revenge on the people who exploited you and leave the spire, curiously not trying in any way to locate and kill Lucien, but whatever. You slice some dudes up, create havoc, blow up some shit, you get the picture.
So you escape, nobody wondering where you'd been the last ten years or anything, and you get right on to find the Hero of Skill, like nothing has happened. Well guess what? Nothing did fucking happen! Funnily enough though, the first thing that happened to me after getting back was that I was arrested for the aforementioned town slaughtering thing. Okay, it was a big deal, but after ten years the authorities are still eagerly pursuing the person who literally dropped off the face of the earth without a trace for ten whole years? Either this is the most watchful police authority ever, or this is a programming oversight. I'm going to guess the latter.
So you find out that the Hero of Skill is a ludicrously awesome pirate king called Reaver and he- Wait a minute. Wait a fucking minute. Is that- YES! Reaver is voiced by STEPHEN FRY!!! Holy shit! How awesome is that? It?s Stephen Fry, possibly one of the funniest, most wonderful men alive. Wow. Having him voice a complete asshole is also very strangely satisfying, hearing what that amazing voice of his could sound like voicing a totally amoral sociopathic monster.
. . . hmmm? Where was I? Oh, right, shitty game.
So Reaver gives you some sort of talisman that he wants you to deliver to a friend of his. Turns out that Reaver has made a pact with supernatural beings, and it's a trap designed to age you drastically so that Reaver can have eternal youth and beauty. Luckily a young woman was accidentally teleported to the exact same place, so you can foist the talisman off to her. So this encounter served only to establish a minor character point and create a gaping plot hole.
So Lucien double crosses Reaver for trying to double cross you (don't worry Mr Fry, I forgive you!) and Reaver leads you outside, where the other Heroes and Theresa teleport in. You fight a giant floating stalactite and Reaver reluctantly joins your party.
So now you use the power of the three Heroes to do . . . something. It's implied that they transfer their powers to you, but there's literally no indication of what the hell happened. The magical thingummy leaves everybody paralysed with pain. What, so being struck down repeatedly with an axe means that I just get back up again in a second, but this is what brings down the mighty heroes? So fucking stupid. So Lucien shows up with a handful of the guys that I've been beating up for about three hours by this point, and says that he's taking the other Heroes.
Then he shoots your dog. Apparently this was supposed to be a big deal. Up till now all he was was a big fuzzy metal detector who managed to severely annoy me with his fucking barking and consistently fail to navigate even the simplest path. Kill the fucking dog, I don't give a shit.
Lucien then shoots you in the fucking face at point blank range. This doesn't kill you, of course, but merely sends you into a dream world of a perfect environment where you're young again, your sister is alive, and apparently you have parents. Now, I?m a sucker for that sort of dream-world surrealism, but the game fucks it up by making you run around shooting bottles and kicking chickens. Why? It does get better when you leave the farmyard and the perfect environment morphs into a hellish vision of death and destruction. Unfortunately it isn't very confronting, because the game doesn?t 'play tricks' with your perception, but just dumps a few bodies and fires in your path. An unfortunate missed opportunity.
So going through this . . . vision thing . . . you find the magic box mcguffin from the start of the game. You then wake up again, alive, with the magic box in your possession. What the fuck?!
How the fuck did I get it? I was shot and in a hallucination wandered a peaceful farmyard before finding this thing among broken bodies and burned possessions, and woke up again with it? What, was it through the power of love or something? For that matter, how the fuck am I still alive? When it happened for the first time, I gave the game the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I was just shot in the shoulder and was healed by Theresa, and as for the fall, Heroes can survive drops that would kill lesser mortals dontcha know. But this? I was shot point blank in the face and was only dropped into unconsciousness. Not only that, the villain had ample opportunity to just shoot me again while I was lying unconscious, or chop my head off, or something of that nature. Didn't he learn anything from the last time he shot me?
Right, so anyway, now that you have the magic box you travel to the spire again to confront Lucien. The box then turns into a full blown dues ex machina, neutralising Lucien's powers, (I wasn?t aware that Gun and Henchmen were special powers) leaving him at your mercy. You can then kill him with a single blow. WHAT THE FUCK?! Oh, but it gets better. After you have him at your mercy he monologues to you about your actions blah blah blah. After he goes on for a bit though, up out of nowhere, Reaver shoots him and kills him instantly! I was waiting for him to finish his spiel so I could get to some end-boss goodness, but apparently not. Then there?s some trite dialogue, you get a choice of rewards (all of which are unbelievably pointless) and that?s it.
The game is over.
So wait, you mean that floating stalactite was the final boss? The thing that I fought like twenty minutes ago? That was the final enemy of the game? Yup. Fuck this game.
But you can keep playing the game of course, since the shittiness can't end there. "Just because you've completed the main story, that doesn?t mean that there?s any reason to stop playing" the loading screens tell us. Yes. Yes it is. It is in fact a wonderful place to stop playing. In fact, before you even started would be a good place to stop playing. Not only that, playing on doesn't make any sense from a narrative standpoint. If you were good, your ultimate goal was to stop the madman from destroying the world. You did that. Job done. If you were evil, your motivation was (I think) to take revenge for your sister and yourself. Not that there was ever much of a motivation for an evil character. You?ve done that. The man who killed your sister is dead. What else are you going to do?
Ultimately, Fable 2 is a terrible, terrible, foul, anticlimactic, irritating, disappointing, poorly programmed, sloppy, stupid, vapid, bullshit, wretched, blight of a game. It's not only not fun, it's a game that makes you angry playing it. It makes you suffer to play through it. Ultimately, however, the best way to sum up the game comes not from me, but from the game itself.
One of the enemies, the Banshee, demoralises you with words, calling you out on your biggest fears and inadequacies and failures, but if you spend long enough time around her, she'll offer this gem of wisdom.
"Think about all the endless hours you've wasted playing this game. And for what? Nothing!"
And that is the best way to sum up this game.
