The ending is horrible.
I've got no problem with no big boss fight at the end. That's not the main failure of the game. Hell, I actually really liked taking out Lucien with one clean shot through the heart.
No, the big problem is that the whole ending is just so poorly written and un-cool.
The Great Shard fight is stilted. It's a chaotic mess but you don't have to try especially hard since there are so many people with plot immunity on the field.
If the hilltop scene was a movie it would get an F for cinematography -- oh, wait, is it a movie! You can't do anything but press left-trigger to change to camera 2! They just root you to one spot and force arbitrary restrictions on your camera, preventing you from even being able to check out the scenery as you're watching the glorified cutscene; that same cutscene are affected by Fable 2's weird audio system, which makes some of the characters very hard to hear because their voice is supposedly far away from the camera even though they're standing right next to YOU (and you can't even move the camera to correct this). I only know Hammer was talking because subtitles showed up.
Now, again, you're rooted in place again and Lucien shoots you. Having your dog save you was a great idea, but it takes the developers all of two seconds to piss away all of the potential of the idea away: Lucien just shoots you again. Great. Anything else would've been better at that point. Maybe there could've been a little fight. Maybe he could've used some magic to throw you off into the water and then drop a mountain onto you. Who knows! Anything would be better than just repeating the same scene again.
Then you get to the little thing with the house... Another not-necessarily-bad idea totally trashed by its implementation. Oh, there's Rose again! Isn't that great! But, wait, no, it's like a weird robot Rose. You can't meaningfully interact with Rose. Not even with the little emotes you use to interact with peasants. All of the "activities" she has for you are really tiresome. The whole area is full of static objects you can't interact with. Were they trying to show you some idyllic heaven? Why was it so flat and lifeless, then? The various Demon-Door areas were a lot more artful/creepy than the scenery here was. (I'll admit that casting me back in the body of the dopey kid didn't make me want to stick around, either.)
The little montage you get when you pick up the box was a nice touch, I thought. (Here I'd like to point out that Lucien dropping a mountain on you would've made more sense. Here he shot you in the face and... what? Did your body disappear? Did he bury you and then the magic box made you an all-new body, complete with a copy of that moldy carrot you've been carrying?) So then they put you back in the Spire and then there's an anti-climax. Wait, no! Bad writer! Think about it: this would be a great time to play up the isolation. Everyone you love is dead! You don't even have a dog! Lucien has won and will destroy the world! Et cetera! We just had a little montage about the pivotal events on your path to becoming the Big Damn Hero -- that means it's time for you to be the Big Damn Hero and do some Big Damn Heroic stuff. But the game cheats you of that. There's no journey to the Spire to face your foe.
Hell, at least give us a nice cut-through-the-mooks-to-get-to-the-bad-guy scene on the steps of the Spire. (If I were designing this part I'd be tempted to give the PC a big load of XP during the hilltop charge-up scene before Lucien shows up -- kinda like you got from standing on the magic hero circle way in the beginning -- and then I'd really pull out all the stops in the end fights.)
If you got all that other stuff right, you wouldn't even need to make Lucien into a special boss fight. Because the player would be so jazzed just from riding the Big-Damn-Hero train to get there that shooting Lucien in the face would feel right.
The final choice really brings out the worst parts of the game. In detail...
Sacrifice: I've met the people who built the Spire. They were braindamaged Sims like every other NPC in the game. They all looked and acted the same and whined at you incoherently. No emotional resonance. Plus, just think about the moral choice here... These people have all basically been worked and tortured to death. Are you going to bring them back as they were when they died and send a bunch of deeply psychologically scarred people back to families who have long since tried to move on? Are you going to create weird Stepford versions of all those dead people like they were ten years ago and send those back to their families?
Love: You get your dog back, which is the only one of these rewards that means anything at all. Also you don't have to give some other random peasant another wedding ring. That's basically it. The fact that my first wife just randomly disappeared halfway through the game didn't help, either. I was hoping that dying and being resurrected would somehow un-bug her. But, no. So I go back to my first family and there's still just a lone kid there. Such a letdown! Feh, guess that'll teach me to raise a family inside a goddamn Demon Door. Good thing you can marry more than one person.
Wealth: It's pretty easy (tedious, but easy) to get a million gold by this point. I bought a bunch of property, played some other game for a week because I was bored with Fable 2, then came back to find a million gold. There's nothing to do with that million gold except buy property, anyway. Maybe if there were ridiculously awesome super-expensive items to buy with that money. Or maybe if you could wish for awesome power and get a million gold and really badass weapon and an evil hat that makes everyone super-afraid of you or something... As it is, this reward is worthless.
These choices really show us that there's... well, there's not much to do in Fable 2. Money is pointless. Relationships are rather shallow and largely pointless. Even the dog doesn't do much.
The wrap-up after that wasn't too bad, I thought. Of course, it's another highly static cutscene. And you don't get to off Reaver (or at least fuck up his immortality trick) like I'm sure 90% of players were hoping to do. I thought the part that Hammer said was pretty good, thought -- unfortunately, it also really brings to light how weak the basic structure of the game is: you're her best friend but, throughout the whole game, you've had basically no ability to actually interact with her in a meaningful way. It struck me that there were many side-quest NPCs in a game like Jade Empire that I knew more about and had shared more of myself with than I did with Hannah through all of Fable 2.
So, the heart of the problem is that the ending was poorly implemented and somehow managed to emphasize the worst elements of Fable 2, leaving those freshest in your mind when the credits roll.
...
All in all, I had fun playing Fable 2.
But it was definitely a bad game.
-- Alex
