Fable 2 has a lot to live up to. The first game was fun, but pretty flawed, and the promises it hefted into the sky were so unreachable that any downside of the game felt like a knife to the stomach. It should have been well known how impossible those feet’s were, but they were what was promised, and it wasn’t what was delivered. Lost Chapters came out to remedy some of the problems, but it introduced even more glitches, and just furthered the formula rather than expand on it.
Fable 2’s advertising and development campaign was far more low key, so expectations were low to begin with, which makes the game a delightful surprise.
You start the game as a lowly urchin in the streets of a big ol’ fantasy city. Your sister guides you through the events of the prologue which introduces you again to the idea of good and evil choices. Every introductory quest has a good way to complete it, and a bad way.
This introduces part of Fable 2’s split personality. You have an expansive array of choices, but they’re all black and white, good and evil. You can be a saint, or you can be a prick, there’s no third option to any choice like a game like Mass Effect, which skews morality into all sorts of shades of gray. Fable 2’s morality system is still as binary as the previous game. On the other hand, the game still keeps this in mind and tries to run with it. A choice you make as a kid will decide what the old town you grew up in turns into. Either it will slip into corruption and poverty, or it’ll become a lawful and peppy place.
Furthermore, there’s ANOTHER meter of choice in the game. Aside from good and evil, you also have purity and corruption. The second set of choices apply mostly to economics. For instance, I could have a hero fully on the side of good, but charge 100% more on rent on all properties that I own. The game would reflect this with character interactions, in that people would always know that I’d do the right thing… but for a price. Also, you could flip that around and be a super evil son of a bitch, but with max purity, meaning you have a very strict set of morals in your evil doing. Again though, it’s pretty binary, in that you have five or so options now of morality, instead of two or three.
The story of the game also isn’t really anything to write home about. It functions perfectly well as a means to string you to event and event, and some of the set piece moments are pretty well crafted, but the combat in quests sticks out far more than the story itself. The way the story presents itself is kind of nice though. If functions much life the Half Life games do, in that you’re rarely ripped away from directly controlling your character. This amounts to basically running in circles while a poorly animated character prattles on about the mission objective though, but it’s nice to just always have fully reign on your character, and helps establish a better flow than the previous game. Also, you can skip dialog at any time by holding the A button down for a few seconds, which means if you’re sick of chatter and just want to start cutting things up, you can avoid all the blabber and just get right into the thick of things.
Speaking of combat, it’s awesome. While morality is pretty strict in how you operate within it, combat is immensely free form and you can tailor it to your heart’s content. It’s very “casual,” though I’m not sure what that word even means in the realm of video games now, but here it means that it’s pretty easy, and every method of combat is assigned just a single button. That’s not a slight against it though. Basically, it’s a system that gives to you, as much as you put into it. If you just flail with your sword a lot, you can beat the entire game doing that. Or, if you pull off more advanced sword techniques, then you get a bonus in the amount of experience earned. This applies for all aspects of combat, so after an introductory period with the three aspects, you really start to build down a path that feels best suited towards your method of play. For instance, my character had moderate strength and good speed and ranged damage, so I could flourish with melee attacks quickly, and instantly pull out my turret pistol and nip at foes from afar. I screwed with spells a bit, but didn’t feel that into them. Thankfully, the game never punishes you for whatever style you use. If you take to one method, you can use it from the start of the game, all the way to the end.
Overall, Fable 2 is a game that is defined by “screwing around”. It caters the experience towards how you screw around, so it’s always encouraging and rarely punishes you in any direct fashion. The already thin story falls to ruin by the end, but I found it easy to forgive, as I still had a ton of side quests on my plate, and I still wanted to buy up tons of other stuff. There’s a goof heft of meat to Fable 2, though I can see that as the series progresses, it may become more and more like a Grand Theft Auto game in a fantasy setting. This iteration alone basically wants to give you the feeling of “here’s a big world, fuck with it as you see fit, in any fashion.” And that’s the richness of the game. I play as a pretty decent fellow, but I’ve already seen a friend play an evil character, and was surprised at how different his play style was, and how different the world around his character was.
Another thing that’ll alter gameplay from the first, is the dog. He can be annoying at times, but he’s really well animated, and… well, basically really sells you on his… dogness. If you’re cruel to him, he’ll cower with his tail between his legs and keep his distance from you. If you’re nice, he’ll be bouncy and peppy and constantly give you that “are we going to play now?” look. Your morality will also affect how the people in the world react to the dog. If you’re a jerk, you can have him help you scare them, or a person will randomly kick the dog when he gets close. On my super nice guy, he’d run up to people barking for attention, and they’d pet him and tell him how well behaved he was. The dog also acts as your means of finding important things. He’ll find spots to dig for goodies, he’ll bark and alert you to treasure chests, and he’ll growl when foes are near.
It’s rare that it happens, but stuff like the dog help give Fable 2 some genuine heart string tugging moments. Major events will spark the game to auto save, so when you’re given a major choice, or face a big event, whatever path you took, you’re stuck with it. This can seem annoying at times as you can reload to see the other side of the fence, but it works in that it actually forced me to think about the consequences of what I did. There’s also some really weird stuff in terms of story direction towards the end. As you near the final encounter, you’re not presented with a grim and horrible look at the death and destruction being wrought, instead you’re presented with a quest called “The Perfect Day”. It’s interesting how the game tries to contrast itself, but it still stumbles a lot along the way.
It’s annoying that two games in, and Fable has yet to build properly on the foundation it always tries to establish itself on. However, again with the split personality thing, the improvements made to many aspects of the game are still vast, and combat’s gone from something that’s decent but not fantastic, to easily one of the high points of the game.
But what’s most strange is what the game feels like as a whole to me now. Fable 2 strikes me as this goofy mixture of the Sims, and a fantasy game. Most of the amusement I had with the game came not from any epic encounters I was faced with, but instead just came from dicking around with various aspects, like managing my family, finances, real estate, outfits, and experience points progression. Fable as a series would be well suited if it would fully embrace this aspect of it, and made the game a bit more gray, instead of good and bad. There’s a lot here that addresses many of the flaws of the first game, but with that, it introduces a whole new set as well.
Also like the first Fable though… it manages to be very fun and endearing in spite of all the bad design and glitches.
