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| The Hero in the middle of seducing several people at once in an alleyway. |
One night in the kingdom of Albion, Lord Lucien invites two orphans to his castle and attempts to murder them as part of a plan to resurrect his wife and daughter. One of the orphans, actually the last in a long line of Heroes, survives. Ten years later, he or she sent off to stop Lucien, whose plans to resurrect his family threaten all of Albion.
Fable II tries to do many things at once, but everything they try is flawed in some way.
The main game is about completing the main quest through a series of missions that compels the Hero to travel across Albion. All the missions revolve around going to someplace and killing everything that tries to stop the Hero, whether it is bandits, or zombies, or Lucien’s soldiers.
The Hero has a melee attack, a ranged attack, and a collection of magic spells. The Hero strengthens these attacks by collecting orbs that are dropped by fallen enemies and spending them on enhancements. The player can either strengthen their attacks and defense, or spend the orbs on attack moves like dodging and blocking.
The type of attack used on enemies affects the type of orb dropped. Melee attacks drop melee orbs, etc. While having the choice of attacks is nice, melee attacks are simply more powerful than ranged attacks and faster than magic attacks, so there is not much reason to focus on leveling up melee, except to make fights more varied.
The Hero has to make money to buy weapons, and since enemies do not drop gold and any items found around Albion sell for only paltry sums of money, the Hero has to get a job in town like bartending or cutting wood. This takes several hours and is really tedious.
The game awards the Hero for completing missions with “renown”. The only practical use of renown is that it makes the price of items goes down slightly, but the game tries to justify it by making some parts of the game impossible to pass without a high enough renown.
The player cannot talk to villagers. Instead the Hero makes gestures that are either friendly or hostile. Friendly gestures make villagers fawn over the Hero, and hostile ones scare them. Like renown, the only practical use for this is making shopkeepers drop their prices slightly; otherwise it is only fun for players who like to watch NPCs run around or crowd the Hero, which is enjoyable at first, but starts to get tiring once they starts asking for rings all the time and blocking doorways.
Another way to make money is buying houses and renting them out. The player will automatically received gold every couple of minutes for every house they own, even when the Xbox is turned off. The Hero can also buy better furniture for their houses to increase the rent. This is a less tedious way to get better weapons, but since it is possible to get the best weapons halfway through the game, it will leave the player with a useless pile of money. Buying all the houses can be addicting, but not very satisfying.
If the Hero makes friendly gestures at a character enough times, which takes about a minutes tops, the Hero can marry that person. Then the Hero’s family can move into a house and have a kid. It is possible to do this several times in different towns, but like renown and gesturing at the NPCs it does not accomplish anything.
There is a morality system, but it is arbitrary. Quests will have some sort of ethical decision at the end that will only allow the Hero to do something really good or really evil without a reasonable middle ground. Doing so gets the Hero good or evil points. But it does not matter anyway since the player can reverse anything by doing simple actions like donating to the church or eating baby birds. All letting the good/evil point accumulates does is affect how the villager act towards the player and their appearance.
The only pointless diversion that is kind of fun is that the player can customize how the character looks, with many different hairstyles and clothes which can be altered with dyes. And lots of video games have that, though maybe not to this level of detail.
A few minor other problems: the dog that accompanies the hero is only useful for finding treasure chests and is useless in combat, and the indicator that points out when new quests, jobs, and sales is only useful for new quests and is prone staying on the screen after the player has checked to see what the new quest/job/sale is.
Combat is genuinely fun and easy. And unlike everything else, fighting monsters actually feels rewarding when skills and magic spells level up. The same feeling accompanies completing quests, which are only there to provide a bit more variety in places when the Hero fights monsters. The story is nothing impressive, even if takes place over the Hero entire life (through use of time skips), but Lionhead’s writing makes the funny dialogue and characters more memorable. Even though the number of regions the Hero visits can be counted on the player’s hands, they are big and varied enough that going through them is never tedious, except for the caves. And even though a lot of the features of the game are pointless, they can be skipped. It is just that the game would feel much shorter without them and the game makes them seem so important.
Fable II is a really ambitious game that falls on its face many times and is mostly suited to those that need to complete everything obsessively. Without the obsessive parts it is nothing but a somewhat humorous adventure game, which would be fine if video games were cheaper.
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