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| Source // Microsoft |
I wasn't too pleased with Fable. Even with the English language being correctly represented through all kinds of colourful accents, a lengthy beginning section sapped all the enjoyment I may have had for the game itself, and I haven't gone back to it since.
Perfect time to see if the sequel has improved on things, then. Enter Fable II, open-world action-RPG where everything matters, and by everything, I mean how long you maintain a fart for. Don't understand? Neither do I.
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| Source // MobyGames |
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| Source // MobyGames |
Fun Times
A CG intro video culminates in a bird shitting on your head as you stand shivering in the snow, looking up to Castle Fairfax, dreaming of a better life. I wouldn't want to be here either, but Fable II does give me a chance to actually play the Xbox 360 for the first time in a while. I think. What did I last play on it. Oh, God, Nuts & Bolts, okay, let's hope this is better.
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| Source // Microsoft |
A crowd of people stand in awe of a trader claiming to sell magical items. A mirror that makes you more beautiful the more you stare at yourself, but that only works in complete darkness. It doesn't catch our attention, but a mysterious box does, and it goes for just 5 gold coins - a week's worth of food for you and me.
If you think this screenshot looks nice, you're right. It does. It's not what Fable II looks like, though.
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| Source // MobyGames |
Frustrations
Fable II doesn't do cinematic shots. It's the kind of game where you exist in a world, not on a film set, and so you have to hold down the left trigger to pay attention to something or someone. You'd think it'd be easy, press the trigger, watch the camera move, let go assuming you're now locked and staring at something, but no. The second you let go, you're dumped back to the default camera, a giant "LT" icon flashing in the middle of the screen, breaking your immersion by urging you to immerse yourself in this world.
Because there are no screenshots, you get to enjoy me trying to explain this intro section. We need that magic box for plot reasons, and so we need 5 gold pieces. It's time to do some odd jobs, the first of which we find by continuing to follow a golden dusty GPS system.
I read it's a controversial feature, included so that everyone can pick up and play the game without feeling lost, and I welcome it. You can ignore it, and it's not in your face too much anyway. It leads me to a town guard who has lost a bunch of warrants and will give us 1 gold if we return all five.
Along the hunt, we beat up bullies, kill some bugs to help a shop keeper, and find a return a bottle of booze to a drunkard...'s angry partner, all for a reward. Fable II gives you choices, see. Do you help people out and increase your social standing, or do you take money from bad people by doing bad things? The choice is yours. We're a goody-two-shoes, naturally.
After buying the box, we make a wish and it disappears. What do we wish for? No idea, but we're brought to Castle Fairfax and introduced to Lord Lucien, who kills us. Or he thinks he does.
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| Source // Microsoft |
Fast forward ten years and we're in a caravan camp, about to be sent out into the world by a blind mystic who knows far more about the world and our place in it than we do. We are a Hero, and Heroes have some kind of purpose that I'm sure we'll discover.
We're sent to a something or other to prove ourselves worthy, I think? I literally stopped playing this and turned on the PC to write about it, and already I've forgotten. It was full of bugs to kill, which is done by mashing the X button until you win, before standing in place and hoovering up experience with the right trigger.
Actually, let's talk about the controls here, because I hate them. Movement is so sluggish in this game that I'm never quite sure where I'm going to end up. But it's not just sluggish, it's this weird floaty sluggish, and you've got what appears to be an infinite sprint, but then you'll notice how blurry the graphics get, which aren't too shabby when they're not blurry, I suppose, but they're blurred an awful lot I feel.
Heroes can land huge drops without breaking bones, says the game, but you won't ever automatically hop down from a ledge, instead having to press the A button to safely vault in a position the game recognizes as a place to hop down to. In a cavern where there's a clear stone ledge? Okay, fine. Out in the countryside where I happen to try cutting a corner? Bit excessive, no?
Combat doesn't feel terrible. Ranged weapons are shot with a press of the Y button, though I don't know how to manually aim yet. Auto-targeting works so far. Getting through this underground temple thing grants us the ability to use magic, and I pick the ability to burn everything, and that takes place on the B button and can be aimed as you charge it up, or just let loose as a ring of fire around you.
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| Source // Microsoft |
I'm told to head to Bowerstone, but the road is blocked because of bandit activity. The guard has absolutely no problems with me killing this bandit to solve the problem, so off we go to a little camp to have a little boss fight. Not too tricky, early days of course. Not too satisfying either, as far as fights go, because nothing much changes from the rest of the gameplay. The camera moves overhead so that you can see, rather than lower down so that you feel.
And Fable II wants you to feel. There are people locked in a cage in this bandit camp, clearly in need of being freed, but along comes a guy who claims he's paid for these slaves and would like them to stay put, thank you very much. His name is Dick. It's clear who we're meant to root for in this exchange. Dick is soon killed for no reason other than he glowed red and was an enemy. Alright then. Off to Bowerstone.
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| Source // Microsoft |
No screenshots of my encounter with a bard who runs up to greet me before I can even step through the city gates. He is chatting to me without stopping for breath and follows me to my objective. As I run, the bottom half of the screen is obscured with the tinted subtitles, and now the top is obscured with a tinted meter showing me whether the bard likes or dislikes me.
To get rid of it, I'd have to interact with the bard, which I can do in a number of ways, and those ways can be extended. The icons make no sense. The options I had were moustache and ballet shoe, so I just tried to ignore him as best I could. That's where the fart would come in, by the way. Haha, you can fart on people, and if you fart too much you'll crap yourself. Hilarious.
The mysterious woman I'm meeting says she's running late, and a 5-minute countdown timer appears on the screen as she tells me I should go shopping.
Nope, I'm done.
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| Source // MobyGames |
Final Word
This is a window regarding the likes, dislikes, and opinions of Annie the Whore, one of the many colourful characters you'll be able to meet and interact with in Fable II. In your own way. In other games, even in open-world RPGs, you'll have just one slider, or it might not even be a slider at all. Someone will hate you, or they won't.
Not in Fable II, no. Eeeeevvvverything matters, doesn't it? Doesn't it? Well, I don't care if it does or doesn't. I'm not even attached to my own character. What makes you think I'll play nice with anyone else? Case in point, the very second I learned that a character was voiced by James Corden, I made sure to sabotage his mission. No, Monty, you won't be running off with the love of your life, you're not good enough.
I should be interested in a game that tries to offer players all this freedom, but there's a reason so many games don't - it doesn't always work, or suit the game that's being played. In an RPG, yes, fine. In one called Fable, literally telling the story of who you are and what you got up to, fine, but somehow it manages to get in my way at each and every opportunity.
It's not subtle. Interactions are reduced to presses of the D-pad, and with the camera's insistence on not showing you anything at a personal level, everyone feels like a walking talking objective marker. I'm sure there are characters to get to know with wonderful stories to tell, but of those I've seen so far, this is a fairytale I want no part of.
Like the first game, it's just boring me. The punchiest thing that's happened to me is being shot as a child and sent flying out of the castle tower, plummeting hundreds of feet onto the snowy cobbled streets below. what happened then? Oh, just ten years of biding my time before I was even allowed to become who I am destined to be. Not ten years of planning and training for my revenge, no. Ten years of idling until I'm ready to leave the caravan park.
Fable II is a marmite-like game, from what I gather. It's either amazing or its dog turd. I want games to be skew towards amazing, and I haven't given Fable II enough time to lean one way or the other. For all its annoying quirks, it is still somehow easy to play. For all its bland storytelling, the world feels far more lively than Oblivion, say.
But there are things about the way it presents itself and how it does things that just irritates me, and stops me from wanting to try it out. The weird movement, the blurring, the icons that tell me nothing, the need to press the left trigger so damn often. There's a game in here somewhere, but I feel like I've got to wade through something stinky to get there.
I think I said I wanted to see more of Fable if only to give it a better chance to show me what it can do. Fable II could do with that as well. I haven't seen what it is that appeals to the fans of this series. Nothing is grabbing me and glueing my arse to the sofa so that I keep playing it. It continues to be this blobby mess that I just can't break into right now.
What mindset do I need to change that?
Fun Facts
Eating food to restore health makes you fat, and being fat makes you uglier in the eyes of the people you encounter, and ugly people get no love. Just try releasing a Fable game in 2020, I dare you.
Fable II, developed by Lionhead Studios, first released in 2008.
Version played: Xbox 360, 2008.