Fable 2

Fable 2 may very well be the first fantasy video game to centrally feature a non-anthropomorphosized, non-alien, non-cybernetic and non-godlike ordinary dog. Having watched the Lionhead Studios Behind the Scenes trailers and then played the actual game, I can say with some certainty that this in itself is a technical triumph. Making you, the player, actually care about this virtual dog is an even fancier trick. Roll over but don’t play dead as we beg the questions and look for bones in the usual, dog-gone way. Arf.

Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Fable 2
Platform: Xbox 360
Played For: 38 hours


The visual style of Fable 2 makes for an interesting mix of Dickens and fairy tales. Urchins run in the streets, English accents abound, but the wilder parts of the world sport goblins and trolls right out of a Charles Vess depiction of Faerie. You can almost picture the people and Lionhead giving sardonic grins as they eagerly went about their designs... a slightly dark-hearted humor suffuses their creation at every level. Save the plot, which must come more from the Russian/Slavic Fairy Tale realm, where the principal moral is that happiness is fleeting, and misery is the central theme of life... the story doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but be ready to watch your hapless hero or heroine suffer some very cruel twists of fate... not the least of which was at least one extended session of food poison and subsequent virtual projectile vomiting.

The general pallor that these ills and omens cast serves to reinforce the extreme importance of the dog to the enjoyment aspect of Fable 2. And what a dog he is... faithful, reliable, full of every trick in the book... and particularly fantastic at helping in the excavation of useful items. Be it purity-inspiring tofu, ratty old books or even condoms of questionable history, the dog of Fable 2 can sniff it out so that your hero can make indiscriminate use of the lost items of yesteryear. It is no wonder that the entire world of Albion seems to come equipped with only one dog... this noble representative of the canine species must have single-handedly been accounting for most of the disk access and CPU processing that occasionally bogged down the loading times and menu navigation to a crawl.

I personally happen to own two cats, and after having played Fable 2 for some time I started to wonder why they weren’t being so darn useful to me. After all, if the wonder dog of Albion could master some fifteen tricks plus fight bandits plus ferret out hidden, uh, “treasure”, surely my kitties could manage at least a hop through a hoop or two. During one particularly long snooze session on the couch I proposed to them the idea that they might start earning their keep along these various lines of self-improvement. To this they merely glanced at me with sleep-heavy eyes... one yawned and the other offered his tummy for a rub. Alas, even after subsequently ignoring them in favor of long stretches of quality time with my virtual dog, the only useful digging my cats would muster in retaliation was entirely within the confines of their litter box.

The rest of the characters in Fable 2 are not particularly memorable, perhaps in part due to the use of a system of “emotes” for conversation rather than the more conventional RPG staple of dialogue trees. To interact with the citizenry of Albion, your hero goes about farting and dancing, burping and striking victory poses, giving the finger or inviting that special someone to the nearest available bedroom. This panoply of interaction options, while entertaining in their animations and fun to produce, do not lead to any deep relationships with other characters.

Everyone either loves or hates you based on your actions during the game, and their reactions are universally the same. Despite each NPC having a suite of characteristics like “serious, straight, amoral, etc” and a small list of likes and dislikes, there is nothing that makes them unique in any way. My character went ahead and got married at one point in the game, and while this did make a small mini-game out of keeping the spouse happy, there was nothing about them that was different from any other person wandering the countryside. Only a few key characters are awarded anything beyond generic dialogue, and none of them are available to form relationships with. Other than the dog, I found it nigh impossible to care one way or another for any other life form in the Fable 2 universe. Which I suppose would have made it easier for me to rampage as an unrepentant evil-doer, but that doesn’t tend to be my style.

Other aspects of the game suffered a similar ailment... it was interesting that you could get involved in so many spheres of life, but each involvement was unsatisfyingly shallow in nature. You can purchase gobs of real estate and upgrade the furniture in the buildings, but there needed to be more of a puzzle or game to the economics of Albion to make it interesting. A lot of the quests amounted to fetching items or activating flip-switches... and there are few unique or interesting items/monsters to uncover in your travels.

Albion is a world that is expansive but thin, more of a promise of cool stuff than an actual helping of such. What it offers is fun and engaging, to be sure, but by trying to do so many things it never manages to develop any one of its ideas... with the exception of the dog, of course. By the end of the game I felt that there was not much else to seek out in the world of Albion, and while collecting silver keys and shooting gargoyles was fun, the rewards supplied for such exhaustive activities were disappointing at best. Fable 2 is a good indicator of what might come to pass in the future, but it is still not the true second world that it aspires to be. But you have to respect Mr. Molyneux and his colleagues at Lionhead for continuing to push in that direction... if Fable 2 is any indication of the direction that world simulations are heading, then we’ve all got a lot of cool things to look forward to.

Will I play it more: Time for my hero to retire and raise a family