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GAME REVIEW: FABLE 2
Not So Much

I’m an on-again, off-again videogame junkie. I’m picky about what I play, and I won’t just turn on a console to have something to do, but when I find a game that suits my interests…well, I’ll see you in a few months.

The original Fable for Xbox was totally my kind of game: mind-blowingly beautiful and expansive, with a well-crafted storyline and a variety of side-quests. The game also offered a level of social interaction with its NPCs (i.e. non-playable characters) that I’d never seen before in an RPG (i.e. role-playing game). So understandably, I was excited by the release of Fable 2 for the 360–so excited that I went out and bought the damn thing instead of, you know, waiting for someone to give me a copy. Several weeks later, I’m not entirely sure it was money well-spent…

FABLE 2: PROS

It’s damn pretty. The developers really used colors to their advantage: happy, friendly places are full of nice, warm, fully saturated tones, while the more dangerous locales are washed out and gray. Also, everything has a Doris Day, Vaseline-on-the-lens fuzziness about it, which is majorly hot–though it’s possible I just need stronger glasses.

Its gameplay is pretty varied. In many videogames, side-quests become repetitive: go find this object in a cave full of trolls, go rescue that princess from a cave full of trolls, go kill all the trolls in a cave full of trolls, etc. In Fable 2, there’s enough variety to keep things interesting, which encourages players to dally a bit instead of plowing straight through the main storyline.

It’s a friendly game. Tutorial advice pops up constantly, and there’s even a sweet little glowing path that’ll guide you through the landscape toward your current goal. (You can turn that off if you’d rather find your own way.) Also friendly: the fact that you can’t die. Well, maybe you can, but you’d really have to work at it. Some might say that cheapens the game and lowers the stakes; I’d say it allows players to focus on other things.

It’s a highly social game. Every NPC has been articulated, and each has specific personality traits, including likes and dislikes, conservative or liberal views, raunchy or prudish tastes. And through a variety of expressions at your disposal–from dancing to laughing to playing dead to farting–you can make NPCs like you or fear you or hate you. Most interestingly, you can play your character as good, evil, or somewhere inbetween, which affects not only your appearance, but also the way folks perceive you. In fact, I’d argue that Fable 2‘s social interaction is its biggest selling point, and possibly where the designers spent most of their time. The end result is not unlike The Sims, but with more swords and voiceovers from Julia Sawalha (Saffie, darling!).

It’s seriously naughty. After you’ve made people like you, you can run off to the nearest bed and bonk the bejesus out of them–and before you do, you’re always asked whether you want to get busy avec or sans condom. (Just like real life, unsafe sex can lead to pregnancy and communicable disease.) Then the screen goes black, and you hear a bit of choice dirty talk from your partner. If you want, you can marry them, or you can leave their affections unrequited. Also: there are TONS of prostitutes–male and female–covering the waterfront, all of whom are available for hire. No patch or minigame necessary; sex is easy to find here.

It’s very GLBT-friendly. If you were playing a male character in the first Fable, there were a couple of guys you could marry. (One was a schoolteacher, I think, and one was a blacksmith.) In Fable 2, there are many more Gayz (and presumably Lesbianz) to choose from, and they’re all over the place. Also, there’s a small side-quest that involves a sweet coming out story, and it’s told very well. Perhaps this should’ve been made available to California voters several months before the last election.

It doesn’t make me want to vomit. Some games–especially first-person shooters–tend to give me vertigo and make me nauseated. (I’ve heard that this is extremely common for players of Asian heritage, but I have no data to back that up.) In fact, I’ve had to drop some games entirely because I just can’t watch the screen. Fable 2 works in third-person, meaning that the camera sits above and behind your character, and that, apparently, keeps me from hurling. So, yay.

Now for the bad news.

FABLE 2: CONS

The interface is awful. On the Xbox 360, 15 of the controller’s 16 buttons, bumpers, sticks, pads, and triggers is used. That’s a lot of fingerwork to keep track of, and it’s rarely intuitive.

The maps are totally useless. Fable 2 wants to be a “sandbox” game, meaning that the creators have created a large “sandbox” for you to explore as you please. However, the maps they’ve given you to navigate this world are minuscule, and no one without a powerful telescope would be able use them for any serious purpose. Remember in Oblivion, how you could wander vast countrysides and quickly, easily refer to a giant map for reference? Not an option here. Of course, that’s of no importance in Fable 2 because of the game’s most annoying flaw…

There’s no jumping allowed. I’m not kidding. The landscape is beautiful, and you’re given 15 buttons to interact with it, but none of those buttons allows jumping. Remember how nifty is was in Assassin’s Creed to hop up to the top of a building just for the hell of it? Remember how gorgeous the cityscape looked, sprawled out before you? Well, the Fable 2 team may have put in an assload of hours building boulders and mountains and spires, but you’re not going to be exploring them anytime soon–even when it looks like there’s cool stuff at the top of the hill. Essentially, they’ve turned Fable 2 into a moderately big, relatively flat maze a la Tomb Raider. For a game that claims to offer total freedom, this is totally frustrating, and pretty much unforgivable.

Using inventory is a drag. There’s no limit to the amount of stuff you can carry in Fable 2–weapons, gifts, treasure, clothing, food, and so on. However, to access all that goodness, you’ve got drill several clicks into a chunky, slow-ass menu system–so slow that it’s often not worth your time. In some cases, by the time I found the item I needed, I’d forgotten why I needed it in the first place. And no, sweetie, I’m not that old.

Anticlimactic isn’t the word. Seriously, the ending of Fable 2‘s main storyline is…well, remember M. Night Shamalamadingdong’s The Village? Yeah, um, EW. I mean, sure, you can keep playing after it’s done and polish off a lot of nifty side-quests, but if that’s the best they can do for the game’s ne plus ultra moment, why bother?

IN SUM

If you’re cool with maze and puzzle games, or if you really liked Clive Barker’s Jericho, you’ll probably be fine with Fable 2. However, if you were a fan of the original and were hoping to see a vastly expanded, sandboxy version of it in round two…well, can I suggest the “Shivering Isles” expansion for Oblivion instead?

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P.S. You know, I’m just realizing that in none of the above did I ever mention the dog. Yeah, see, you’re given a dog in Fable 2–in fact, it was one of the things about the game that Peter Molyneux loved most, and it was meant to be major selling point, but honestly, it’s not that big a deal. The dog doesn’t do anything except play fetch and whine when s/he is hurt, and s/he kinda helps you in battle, but not much. The dog is essentially another NPC, but you can’t sleep with it. (Ironic, since the developers seemed to have screwed the pooch in so many other ways.) Call me old-fashioned, but throwing a tamagotchi into the middle of an RPG doesn’t seem all that groundbreaking to me.