The current video game environment is peculiar in its dependence on deeper meaning and hard-hitting narrative. Even the most compelling of role playing games try to impart a higher meaning on their stories - be it emotional weight or real world commentary. Lionhead would have you believe Fable 2 provides this, but it does not, and it is all the better for it. There are ‘big decisions’ in Fable 2, but each one carries an air of whimsy and fairy tale logic that creates an incredibly relaxing and pleasing experience overall. Stepping into the world of Albion is truly an escape - a glowing retreat from harsh times and cutting narrative.
The greatest success of Fable 2 is in the game environment Lionhead has cultivated. Sharing coherency between the first title in the series was a great move, revealing to you past locations, changed and twisted by five hundred years of development and technological advancement. At the centre of this brave new world is Bowerstone, the former medieval fortified town of Fable is now a sprawling industrial metropolis complete with districts, factories and spooky mansions looming above. This effect is repeated throughout the game, with small villages becoming ruined marshland, rugged bandit camps becoming Tortuga-esque pirate hideaways, etc. The amount of change in landscape is not just cosmetic - with Fable giving you narrow corridor paths to traverse, Fable 2 broadens the road, giving you wide open fields, entire towns to visit, and a landscape designed from the ground up for openness and freedom of movement. Combat can take place in choke points or in the middle of no-mans land, in the middle of the ocean, or on the edge of mile-high cliffs.
This brings me to the incredibly satisfying and solid fighting mechanics. Three aspects of combat from Fable have returned; swordplay, magic and ranged warfare. Here, they are each mapped to a separate button, allowing you to switch between them at your leisure. Experience from battles is awarded to you based on how you approach it. Slice a bandit’s head off with a longsword and you will get strength experience, while incinerating him with a high level fireball will net you a bounty of will points. Interestingly, this makes your decisions quite limited; with each tier escalating in XP cost, you can be the master of one route or be mediocre in them all. I found it best to pick a side and stick with it, increasing your combat effectiveness but decreasing your versatility, especially since once you get into the upper echelons of the skill system, your combat potency becomes Godlike.
As a result of this, there is a major imbalance in the game - the magic is all-consuming and grossly overpowered. Not only can you cast spells indefinitely with no mana system to speak of, you can slow down time to provide you with even more breathing room with which to charge that level five inferno. Playing a wizard character very quickly became repetitive and boring, with each fight playing the exact same way - instant-cast time lapse, a high level raise dead spell to summon minions from the earth to fight for you, then throwing out fireballs constantly until everything is dead. This worked on bandits, on hobbes, on enormous forest trolls and shrieking banshees. Mixing up this formula at all, even with higher level spells, almost always resulted in more difficult and lengthier fights.
Worse still, even a light dabbling in magic drastically alters the appearance of your character; luminous blue veins of magic traverse your entire body even after the briefest of will use. My gun-totin’ highwayman shouldn’t end up looking like a totemic being of pure magic just because he needed to use a stun spell to escape from some lowly Hobbes.
Furthermore, the character customization feels perhaps more limited than Fable, despite giving you far more options. The problem is that all but a select few result in a goofy looking character with terrible attributes and no real reason to exist in that state. The clothing and weapon stalls are also inconsistent in their stock, sometimes providing you three out of five pieces of an armour set with no other vendor in the game offering the remainder. You just have to wait for weeks in game time for them to restock. These minor sacrifices for gameplay in the effort to make the world more believable are almost universally annoying and arbitrary. Shops run out of stock all the time and you find yourself fast traveling all over Albion in search of one stick of celery.
The breadth of items for purchase and discovery is nice, but again, it feels limited because only a small amount are useful. You get an almost endless amount of potions from quests and looting treasure chests, but even consuming them out of battle is a massive chore. You have to enter the three-tier deep menu system to even drink one, which brings you out of the menu to watch your character drink it, then collect up the experience orbs. Every single time. There is no world map to speak of, meaning you either have to learn the landscape entirely or follow the annoying bread crumb trail (which is either permanently on or permanently off, never context sensitive) or be lost all the time. Changing equipment or items in your inventory is equally excruciating, with perhaps the worst UI I have seen in an RPG for a long time. It is too slow to load, always fighting your intuition and often doing the opposite of what you want. For example, to find out where a quest takes place, I have to set it as a destination rather than it just telling me. Or how about being forced to select each item of clothing to dye individually rather than letting me apply it to the whole set. I have encounted game lock-ups, 30 second loading times and artifact effects just from the menu system, which feels slow and painful already.
This clunkiness in UI design is mirrored in the D-pad context-sensitive button placement, which only ever brings up potions to quick use when on extremely low health, meaning more times than once, I died because it was too hard to use one on anything less than critical HP. Or the numerous times it selected a fattening pie to use as health restore instead of my rack of potions, meaning I ended up becoming the world’s premier purveyor of slimming celery just to combat my puzzling girth. Using expressions too required another menu system; it does not let you assign hotkeys and will never suggest any that you would want to use. For instance, when I walk up to a group of children in the market and I am playing an evil being of pure hate, and it suggests I dance to them or do a sock puppet show with my hands.
Fable 2 is a tarnished experience because of the inconsistency in the design. Some aspects are incredibly slick and well implemented. The dog companion that follows you throughout is staggeringly realistic in animation and behavior, and genuinely useful in gameplay use by finding you hidden treasure and finishing off fleeing enemies. But on the other side, the game breaks this immersion by having repetitive NPC interactions and meaningless quests. Most reward nothing but gold and renown, both of which can be harvested quicker and easier by sitting in Bowerstone market and hammering swords at the blacksmith or dancing for large crowds.
Ultimately it means that your mileage may vary with Fable 2. The world itself is breathtaking in style and feels complete and living. References to the first game are constant and almost always tongue in cheek. But then the game throws out all of this good work with a terrible UI and a patchy narrative. The game ends before it gets going and often features arbitrary plot devices and a predictable conclusion. The main quest is perhaps too weak to benefit the wide variety of side missions and extra curricular activities. Approach with tempered expectations and you will be pleasantly surprised. Expect an earth-shattering narrative and interesting interactions, and you will wind up somewhat let down.
