My Fable II review.

From what I’ve seen Fable 2, was met with a pretty decent critical reception. It was certainly one of the year’s premier releases in the gaming world and why shouldn’t it be? High production values, lots of sidequests, and you can have… SEX!

And there’s a dog too! Ok, I’ll stop. But these are some of the talking points Molyneux pedaled during his traditional PR campaign he runs for every single Lionhead game. These ideas are super awesome when you imagine them in a game:
a forgotten gamer

“I can have children! We’ll play in the woods and he’ll grow up to be like me. I can teach him how to fight with a sword. My dog! Oh yea, I’ll name him meatball and he’ll save me from battles and stuff if I get injured. It’ll be like a video game version of White Fang. And after awhile we’ll bond and he’ll start trusting me. We’ll start trusting each other. Oh man! That would be sweet!”

But not really. I mean, those are just ideas after all. No game can ever compete with the boundless possibilities of imagination. As soon as gamers hear these kind of things they begin tailoring the idea to exactly what they would want out of a game with child birth and dogs. A lot of the times it’ll be different, but if a game like this followed the desires of the quoted gamer above, he’d be in heaven. His dreams mostly met, the game would be an ode to his vision and he would fall in love. It might even be a game he remembers for his entire life.

But that’s not Fable II. Fable II is a game in which you have an animal that sniffs treasure [buried and above ground] and occasionally bites enemies ineffectually. When you have children, they are most interested in your raw attention rather than what most kids like to do… go out and play! Your wives don’t really mind if you have 20 others in the same town, just as long as you kill a yokel under a bridge blackmailing you. Townspeople adore you for your flatulence and flute-playing ability, but hate you for shooting a gun to kill a beetle that’s wandered into the square threatening the townsfolk. None of these things make much sense nor are they all that interesting.

Separating out the well-known intentions of the developer [Molyneux's teaser-squawking] from the actual game is quite difficult for me. But I suppose if I were to review this without knowing any of the intentions at hand, I would say it’s a pretty fun action-combat game when you’re actually fighting. Kind of like a watered down God of War without any of the pesky difficulty or mind blowing animations. Not to say Fable II isn’t beautiful. I’ve always loved the art direction in the Fable series and I think they often pull off incredible environments, interesting, and fresh character models. The whole world looks and feels magical. The more I played Fable II, the more I realized just how much work went into the content of the game, and how little went into its actual functionality.

Everything that is supposed to make Fable II, Fable II is pretty much a cop-out. Here’s a list:

• When I head to my bartending job to make some cash, filling pints boils down to a simple timing exercise. This convention pops up in every single other job and in expressions. It’s a boring and lazy universal solution that pleases nobody.
• Having children has nothing to do with the cool parts of having kids. It really just serves as a tax on your daily income. Instead of feeling like you have a child, or even a fraction of one, it seems more that you have an egg timer that eats gold every now and then. The same goes for your wife, although you get to hear her moan a couple times.
• As a hero, I wanted to have 15-20 kids per woman. I wanted a huge family to dominate the land. Sadly, I can only have one child per family, driving me into a life of polygamy and shame.
• You can’t really die. When you get “knocked out” you lose some amount of relative experience, essentially making the combat even less tense than its one-button design already is.
• The dog, as I said earlier, could be replaced by a treasure radar. Although I will say it’s interesting to have the dog bark off screen and respond. The implementation of that feature is very well done but, like most everything else, underdone.
• The only real consequence to most of your actions is a change to your affinity, which often times becomes the final boundary after becoming bored with the game.
• Bugs. Lots of them. I know I should give them leeway being a fellow developer and all, but seriously, these guys can afford it. It’s like the testers played for a couple hours and then called it good.
• The most fun I had in the game was after it was finished. The sidequests after the game ended were much more interesting and personal that anything I did in the game previous. There were little vignettes of story in each of them and they all felt cared-for and special. The salty jack quest. The graverobber quest. I have no idea why these were saved until after the game, but it all seemed like too little too late anyhow.

SPOILERS

I have two more gripes [big ones] that have to do with the end of the game. After you’ve collected all your heroes you assemble on top of a mountain. They form up and send you their power beams to give you strength to kill the boss guy who has just arrived as well. And then the big moment! Just as Lucien raises his gun and fires at you, your dog jumps out in front of the bullet and is killed instantly. I felt absolutely nothing. You know why? Because my dog is treasure radar. She was never in danger before, so I never had to fear for her death. No connection was made, because there was never any meaningful interaction that preempted it.

I posted something in response to Molyneux’s bit about “experiencing Love’ in a video game” on the Lionhead forums back when the PR train was running full steam. It’s what I’m guessing he was driving at with this whole dog thing. The intention being to make the player “love” the dog and then kill it so the player would feel something… real. I can’t find the post, it’s probably too old, but I said something to the tune of this:
past me

You can’t simply make a player feel love in a game by aligning it with things people love in real life. Love, or something like love, is only felt when there’s some kind of underlying risk involved. I only truly know I love someone when I worry about if they made it home okay on a long car trip, or if there’s uncertainty if they’ll make it through an illness of some kind. Love is felt when there is fear, longing, guilt and all the other messy dark feelings that go with it. Life has real tension because we can die at any moment and out of that we seek love, companionship and affection in an effort to share it and make it easier on us. Games rarely have that because we have save points, respawns and “knock outs” that don’t provide a real sense of the implicit wonder of the “now”.

The final quibbling came at the very end of the game. The boss battle… Once your dog is killed you watch a cutscene and get teleported to a dreamworld with your big sister (killed by Lucien early, the big boss guy) and you go around doing meaningless shit like shooting bottles and kicking chickens. It’s a little charming but I’m typing this with the bad taste in my mouth that follows. Eventually the music box starts playing and curiosity being what it is, you run towards the music. All of the sudden you’re there in the spire with Lucien and he’s got the three heroes powering him up with the power beams. The cutscene continues and you play [rather your character does, since you're not controlling him] the music box and it breaks Lucien’s power beams. Now, finally you have control of your character, you hit “A” and he falls dead and you’ve won. It’s a one-button boss.

I can’t help but think that this faux pas has something to do with the idea of “one-button” combat that’s strung throughout the battle system in Fable II. But there it works. It’s situational and not so rudimentary that it becomes boring. Why not let me fight the end boss? If you want to make the end guy a mere formality then give me something challenging before it [i.e. Jenova before winged Sephiroth]. Make my blood pump a little. It’s an action game!

END SPOILERS

And herein lies the issue. The growing disparity between the gamer and his creator/reviewer. Lionhead forgot to make a boss battle fun. They forgot that video games are nearly all about the boss battles. There’s absolutely no reason to cop-out on an ending like this. It wouldn’t have “compromised the vision” it was just plain lazy. How can Metacritic award this game what is essentially 89% approval and the public 61%? Take Fallout3’s rating [there's a game with a dog in it too, and it really can die!] for example. Fable II is entirely superficial. It’s full of pretty colors, fantastic scenes and high-strung promises. But none of that delivers. All in classic Molyneux fashion. A notion clearly lost on the majority of the gaming press, perhaps because they like their games easy-to-swallow and fun to watch, yet strangely most gamers like their games moderately challenging and fun to play.