Fable 2 (Xbox 360)

Peter Molyneux, as you may well know, likes to make big promises. Big, extravagant, bold promises that he inevitably can’t keep. He managed to bite his tongue, more or less, for Fable 2, but there was still the inference that it was going to be great.

And… well… that depends on your definition of the word “great”. By the Peter Molyneux Standard of Greatness, a game should do everything short of making you breakfast or giving you a blowjob (M-rated games only). And Fable 2 is nowhere near that. But taken as a standard action RPG (complete with Legend of Zelda-esque “find the three heroes to defeat the bad guy” plot), Fable 2 is great.

It’s been a long time since I played Fable the original, but Fable 2 seems to be just a refinement of the original. The morality is still black and white (except there’s a new meter for purity/corruption in addition to good/evil), so you’re either hated and feared or loved and adored. Interaction with NPCs is also binary: tap left on the d-pad to do something that will annoy people, right on the d-pad to do something that they will enjoy. There are a bunch of expressions you can perform, but honestly everyone only wanted to see me dance and fart.

You’re supposedly able to affect the economies of the cities you visit by either a. taking jobs and buying things, or b. committing crimes. I couldn’t figure out whether anything I was doing actually affected things. You can buy pretty much every building in the game, which leads to some game-breaking problems: keep buying up property and you get rent money, which you accumulate (to an extent) even while not playing. So, pretty soon you can afford the best weapons in the game. Which you have to buy, because the Digital Armaments Storage Act of 1999 mandates that treasure chests only have potions or money in them, instead of something, you know, useful.

Combat is a mixed bag. Your experience goes up primarily depending on what kind of attacks you use (melee, ranged, or magic). Melee combat is mostly button-mashing with the occasional “charge up attacks to break an enemy’s blocking”. I played through the game focusing on ranged combat, which was more fun: you can learn abilities to target enemies more efficiently, and can often take out enemies at a distance before they get to you. (There are also more varieties of weapons now: in addition to crossbows, you get guns.) Magic can be frustrating to use: rather than having an MP meter, you hold down the magic button to charge up your spells. The longer you wait, the higher the level (assuming you’ve earned the upgrades), and the larger effects and more powerful the spell. Which is great until you get assaulted by a half-dozen enemies that cut you to pieces before you can unleash your spell.

Oh yeah, another kind of stupid thing: there’s no penalty for death. You get a permanent scar on your body and lose some experience, but that’s it. Basically, unless you’re obsessive about your character’s appearance, you can play the entire game without buying a single healing item.

Overall, Fable 2 is a pretty good game. It’s an enjoyable action RPG, but I can’t say that I’ve been overwhelmed by Peter Molyneux’s genius.

4 out of 5