Fable II (spoilers)

as if anyone wouldn't pick love. The game sets you up to pick it.

I wanted to kill Hammer and Reaver at the end so bad though. The game had a horrible ending, I remeber when Reaver shot Lucien, Hammer asked if he was really dead, and I was saying:

"Of course not! While he falls he is going to absorb the power of the spire, then he'll rise back up, I'll pull out the music box, he'll absorb it into his chest so he has the power of the three again and then the real boss fight starts, and after shattering the music box he'll die and the tattered spire will start to fall apart and I can either save the spire or use its magic to make a wish..."

Wait. He is dead. That was it. GACK!

I have a feeling the Molynator decided to screw us all by releasing the game like this and then he'll start the DLC a la TLC. That's where the real story will begin, for a ... modest fee.

After all, we didn't pay $60 expecting a full game now did we?
 
Fable II was a huge waste of my time.

The Time Jump - It warned me I wouldn't be coming back for a long time before you go to the spire for the first time. Okay, good. I did all my quests, got a wife, got a maxed out weapon and then was ready to go on.

Uhm, what?

I felt like that wasn't even that big of a deal. I lost all that stuff I had anyways for the duration, so it wasn't really worth it. Whatever though, no big deal. I'll get over it. So now I have a boatload of new quests, new stuff, and I have the second guy. Sweet. So it tells me to get the third guy, who might I add REALLY pissed me off, because he killed that little fucker I gave 5000 gold to get his amusement park started. The quest told me he would call for me eventually, and he never did. Not before the jump, not after. So he was dead, that made me hate Reaver.

But I had no choice. The game gave me pretty much no choices. There was really no difference in the game depending on how you play through it.

Bullshit.

So then I gather him, and it tells me to go do the ceremony. Okay cool. So now something will happen, and there's going to be a whole 'nother section of the game to play through. Besides, they'd tell me if it would be a big you-better-pack-your-bags situation like the time jump, right? Wrong. I didn't get anywhere I wanted to be at that point. Whatever, so final dungeon...

...where you kick chickens and find hidden bottles. Really? REALLY? Okay, so I pretty much felt like it was a huge waste of my time there, but this is only an interlude to the rest of the game. There will be some awesome fighting next. A true final battle. So I wake up out of the gay dream and BEHOLD, I'm now magically in the spire. Wait what? Whatever! Lets get to ass kicking like in the time jump!

Aaaaaand nothing. I absorbed his powers, and he flips out. He starts giving me some bullshit speech about righteousness and I shot him.

I found out that's it, it's over. Sure, I could keep playing, but I didn't even see the need. Pointless. I really really recommend not buying this game, over ever playing it. It's utter crap. Buy fallout 3 instead. In fallout, you can actually see the effects of your right (or wrong) doings.
 
I don't think it gets GOTY partially for the length and partially since it wasn't very conventional as far as an rpg goes as far as formula which is getting mixed reviews, but it set up pretty nicely for fable 3 or another tlc thing(or more likely, both).


Fable II was a huge waste of my time.

The Time Jump - It warned me I wouldn't be coming back for a long time before you go to the spire for the first time. Okay, good. I did all my quests, got a wife, got a maxed out weapon and then was ready to go on.

Uhm, what?

I felt like that wasn't even that big of a deal. I lost all that stuff I had anyways for the duration, so it wasn't really worth it.
You lose access to some quests, your family grows up and gets mad at you, etc. The Barnum quest mentioned below is the big one since it determines whether or not the town develops, and the choice between the temples of Shadows and Light determines which survives and flourishes, it's not exactly irrelevant, it has a pretty decent impact on what happens to a few areas, at least.

thunderpup said:
The quest told me he would call for me eventually, and he never did. Not before the jump, not after. So he was dead, that made me hate Reaver.
Your quest log updates as soon as you get back from the spire that hes called for you, you can turn it in the moment you get back.
 
I really loved that there was no final boss fight.

When Lucien started giving his speech I was rolling my eyes. I started gearing up for ten minutes of boring spell-casting, having to roll three times then fire, or get his shields down and take off a third of his health, or collapse pillars onto him in sequence - exactly the same stuff games have been doing since the boss fight was invented.

Finding patterns and exploiting them is boring. It eliminates tension. It's not difficult, all it requires is thirty seconds of basic puzzle-solving and then good timing from there on. So yeah, when Reaver shot Lucien I was pleasantly surprised.

The real end fight of the game was a much more interesting and difficult one: it was the moral decision. Up until now, games with morality systems have approached them one of two ways: they're either incredibly simplistic (save the baby vs. eat the baby, as in Fable 1 or Bioshock), or they trick the player, by introducing unforeseeable negative consequences to "good" decisions as in KoTOR. Neither of them accurately mimic real life morality.

But the choices in Fable II took big steps to becoming difficult for the right reasons. When you have to pick between growing old or letting an anonymous victim grow old in your place, you really, truly do not want to sacrifice your youth and looks. Even though you know which choice is good and which is evil, you have difficulty deciding what to do - because the stakes matter to you. You don't just think "oh hey I'm being good this game so I'll pick the good option". You really don't want to grow old and ugly. It becomes a legitimately tough call.

And the final choice is the same. The evil one is fairly easy to discount because if you've been buying property you've got heaps of money by the end of the game anyway. But the choice between your family and thousands of innocent people's families - that's difficult. That was the final boss fight of Fable II.

And that final shot, of Theresa, when you realize she's been manipulating you and the three heroes all along, that was awesome and spooky.
 
I agree with most of the above, I think it is both a strength and a weakness, however. I liked that Fable 2 was really trying to take video game storytelling to another level by forcing you to connect, first with your dog and your sister even though neither of these were executed very well. Then as the game progressed there is the relationship with Hammer, who in spite of being incredibly unpopular online is probably one of the best developed RPG characters I've seen outside of some flagship story heavy franchises like Final Fantasy(and even there nothing has developed a character better since FFX) and I think if people look past the fact they don't want to stick their cocks in her polygonal shorts she's a pretty endearing character. You again sort of get forced to connect to your fellow guard on the spire, although realistically I doubt I'm the only one who sniffed 'oh you're going to die soon' out the moment he started telling me about himself so I wish that had been executed a little sneakier. The situation with the girl and the aging was pretty good too, and even though my original hero was mostly good I actually kept my youth cos if i aint livin' fantabulous i aint livin' at all. Then obviously there's the scene at the end with the dog and your murdered family(although I have to give Lucien a hand, when I picked sacrifice there weren't corpses or blood or anything! He sure does clean up well.) which are pretty motivating. I'm still sort of mixed about not having a true final boss battle(although you could argue the combat with the other three heroes functions as it) because while I like the concept in the lesson that Lucien doesn't turn into some magical dragon demon raaaawrgh because he's just a normal guy with some corrupt dreams, there are expectations gamers have and I think that decision was just asking for trouble.

I did like it in general for advancing the morality element of video games forward, since if they're going to keep throwing unnamed protagonists at us to develop it's something that'll be important to keep improving. I'd really like to lose the physical effects of being good or evil though, I don't really see the benefit of making morality more realistic but giving me horns or turning my skin paler or whatever if im good or pure.
 
Yeah, exactly. It was basically a whole lot of important videogame ideas executed poorly... But at least it's taking steps in the right direction.
 
Fable II was a huge waste of my time.


...where you kick chickens and find hidden bottles. Really? REALLY? Okay, so I pretty much felt like it was a huge waste of my time there, but this is only an interlude to the rest of the game. There will be some awesome fighting next. A true final battle. So I wake up out of the gay dream and BEHOLD, I'm now magically in the spire. Wait what? Whatever! Lets get to ass kicking like in the time jump!.
I don't get that part either.

Maybe it's a dream sequence?
 
Okay, well I completely understand the morality decisions. That was pretty good because I really was at a loss what to pick. The game was effective at the end for making you really want to pick all three options. I did walk the good path, and I did sacrifice my beauty for the stranger, and ended up looking pretty friggin' badass looking, I might add. The red eyes were awesome.

However, like you added at the end, execution was terrible. I mean, it has good elements but overall they goofed. And I will like to mention if I was to fight lucien, I really wanted to fight him hardcore style. I felt like a bully when I just one-shot him. I really didn't understand why it was so necessary to gather the three heroes if I just killed him easier than I killed any of his henchmen. I mean, seriously, final bosses are pretty much standard, and while overused, they really are "the final hump" to get over. It's really the reason you're playing the game, to get to the climax where you face the final boss.

Know what I thought was a bullshit morality question though? Lucien only wanted to bring his loved ones back, like hammer put it, and the pages of his diary hinted at it. It was his little girl, I mean the spellcaster said he might get drunk with power, however I really didn't think the guy was terribly evil. He was pretty grey overall, he was mostly just selfish, and I didn't want to kill him at the end, mostly. I kind of wanted to give him a chance, or to keep him alive and give him his family back, because that's what I had the selfishness to do for myself. The game never really paints him as overwhelming evil, yet he always dies, no matter what. I was disappointed.

And until a game produces real consequences for actions, I won't be satisfied with morality games. This game sold itself as "good vs. evil inside of you" and acted like it would be mainly about that, but besides a few things changing in the gameworld, the scope was fairly limited. I didn't feel like my actions actually impacted too much of the world. Plus, character customization sucked. Not to mention you can't be a legit swordfighter without being jacked, or a gunslinger without being huge, or a spellcaster being all blue (which is the only cool side-effect).
 
That is one of the things. Honestly, I would have removed the good/evil distinction in the game and kept only purity/corruption because there is no truly evil ending, only selfish vs. sacrificial one.

Really, your character is about as one-dimensional as characters get. Yes, your actions have consequences, but when you don't talk and you spend the entire game doing what Theresa tells you to do it's hard to really identify with the character. The world shapes around the character, but the character doesn't change based on what you do, except in appearance and a quick trip to either temple or a change in rent can flip your morality, so it doesn't feel like your character evolves unless you go out of the way evolve your character. That's not good story telling.

I don't understand why the game was "against cutscenes". There are cutscenes all the time in the game, hell when you dig up a condom its a cutscene, yet when there is any sort of plot development going on I can't get the camera where I want it, and there is seriously no advantage to that. Almost none of the sequences are actually interactive and a Mass Effect style conversation wheel would have worked for the few interactive ones (like 3) I spent most of the time in that (near) final scene on hero hill trying to figure out if it looked better if I was holding the left trigger or not instead of listening to the story. I should not be watching the cutscene and directing the cutscene simultaneously.

The game, ironically like most morality games, pigeonholes you into what happens. The thing that tipped me off that this might happen was that they said that the villain of the game is Lucien and the goal is to assemble a team of heroes to defeat him. If this is a freeform game shouldn't I be able to change who the villain is, if he turns or burns, how I defeat him? Can't I be the villain?

Morality games aren't about who you are or doing what you want, or making your own story. Its about how you do what you're supposed to do. How you complete the story, not the story you complete.
 
I found this game to be quite disappointing. There was not as much humor as I was expecting. I really liked the first fable which was never ruined by hype since didn't know about it till it was released and didn't play it all the way through till the lost chapters was added.

This game has a lot of cool ideas but somewhere the fun was left along the way. This game felt a little like a chore to play and maybe I am not the only person that feels this way.

There was very little plot or characters and quest even events that brought significance to any character other then yourself. One of the shining moments was when you had a choice to age the girl or yourself. This brought back good memories from fable when you had the choice to kill the balvaren infected traveling merchant before he transformed.

In fable you got a good sense of where you were in the world by the time you got to the end of the game. In fable 2 it was so easy to ward from area to area and follow the stupid bread trail that it did a lot to my sense of immersion into the game.

Fable 2 also excels in some of the negatives that the first game had. I came to several point where I would randomly have disk read errors as well as the game crashing during a load and the main menu always loading slow as well as the in game menus.

This game had good ideas but also took missteps away for fable one in terms of humor IMO. They should have spend more time on making everything run smoothly as well as adding more main story quests. In making so many quests optional it really makes it a chore when you get stopped from the main story line because you have to get renown.
 
IMO, Fable 2 could be as revolutionary as people claim Final Fantasy 7 was (Thats an arguement for another day). The problem is is tha tpeople are upset that its so short. Seriously, if you play through the game with little to no sidequest stuff, then ya its a 10 hour game. I just beat it and did all the light-side related quests and it took me roughly 24 hours, and thats without combing the land for gargoyles and Silver keys

Fable is basically what you make it out to be, if you set it out to get all the quests and suc done then its alot longer of a game. The lack of a final boss fight was more unsettling then disapointing. At first I felt extremely un-fullfilled so I understand where people are coming from. I woke up, pooped Lucien in the middle of his speech and..thats it?

I got over it quickly though, I think Fables replayability gives it a feel of a never-ending story type thing.

Also would like to say I concur with the people that said the final decision was the final boss type thing.
 
Aw man, there's so many things that irked me about this game it's unreal. Ignoring bugs here they are:

Where the hell's my armor? Sure i'm all for customisation but I was perfectly content to keep a separate set of clothing for my ingame social life and wear my armor for when I went out killing monsters in Fable 1. The lack of armor caused the enemies to be rather easy.

What new enemies do we have in this game from the last one... err spire thingys that are easy to kill? Banshees that are killed in a few gunshots? I think there was a lack of anything interesting to fight. The first time I saw a banshee I was thinking "yay, this sounds like a difficult monster" half a minute later I was more like "well that was anti-climatic". I said that sentence several times through the game not least for the ending.

The job minigames are tedious. Do I need to say more?

If you want to go as a physical character as a girl I hope you like butch. Yeesh, I wish they separated the sim from the action element.

This game forces you to pick the love option at the end if you're a completionist that hasn't done all the dog quests.

They redid the prison segment of Fable 1, just replace prison with spire. I'd like to see a fresh storyline please?

There are also many more but i'd be here all day. That said it was a pretty good looking game and it make chuckle several times (Reavers rear passage, heh) but despite that it has, in my opinion, created more flaws than fixed them from the last game and for all what people say about the game having replayability i've never really found much worth replaying it for and after the initial completion i'll only be playing it for the achievements now.

It could have been good. Shame.
 

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