After going back and forth with someone on a different Fable 2 topic, I decided to make a review for the game. I got this game on sale for $45.00 at Best Buy, and would have probably bought it anyway since I loved the first Fable.
You start out as a kid, just like the old Fable, walking around with your sister and discovering a music box that is supposedly magical (A blind fortune teller lady shows you). You have to travel around town trying to earn five gold pieces to buy the music box, in which the game teaches you the concepts that are used to make money. They are rather easy, and you can complete them pretty fast.
You then get the music box, think it doesn't work, go to sleep, wake up and get invited to a castle off in the distance, go there to find an evil scientist type guy who ends up killing your sister and knocking you out of a window about a billion stories tall. This should obviously kill someone, but I guess their excuse is that you are a "hero" so you don't die from falling out of buildings. Ironically, if you die in this game it is pretty pathetic anyway. The blind woman and a stray dog that you found in an earlier quest come up next to you laying on the ground, and it then progresses into the real game.
It advances you through the years to the point where you are now a young adult. You get a sword and crossbow, some training on how to use them (and magic), and your stray dog as a companion. The combat system is a one button system, which I am not a big fan of. I enjoy being challenged, and this was something that did not challenge my competitive nature. Even though you have magic and ranged abilities, you primarily use melee attacks until later in the game. I thought they were going to make it more balanced than the first Fable from that perspective, but it doesn't seem that way.
The only time I used ranged weapons was either to shoot someones head off when I was bored, or to kill a civilians (which you will eventually end up doing out of boredom). Magic on the other hand is very useful late game. You get a spell called "inferno" that shoots out a ring of fire around you. Every new rank of the spell you learn increases the range the inferno reaches. Once I got to the 3rd rank and above, I almost felt as if I was cheating. I literally could just gather up a group of enemies, cast inferno, and two seconds later I had an experience orb rainbow scattered across the ground.
The world you explore is amazing. The graphics are sharp, and the environment is just beautiful. Sometimes they over do it with the glares, but for the most part it is an excellent world they created. There are a good amount of quests to do in this stunning environment, which give you experience as well as money and different types of rewards. Although it gives you a golden trail to follow to act as a quest tracker, I ended up turning it off to increase the difficulty. You also have the option for some quests to add an extra challenge for greater rewards. For example, you can finish the quest without dying to receive double the gold you would normally receive.
Your dog is either helpful or annoying depending on your mood. At first it's cool because he is helping you find treasure chests and secret dig spots. He also helps you out in combat by biting enemies that are down on the ground. On the negative side, as you progress through the game, it get's quite annoying. They must have put a treasure chest or dig spot every 10 feet you walk, because your dog will bark every 10 seconds to alert you that treasure is abound! Once you get stronger at combat, you find that the dog doesn't do anything useful to help you in a fight. If an enemy is on the ground, you end up stabbing your sword through him before the dog can even use his arm as a chew toy. This was a good idea by the developers, but it could have been more thought out.
Money in this game is amazingly easy to earn. You can start getting it by doing quests, or just picking up a job. You can be a blacksmith, bartender, wood cutter, bounty hunter, or something else that is like a bounty hunter. Even though you have all these professions to choose from, blacksmithing is all you need. The way to blacksmith, woodcut, and bar tend is exactly the same. A little dot goes back and forth on a line, and you have to hit A when the dot is in the green area inside the line. The line shrinks as you wait, so it is best to hit A fast. Just like everything else in this game, it is fun at first, but makes you want to punch a hole in the wall after doing it endlessly to make money.
After accumulating all this money, all you have to do is buy out stores. This allows you to earn the profit earned by that store (even when you aren't playing!). This has to be one of the stupidest ideas ever. If you want the game to have replay value, why hand out free money even when that person isn't playing? Imagine if in WoW you earned one gold every five hours for every item in your bank (such as, you have 15 items in your bank, so you make 15g every five hours). Although this doesn't sound like much, it adds up. You would have 75g after 25 hours, and it would continuously keep going. It's just a pointless idea.
The storyline is nothing special, and this is the main part I remember that I will describe. You are trying to find the guy that killed your sister, and end up going back to the castle as a guard. The only way you can become a guard for that castle is if you do some arena type event which is rather easy (You fight mobs and progress to different mobs). When you complete it you head to a dock where you leave your gear and weapons behind with a woman you've done earlier quests with. You go under training, where a commandant tries to break you in with an electric collar. You can either agree or disagree to give into him, although I only know what disagree does (he shocks you and you lose some experience) because I refused to give into some random video game leader. After all that happens, you break free of the collar with the help of a prisoner who is a wizard, and go kill the commandant. After that you sail home where you are now older and continue on with your adventure. I know there is probably more to the story after this (although probably not much since I heard it was short), but by now I was getting tired of the game, and didn't care what happened next.
The last thing I will go into detail on is the personality system. Each character has favorite emotions, items, food, etc. They also have a bar on if they like you or not. If you show them their favorite emoticons in front of them, they will like you more, and vice versa. Just like everything else in this game, it's fun at first, but gets old fast. When I started my adventure, I ended up knocking on a farmers door, to which he told me to "go away, I'm trying to sleep!". I didn't take to kindly to that, so I eventually (when I was stronger) went to his house, kicked down the door, stole his possessions, and married his wife. I named her Carrie Underwood.
This was quite enjoyable until a couple days later where she kept talking about how I never come to visit her anymore (Is this Animal Crossing?) and my kid seems to hate me since I didn't visit him for two days. The villagers all look the same for the most part, and say the same things over and over. The combination of repetitiveness and boredom got to me after a while, and I ended up going around casting my overpowered inferno spell to kill an entire town.
Final Verdict: Rent it / Buy if on sale
It's a rather confusing choice on whether to buy or rent this game. If you rent it, you won't have it long enough to get the full value out of it. If you buy it, you will end up selling it after a month or two. This had the potential to be a promising game, but they got lazy on a bunch of different areas. Oh well, at least I got to somewhat fulfill my dream of marrying Carrie Underwood... except her face didn't look like I thought it would.
You start out as a kid, just like the old Fable, walking around with your sister and discovering a music box that is supposedly magical (A blind fortune teller lady shows you). You have to travel around town trying to earn five gold pieces to buy the music box, in which the game teaches you the concepts that are used to make money. They are rather easy, and you can complete them pretty fast.
You then get the music box, think it doesn't work, go to sleep, wake up and get invited to a castle off in the distance, go there to find an evil scientist type guy who ends up killing your sister and knocking you out of a window about a billion stories tall. This should obviously kill someone, but I guess their excuse is that you are a "hero" so you don't die from falling out of buildings. Ironically, if you die in this game it is pretty pathetic anyway. The blind woman and a stray dog that you found in an earlier quest come up next to you laying on the ground, and it then progresses into the real game.
It advances you through the years to the point where you are now a young adult. You get a sword and crossbow, some training on how to use them (and magic), and your stray dog as a companion. The combat system is a one button system, which I am not a big fan of. I enjoy being challenged, and this was something that did not challenge my competitive nature. Even though you have magic and ranged abilities, you primarily use melee attacks until later in the game. I thought they were going to make it more balanced than the first Fable from that perspective, but it doesn't seem that way.
The only time I used ranged weapons was either to shoot someones head off when I was bored, or to kill a civilians (which you will eventually end up doing out of boredom). Magic on the other hand is very useful late game. You get a spell called "inferno" that shoots out a ring of fire around you. Every new rank of the spell you learn increases the range the inferno reaches. Once I got to the 3rd rank and above, I almost felt as if I was cheating. I literally could just gather up a group of enemies, cast inferno, and two seconds later I had an experience orb rainbow scattered across the ground.
The world you explore is amazing. The graphics are sharp, and the environment is just beautiful. Sometimes they over do it with the glares, but for the most part it is an excellent world they created. There are a good amount of quests to do in this stunning environment, which give you experience as well as money and different types of rewards. Although it gives you a golden trail to follow to act as a quest tracker, I ended up turning it off to increase the difficulty. You also have the option for some quests to add an extra challenge for greater rewards. For example, you can finish the quest without dying to receive double the gold you would normally receive.
Your dog is either helpful or annoying depending on your mood. At first it's cool because he is helping you find treasure chests and secret dig spots. He also helps you out in combat by biting enemies that are down on the ground. On the negative side, as you progress through the game, it get's quite annoying. They must have put a treasure chest or dig spot every 10 feet you walk, because your dog will bark every 10 seconds to alert you that treasure is abound! Once you get stronger at combat, you find that the dog doesn't do anything useful to help you in a fight. If an enemy is on the ground, you end up stabbing your sword through him before the dog can even use his arm as a chew toy. This was a good idea by the developers, but it could have been more thought out.
Money in this game is amazingly easy to earn. You can start getting it by doing quests, or just picking up a job. You can be a blacksmith, bartender, wood cutter, bounty hunter, or something else that is like a bounty hunter. Even though you have all these professions to choose from, blacksmithing is all you need. The way to blacksmith, woodcut, and bar tend is exactly the same. A little dot goes back and forth on a line, and you have to hit A when the dot is in the green area inside the line. The line shrinks as you wait, so it is best to hit A fast. Just like everything else in this game, it is fun at first, but makes you want to punch a hole in the wall after doing it endlessly to make money.
After accumulating all this money, all you have to do is buy out stores. This allows you to earn the profit earned by that store (even when you aren't playing!). This has to be one of the stupidest ideas ever. If you want the game to have replay value, why hand out free money even when that person isn't playing? Imagine if in WoW you earned one gold every five hours for every item in your bank (such as, you have 15 items in your bank, so you make 15g every five hours). Although this doesn't sound like much, it adds up. You would have 75g after 25 hours, and it would continuously keep going. It's just a pointless idea.
The storyline is nothing special, and this is the main part I remember that I will describe. You are trying to find the guy that killed your sister, and end up going back to the castle as a guard. The only way you can become a guard for that castle is if you do some arena type event which is rather easy (You fight mobs and progress to different mobs). When you complete it you head to a dock where you leave your gear and weapons behind with a woman you've done earlier quests with. You go under training, where a commandant tries to break you in with an electric collar. You can either agree or disagree to give into him, although I only know what disagree does (he shocks you and you lose some experience) because I refused to give into some random video game leader. After all that happens, you break free of the collar with the help of a prisoner who is a wizard, and go kill the commandant. After that you sail home where you are now older and continue on with your adventure. I know there is probably more to the story after this (although probably not much since I heard it was short), but by now I was getting tired of the game, and didn't care what happened next.
The last thing I will go into detail on is the personality system. Each character has favorite emotions, items, food, etc. They also have a bar on if they like you or not. If you show them their favorite emoticons in front of them, they will like you more, and vice versa. Just like everything else in this game, it's fun at first, but gets old fast. When I started my adventure, I ended up knocking on a farmers door, to which he told me to "go away, I'm trying to sleep!". I didn't take to kindly to that, so I eventually (when I was stronger) went to his house, kicked down the door, stole his possessions, and married his wife. I named her Carrie Underwood.
This was quite enjoyable until a couple days later where she kept talking about how I never come to visit her anymore (Is this Animal Crossing?) and my kid seems to hate me since I didn't visit him for two days. The villagers all look the same for the most part, and say the same things over and over. The combination of repetitiveness and boredom got to me after a while, and I ended up going around casting my overpowered inferno spell to kill an entire town.
Final Verdict: Rent it / Buy if on sale
It's a rather confusing choice on whether to buy or rent this game. If you rent it, you won't have it long enough to get the full value out of it. If you buy it, you will end up selling it after a month or two. This had the potential to be a promising game, but they got lazy on a bunch of different areas. Oh well, at least I got to somewhat fulfill my dream of marrying Carrie Underwood... except her face didn't look like I thought it would.
