<\/td><\/tr>Spoilers begin now…<\/p><\/div>\n
Thematically, most of Fable 2 exists somewhere between Shrek and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Sometimes there is a dash of dark humor. Sometimes things are mildly edgy or risqué. But for the most part this is a world of whimsy and storybook fantasy with a dash of adult humor. (This is a game with a very cartoonish, child-like view of morality. You earn purity points for eating veggies, corruption points for eating meat, and evil<\/strong> points for killing harmless woodland creatures.) <\/p>\n This is a huge collection of serious, ugly deeds. These darker elements – all of which befell the good guys – often felt incongruous. It was like having the torture scene from Reservoir Dogs<\/em> inserted into The Incredibles<\/em>. A story about a villain who murders everyone you have ever befriended or loved does not fit in what is otherwise a world played for laughs.<\/p>\n Then the endgame: You get to hit the bad guy once, and then he falls and (we assume) dies off-screen<\/strong>. Disney<\/em> villains get more comeuppance than the antagonist in Fable 2. (And Reaver, who shot Barnum and stole your youth, gets to walk away without ever having to answer for his crimes. He’s just as evil and callous as Lucian, he’s simply evil on a smaller and less ambitious scale. He saunters off with a chuckle.)<\/p>\n As I played, I could picture the writer churning this mess out at his computer. How can I make the player really hate my villain? I am an artless hack, so I can’t hope to accomplish this by drawing the player into the world and the plight of its inhabitants. I guess I’ll just have to annoy the hell out of them at every turn. That should do it!<\/em> Lacking the skill to make a truly compelling adversary, he just buries you in layers of injustice. In the end, I ended up hating the writer, not Lucian. I felt like the game was hitting me with a brick and forcing me to hit back with a pillow. <\/p>\n Likewise, the trip to the evil Spire puts you into situations where you must do evil or be tortured and endure a massive XP drain. All told, the total XP loss for cleaving to the path of righteousness is about two hours<\/em> of leveling. This game sold itself on “player choices”, but choosing between playing as an evil jerk or having a huge portion of your hard-won progress pissed away isn’t exactly the kind of nuanced “choice” gamers are clamoring for. <\/p>\n The person who devised this tale wanted the player character to endure a preposterous level of frustration. Not even gruesome, gritty games like Kayne & Lynch or Max Payne try to heap this<\/em> much suffering onto the head of the protagonist. To do so in such a gentle-looking world – and then to deny the player anything that might resemble revenge at the end – is to convey pure contempt for the audience on the part of the writer. <\/p>\n But most of all, I resented the way the story I hated tried to prop itself up at the expense of the gameplay I loved. A story and gameplay should be in harmony. In a bad game, they stand apart. In Fable 2, they cannibalize each other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I mentioned in my original post on Fable 2 that the plot is insultingly simplistic, ham-fisted, and perfunctory. It’s my only gripe with what is otherwise a stellar game. I do not count the hours I spent with Fable 2 as time squandered, but I do resent the main story and its self-indulgent idiocies. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[612],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-2102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospectives","tag-fable"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44257,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2102\/revisions\/44257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/td><\/tr>Muah ha ha ha! Hate me because I am an evil dick who shoots children! Note that here Lucian is supposedly shooting a little seven year old kid (you) who comes up to his waist, but he’s aiming at eye level. Maybe he went and got a box for you to stand on.<\/td><\/tr><\/table>The candyland storybook vibe holds true everywhere in the game except<\/em> where the main character is concerned. When it comes to your avatar and the people you care about, the gloves are off<\/em>. Lucian, the evil asshole of our tale, murders your pre-teen sister on-screen in the opening minutes of the game. You (an even younger child) are then shot and thrown out of a window to fall hundreds of feet onto cobblestones. As an adult, you are tortured on-screen. You are made to either murder your friend Bob, or be tortured and suffer a severe penalty to your powers. (A really harsh XP drain.) You are disfigured and permanently robbed of your youth unless you’re willing to sacrifice an innocent to take your place. Barnum, your harmless and innocent inventor friend, is murdered on-screen. At the end, Lucian traps you in a Plot Field that lets him monologue while you remain frozen and helpless. He brags that he’s just got done personally murdering your spouse and all your children<\/em> (assuming you had any) and then he kills your dog in front of you. You are then shot in the face from a first-person perspective. Again.<\/p>\n 
<\/td><\/tr>My two best friends: My dog, and my perfectly chiseled physique.<\/em><\/td><\/tr><\/table>I also cry foul at the game for killing your dog. He’s a key gameplay<\/em> component. I can (sort of) accept the loss of the dog as a character<\/em>, but not the loss of the game content<\/em> that he provides. Without him, you can’t really hope to complete all the treasure-hunting sidequests that pop up after the game is won. You get a multiple-choice ending, and one of the endings allows you to bring him back, but that decision mixes in-game and out-of-game variables. Do you want to have fun parts of the game removed and some quests locked off, or do you want to break character?<\/em> You do not add tension to a story by holding gameplay elements ransom. <\/p>\n