I have been spending a little bit of time lately playing games with some reviewers and gamers who have some very strong opinions. It’s been a great experience lately, as I’ve been able to discover some games I would have otherwise missed, and hear different takes on how these people apply their discerning angle to the games that they play.
After having “dragged” one of my friends into playing Castle Crashers with me, I felt that I owed it to him to pickup a game of his choice. Fable 2 would be the game of choice from him. Within our micro-community, a few of the people were super hyped about this game, having truly enjoyed the first iteration. My experience with ARPG’s has still been touchy at best – I am not well played in this genre. I have also become increasingly critical about approaching video games as a story-telling mechanism rather than just a point of entertainment. Not ever game or genre need to achieve a perfect balance between story and mindless entertainment, but it is definitely something the ARPG’s hinge on.
So, I jumped into Fable II. I tried to keep myself as neutral about it as possible. I didn’t want to read into the hype online, and I tried to take everything that my peers were oogling about with a grain of salt. I read up on the story a bit on Wikipedia, and left it at that. My friend and I were incredibly interested in the multiplayer co-op that the game boasted, and we were looking forward to gunning through the game together, taking in the experience for what it was worth. I’m a sucker for cooperative play, so if anything had piqued my interest, it was going to be this.
Overview
From Wikipedia:
The game takes place in the fictional world of Albion, five hundred years after Fable’s setting, in a colonial era resembling the time of highwaymen or the Enlightenment; guns are still primitive, and large castles and cities have developed in the place of towns. Unlike the original, the player may choose to be either male or female.
Impressions
The game itself promised to be incredibly open with never just one choice for anything you did. My friend and I wanted to take that for all it was worth. We had just finished playing another game where we had taken the good side, and we wanted to turn that around on this one. I wanted to be as evil as this game would allow. Every option the game gave, we took the most sinister approach. We rescued people, then murdered them. Our first order of business was to slaughter the entire town, and kill a few dozen guards before we moved onto our first quests. We killed parents right in front of the eyes of children. Then we tried killing the children – but I guess the game has some limits – children are invulnerable. The evil continued – we massacred villages, destroyed families, relationships, and left any possible wake of dismay, despair, and destruction in our paths. One thing that struck me instantly was the cut scenes this game had: they were absolutely gorgeous! After having beaten the game, I was entertained, but not floored by the experience that I had played through.
This game was a turning point for me in how I will approach my future game purchases as well – the overall feeling of mediocrity that I was left with this game is making me consider my purchases versus rentals/trades a bit more seriously.
Issues (Spoilers Ahead)
Lack of cut scenes. With the backlash from Metal Gear Solid 4′s hour and a half of cut scenes, this game actually had a selling point that it had “less than five minutes of cut scenes”. After seeing how great they did on the small cut scenes that were available within the game, I was simply left with wanting more. The lack of cut scenes should not necessarily be a selling point of a game, the correct balance of using them with gameplay to push the storyline forward should be.
Menu system. The menu system for this game seems to come up quite a bit when I talk about my complaints about this game to other people. It’s laggy, and takes a long time to get into and use. Secondly, there are some things within the menu system that see too much use (items, clothing, weapon changes) to require you to have to deal with such a slow moving piece of crap. There are a few reports that the menu system sped up when NXE was installed, but that doesn’t do any good because the game came out before the install feature was even an option. I personally wish the controller design had be re-engineered to control some more of the features that we had to go into the menu for rather than some of the features it gave us immediate access to.
Controller Bindings. Generally, games have you aim with your right joystick, and move with your left. I’ve had this unbreakable habit of having my right stick be inverted. I tend to blame 007 on the N64, but it is probably more likely a testament to how stuck in my ways about my controller setup I am. Either way, this game has the left stick be your aiming, so neither regular nor inverted felt right for aiming. This is compounded by the fact that when you shoot, you need to hit B, rather than a trigger to shoot, making it ineffective and even worse design if you were to make the right stick be aiming, because you need to move your thumb off the joystick in order to shoot. I think that this is a case of either trying to put too much into the game, or just failed controller design.
Fashion, the big deal, but not really. RPG games are starting to put quite a bit more effort into the customization of your character. Dying, various lines of clothing, and Fable II even has tattoos that you can apply to your body. Pretty interesting stuff, as the customization allows you to really create your unique image within the virtual world that you’re immersing yourself into. Only problem, is the game doesn’t really do too much in letting you be able to see that. The camera control allows no zoom, there are no cut scenes where you get any closeups of your character, and even the character “dress-up” menu doesn’t let you zoom in to your character to look at the details of the features you are adding. It’s a few steps back from pushing the customization features.
Eating disorders. I’ll admit, I was a bit sexist in the approach to building my character. I wanted her to be an evil, magic oriented character, but I wanted her to be good looking. After I mistakenly ate a piece of cheese and saw +Fat, I never let my character eat anything again – I sold any food I came up to. I eventually learned that veggies were good to reduce fatness, and she got to eat some old celery, but it was just potions after that. The game itself lets you “let go” in terms of food, equating a few pieces of pie into about a 25-50 lb gain. And with all the damn running I do from quest to quest? Come on!
Your under annoyance! No matter how many guards I killed, I would continually be approached for arrest. This brings up a delayed menu, which chooses what you want to do: pay a fine, community service, or resist arrest. Because of the delayed menu, I once had to start killing some guards right in front of my husband. He divorced me soon thereafter – probably couldn’t stand that I was wearing the pants in the relationship. Either way, one easy way to get around this nuisance is to promise to do community service, and never do it, with no fear of repercussions. It was the personality that I wanted to be portraying in the game, but too much of a cop out of the feature.
Play a game, not a job. Yahtzee did a great job at picking fun at this part of the game, and I can’t help but agree with him. The jobs in this game, which you use to build money, buy houses, and thus continue to increase your wealth are BORING. What’s that you say? Jobs are boring in real life and thus this is just more of a realistic approach? Oh okay. Well when I want a real life simulation, I’ll step outside. For now, please focus on entertainment while I play a game which I purchased to ENTERTAIN ME. Also, another complaint about the jobs that I have, is the game seemed to be truly pushing the limits of the 360, and I was experiencing a bit of frame lag now and then. When you’ve got a minigame that suffers from framelag at fast speeds, the experience is further deteriorated for the user.
Multiplayer? As I said, multiplayer was the one thing that I was excited about for this game. Technology has come along way since the 2600, we’ve got the hardware, we’ve got the bandwidth, now give us some jaw-dropping co-op experiences. Sadly, this game didn’t deliver a good multiplayer experience. First off, anyone who joins is your “henchmen”, any of their actions have no affect on their character whatsoever, other than that they can gain experience and use to train their character. The game, overall, seemed to move incredibly slow with this feature, and take any entertainment value out of the game that was previously there. After a few hours of this, my friend and I ended up doing something that has been called “orb-questing” online. Where we progressed through the entire game nearby while online, and we could see each other’s position, would help each other finding objects, unlocking puzzles and whatnot. This actually brought some entertainment to playing it alongside someone else.
Premature Ending. This entire game builds up for you finding these three “heroes” to get together so you can fight and oppose the evil that is overtaking your area. After you’ve amassed your trio of assistants, you merely use them to suck up their powers, and punch the bad guy off his proverbial pedestal to his death. End Game. After this happened, I realized that the last fight at the beach against that huge shard was the last boss fight, and I felt even more cheated. For an ARPG, we could have used more A. To add to this anti-climactic ending, my friend who was playing waited too long before he did anything to the enemy, and the gun hero ended up shooting the bad guy and said “Oops, were you going to do something?”. Essentially taking the game chugging along at 30MPH right into a brick wall.
The “ending”. At the end of the game, after the dream sequence where you are taken through the color changing landscape with some sound bytes that show you coming from where you were as a kid to where you are now in your life, this was an absolutely great idea. It had very similar experience to Shadow of the Colossus, Call of Duty 4′s nuke-death sequence. However, just like the game itself, the thing was over before it started. In the beginning of the game, you were not allowed to run when following the butler in the castle, and this should have had the same sort of speed control. While this did have an impact, I feel the emotional impact to the gamer would have been much stronger had the entire transition period from the dream world to the “grim reality” that is your characters life had lasted another 30-60 seconds, to really let the whole weight of everything that’s happened sink in.
In short, if I could do it again, I would have simply rented this game.
