Fable 2 Feature - Walking the Path of a Hero: Part 1

Posted by Ty Huston on 10.28.2008

And the adventure begins. This is part one a bi-weekly journal entry regarding life in Albion. Spoilers inside, I repeat - SPOILERS inside.

Fable – the name itself sparks controversy in the gaming world. After years of hyperbole and finally the release of the original game, designer Peter Molyneux – best known up until this point for his works with “God games” Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and Black & White - was heavily criticized for over hyping the game due to the long development period and lack of dozens of ideas that he had for the game yet were never implemented.

Released in 2004, Fable received praise for being a fun, quality adventure game yet was met with a horrible stigma thanks to the over eagerness of Molyneux to tell the world of his fantastic ideas and failure to follow through. Now, the highly anticipated sequel has arrived and yet again Molyneux has hyped it to death. It’s time to see if it lives up to the expectations.

As part of reviewing the game, I will be providing a sort of journal where I'll make a couple of entries during my adventure. Here, I’ll give a little insight into how I’ve played the game and what my experiences were like. Unfortunately, I don’t have the set up for taking screenshots of my handy work unlike some other 411 columnists *cough*Oracheski*cough*.





The Beginning

Entering into the world of Albion for the second time, I decided to make a guy (since pretty much every chick you’ll find in roleplaying games online are dudes anyway and I’m not much for cross dressing anymore). You start out, and I’ll make attempts here not to spoil any of the game too much, but you and your sister run around and take care of some errands for people to earn a whopping 5 gold coins which seems like the most incredible amount of money ever until you go through the rest of the game and realize that 5 gold is equal to the cost of toilet paper in Albion even though your sister claims its enough to feed the both of you for a week. In the process, you whip some little kid’s ass for beating up a dog and the dog actually decides you are his new owner.

Anyway, you get the gold and purchase a magical music box which leads to your sister being murdered by a fellow named Lucien who lives in the castle but is or isn’t the king because they really don’t touch on it. If so, he disappears and leaves the kingdom wide open for a rebellion that never happens or he’s just some shlub that gets to live in the castle and research old shit with his sidekick Garth (party on Lucien!) and Lucien figures out that you and/or your sister have some untapped skills of some kind which pisses him off and he shoots your sister dead and then turns to shoot you.

Now, here is an interesting part. Your sister gets capped and she falls in a heap and is dead. D-E-D; dead. You, on the other hand, get shot, fly out a stained glass window and fall what looks like a few hundred feet to the city below and somehow some chick named Theresa (who coincidently has the same name as the sister of the main character in the first game … or is it?) keeps or brings you back to life to fight another day. Seriously.

Fast forward, you’re all grown up and its time to get you some revenge. Theresa has raised you with a band of gypsies (you can’t make this stuff up) and although it would be fucking GOLDEN to have included a gypsy musician who sings Cher’s “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves”, such an awesome thing doesn’t happen. Instead, you go gather a bunch of junk (shovel, sword, crossbow, toilet paper, razor, pack of gum, etc.) – alright, it’s not junk. At least not the gum. You take your new found weaponry and stuff and embark on the quest for your DESTINY!





Questing Away …

At this point, you and your dog (Who is still alive? What the hell?) travel out into Bowerstone Lake to a little island with a mausoleum, enter and embark downward to find swanky new stuff. I fought a bunch of hobbes and such, and at this point I have to say that the combat in this game is really excellent and fluid swapping between weapons and magic. The gun is invaluable, magic works quite well and the hand-to-hand combat is very good. After killing a bunch of mofos and working my way down the thing, I finally discover that this is actually what is left of the Guild of Heroes from the original game. See, apparently the people rose up against the Heroes because they were lazy asses and didn’t help the commoners anymore. Yet, somehow, these mighty Heroes got their asses handed to them and the Guild was destroyed. Amazing.

This puts me toward my next quest, but that, my friends … is for the next installment. See you in a couple of days!

Screenshots
All 17 Fable 2 Screenshots

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