Was Fable II as good as I remember? - An imperfect clone of its predecessor

2008 was a pretty big year for video games we had fallout 3 and gta 4 we had smash bros brawl and the wrath of the lich king expansion for wow there was dead space metal gear solid 4 the force unleashed and quite a few other releases that i wound up burying myself in while i was going through high school but fable 2 was one of the biggest releases for me personally at the time and the most messed up thing about that is that i think i wound up playing fable 1 and 3 more overall i remember enjoying 2 but i also remember spending much less time with it when compared to literally all of those other releases which i mentioned with one i remembered quite a bit about the bigger events with three i remembered my excitement about a good chunk of the mechanics and my disappointment with others but with two i just remember its existence with a handful of bigger occurrences throughout the game so i decided to set out and give it another spin after all this time now my first mistake here was thinking that the game existed on anything besides xbox consoles when i moved to germany i did not bring all of my video game consoles games and paraphernalia with me so i decided that i'd try to emulate it well turns out that the performance is sub-optimal when it comes to emulation so i turned to my trusted friend ebay and bought the game with the console the game language was in german so i bought another copy after realizing that the 360 needs a soldering iron to homebrew it then i wound up buying three different controllers just to get one that fully functioned i also ordered some battery packs and those still haven't arrived but whatever in this video i'm going to cover as much of fable 2 as i can exploring its mechanics giving my thoughts on the storyline and generally giving my feedback on what could have been done better i'll be playing through the entire game and narrating it as i usually do so please stay tuned for that if that tickles your proverbial pickle before i begin i'll note that i stream on twitch.transylvania nearly every monday tuesday and friday actually i'm going to be starting a modded oblivion run here soon so that should be fun alright let's talk about fable 2. so you start out by getting to choose a boy or a girl as lion head figured out the technology to do so somehow the opening for this game actually looks surprisingly good i mean don't get me wrong a lot of the character art and models are still uh but this opening scene looks wonderful for a 13 year old game as the scene concludes the little bird we've been following around takes a dump on the main character's head effectively predicting the developer's own downhill trajectory [Music] oh what was that oh yuck so here we are poor is [ __ ] and huddled around a trash fire my character's sister tells me to squeeze that left trigger which has us focusing on a castle she goes on a bit about how the lord of the castle's wife and kid died before a commotion in part of the town occurs this causes us to follow this oh so wonderfully sparkly trail of gold i'm a big fan of trails and compass markers in my games they make it so that i don't have to think so hard so we follow this trail while the sister gets propositioned to do something for money which isn't defined but judging by her answer it's probably sex with the 10 or so year old girl good start eventually we arrive at this merchant who is selling what he believes to be shitty ordinary things for five gold under the guise of all of them having magical properties this is truly a magical mirror for as long as you look into it it will make you beautiful i'll take it very wise now just remember the magic only works if you look at it in complete darkness when he presents this box which is supposed to grant a single wish the sister calls him out for selling junk craya here then tells us that the box really is magical and then prompts us to raise five gold by performing various tasks in a tutorial like wait a minute this is just fable one's opening but with us being poor as [ __ ] very cool lionhead so yeah we make a gold each by gathering five arrest warrants posing for a photo getting back a drunkard's booze helping some oaf to bypass a girl's mother and shooting down some beetles that are infesting a warehouse obviously the concept of morality makes its debut in this tutorial showcasing the fact that you can gain good or evil karma by performing some of these tasks for example i can smash up the warehouse guy's stock for a mobster-like entity to earn a gold that way instead but without the promise of more pay i really see no reason to do so the main thing that i noticed is how abysmally slow it is for conversations to progress at times like listening in on some of these conversations have me waiting for the next chunk of dialogue to load almost which is definitely annoying it doesn't happen every time but it does happen a fair amount no words shh i think mother heard us you again also the ai pathing in this game is [ __ ] horrendous like good god a lot of the game is horribly dated when it comes to npcs staring into the abyss your character janking out while standing still and stuff like that the game understandably comes from an era where this kind of stuff didn't meet nearly as much scrutiny but man is it hard to overlook at times well eventually i use my gigantic six-head brain encased in my head that's bigger than every other adults in order to cobble together five gold pieces before hauling it to the merchant who gladly parts with what he thinks is junk we make our wish the box spins into orbit and then we go to sleep in a huff after thinking that we got scammed well that night the guard sends us to meet the lord of castle fairfax one lucian when we arrive in the opulent castle the butler escorts us to the lord noting that he hasn't quite been himself since the tragic deaths of his wife and child nothing is elaborated on further as the butler then insists that we do not ask the lord about these mysterious deaths when we enter lord lucian's chambers he asks what happened to the box to which my voiceless character model continues to slightly parkinson's on screen while his sister answers that it disappeared after he made a wish to live in a castle would you kindly stand in the circle please would you kindly get this would you kindly find that would you call it don't do it sister whose name i can't remember every goddamn time so this guy is on the hunt to find heroes except when his magic circle tells him that we are those heroes he suddenly exclaims that one of us is the fourth hero when there were only supposed to be three this leads us to the totally reasonable conclusion of murdering two children well kind of i think he bare knuckle up or cutted my kid out the window seeing as whatever he did caused him to crash through it while he miraculously survives with the help of crea from before who hides him away and promises him vengeance against lucian one day so once again we have the exact same setup from fable1 except for the whole being poor thing 10 years pass and our character's body has grown into his head as theresa proclaims that we are now ready to start on our vengeance quest oh yeah that's probably something worth clearing up the old lady is the original hero's sister from the first game she's gotta be around 500 plus years old at this stage as fable 2 takes place way after fable 1. i just want to clear that up because sometimes i do forget characters in video games and people get upset about that so anyways this is where the game really starts to open up right away you get to rename your dog which has to be close to dead by now i mean let's be honest this dog seems like some kind of bigger dog hybrid mix and those tend to live to be right around i don't know 10 to 15 years old and this dog's been with me for the past 10 years so it's gotta be on death's door you also get to rent out and rest in your first property which is this little wagon thing i've always loved buying up and renting out as much property as i can get my hands on in these games so i'm definitely excited about that bit but beyond this i'm a smelly peasant who's wearing shitty and unattractive clothing so let's go change that my first stop is to head inside this old tomb to transform into a hero or so teresa tells me graphically this game is kind of a laggy mess nearly half the time i'll have points where the game clearly struggles to keep feeding me frames and things are never anywhere near as impressive as the fully rendered opening cutscene which is to be expected these graphical issues become pretty damn hard to ignore at times as if the game was never fully optimized i have heard that it runs better on the xbox one onwards but i didn't want to drop another 100 euros or so to play this game so i guess that's my bad if it does run smoothly on newer consoles but mechanically this game has a minor handful of new features when compared to its predecessor first off verticality seems to be a lot more abundant as you can leap off of different cliff faces and the like for shortcuts the dog itself is great at telling you when you happen to be near some kind of treasure whether it be a simple consumable or a silver key and lastly at least so far you can swim which is kinda neat but i'm also scared of it i don't mind swimming in games hell i enjoy it if it lets me cross a map that i'd otherwise have to walk around but i'm already annoyed with the movement for a lot of this game and adding the rendering of any kind of water physics seems like it's going to melt my xbox 360. so i'm kind of hoping that swimming isn't super prominent but that's where the new and semi-good mechanics end let's circle back to the movement i don't understand how the movement of all things is worse in this game than it was in the last there are so many times in fable 2 where i went to stop at a certain point and my character just keeps moving for another foot or so there are moments where i try to walk around an obstacle or into a door and i just miss i didn't realize it at first but holy [ __ ] how the hell did they mess this up this hard you will need to jump into that hole to continue don't worry the water at the bottom will break so we press onward through albion's fiercest enemy beetles before i arrive at a very familiar chamber adorned with tapestries depicting the exploits of the first game's hero from here i'm directed to activate my hero blood by stepping into the light and now i can spend my experience that i've earned so a lot of this is familiar from the first game with stuff like physique improvements accuracy upgrades and spells which existed previously the differences here are the fact that there's no guile which means no more buying and selling from people for great prices with skill upgrades but there are fighting styles which allow you to learn new moves in combat like blocking rolling flourishing zooming and so on the issue here is that the game's combat is so simple that mastering the combos gained from strength is entirely unnecessary and using the last dextrous style of sub targeting is almost never as good as just spam shooting your gun without manually aiming so a lot of these upgrades are near worthless in general and finally the biggest difference here is the amount of spells in this game and how mana works as in there are 10 less spells in fable 2 than its predecessor and no mana or spell cooldowns which is kind of a little [ __ ] up on the surface at first i was a little bit upset about the lesser amount of spells until i realized that the magic system in this game condensed nearly every single spell into less spells overall still i hardly ever used magic with the way that i play the game the only spell that i really tended to gravitate towards was time control which now doubles as the assassin rush from the first game if i choose to hold down a direction on the control stick instead of flat casting it as an aoe it's a pretty interesting way to squash down many of the 18 spells from the first game while still retaining many of their effects though i do have to say that i wish they would have experimented a little more with some new spells in general i mean there still isn't any ice or water element to them maybe something that makes enemies do less damage or take more damage something along those lines but what i really don't get is the lack of mana i mean [ __ ] great news for me if i decide to cast spells non-stop it certainly feels more heroic i guess but man doesn't make the game easy at times when you can just spam cast spells with no consequence oh well from here we're to make it back to the camp which has us taking out bandits and the like after taking out the bandit leader i collect his head and the renown which comes with it effectively beginning my journey as a hero in an age which had long forgotten about heroes after reaching bowerstone market a lot more opens up with how you can interact with people and properties as with the last game you can charm and marry or intimidate and cause fear in the various citizens of albion and this of course as always comes with a bevy of potentially hilarious effects like if you're highly attractive and cheat on your spouse you're a lot more likely to be forgiven for it also you can divorce your spouse but it gives you a load of evil karma but if you kill them you get less than that and if you propose to someone who already has a spouse their spouse and kids just poof away when you set a marital home it's ridiculously goofy and i enjoy it a lot property management on the other hand is a whole other can of worms stuff like renown economy and decoration all affect property value in this game there are a lot of properties to sink your teeth into from tiny one-room shacks to market stalls to posh and upscale homes in a castle it might be one of my favorite things to do in this game just buying up properties and renting them out to gain more money but in order to get to that point we gotta make some money which is where jobs come in obviously you've got the average bounty jobs assassination contracts and slave rescue jobs but you also have blacksmithing wood cutting and bartending each one has its own mini-game attached with a blacksmithing opening up the soonest this job gets pretty tough when your multiplier gets high enough as the little dot moves pretty damn quickly across the screen but it's well worth it to focus on it for a bit for money it's monotonous but the money that you rack up is addicting especially once you continue grabbing up stars on your way to becoming a 5 star blacksmith plus it's even more impressive when you pull off a job in a chicken suit because those forges get [ __ ] hot the whole thing is a simultaneously boring and fun endeavor which has me addicted to earning money buying property and snatching up better clothing in order to woo more people i just wish the actual bar during the mini-game was consistent because sometimes i swear i hit the green bit and it just whiffs and other times i'll whiff the bar completely and still make the strike the other games are just as tedious and boring with the bartending job being my favorite of the bunch mostly because i could just watch a video while i'm doing it though it is worth noting that you gain extra money with smithing if you have a bigger physique which is a nice touch the whole money making process is a weird mesh of like and dislike for me personally and it has me unable to imagine this game without it so after screwing around for a while and buying up property i meet up with teresa who explains to me that with great power comes great responsibility and how my actions are actions and all that fun [ __ ] she then directs me to a foggy jpeg in the distance which transitions into a cutscene in which she explains that our boy lucian really wants to raise an ancient tower known as the spire which was initially constructed by the ruler of albion to bend reality to their will by harnessing all magic on the planet which definitely seems like a solid plan well somehow it wasn't as the spire exploded with magic wiping out the ancient peoples of albion before this era's peoples got back to where they are now yeah for some reason lucian wants that to happen again or let's be honest we know one thing about the guy and one thing only he lost his wife and child so he probably wants to bend them back into existence or obliterate everyone trying yeah i'm not gonna lie i'm liking fable one's villain a lot better so far but we'll see if this is salvageable or not so yeah the reason why lucian killed my sister and tried to kill me was because the heroes are the only ones that can stop him so now i'm to gather the three other heroes and take a fine look at sticking our collective boot up his ass after making my character look like a total [ __ ] which people love by the way i set out to oakfield to track down a lead on our first hero i gotta say i really love when a game lets you dye your clothing with purchasable dies and this game might have been one of the earliest adopters of that system though quite a few of them seem to be nearly the same shade to my eye despite being called different things and i only ever seem to find grays blues light purples and browns not reds yellows greens and so on it's also worth noting that there are some pretty handy features in the menu such as the game noting particular sales or price increases on select shops and allowing you to set that shop as your destination while fast traveling to its closest waypoint i enjoy that quite a lot and it complements the game's time progression system in that the traveling takes hours or days depending on how close or far your destination is so i head off to oakfield after discovering that the slum which my character grew up in is now the nicest part of town according to the dopey sheriff which i helped at the beginning of the game i mean i don't believe the guy as far as that goes seeing as it's still a pretty poor area but it's definitely been fixed up since i was a kiddo and new commerce has moved in and all that great exploration in fable 2 is a mixed bag on one hand you're bound to find a variety of treasures if you explore off the beaten path and decide to go in the opposite direction of your handy-dandy golden chem trail but on the other hand much of the time you're rewarded with a few handfuls of gold which you could earn by doing a job in a matter of seconds and more importantly you can usually only go so far before the game forcibly cuts you off a prime example of this was when i decided to run through this mining area instead of beelining it to oakfield sure i found some gold and a bandit outfit but when i finally do head to oakfield the abbott here wants me to prove myself by earning more renown before he'll let me continue on with the main quest this means heading back to the mine which is now suddenly teeming with bandits and following the exact same trail effectively making my exploration efforts earlier a fruitless endeavor overall it makes me not want to explore at all until i get all of the questing out of the way which is kinda sad so my renowned gathering endeavors basically involve me sidequesting and exploring around which i don't mind because there are quite a few side quests in this game which are semi-entertaining for example the first one that i do involves me getting a girl to fall in love with me then giving her a harshly worded rejection note so that i can avenge a heartbroken ghost who presumably had the same kind of thing done to him when he was still alive the problem is that the lady who i'm supposed to be doing this to isn't someone who's super callous and mean she's actually really torn up about the guy killing himself right after she got cold feet because she was so young i can actually choose between rejecting her anyway or actually marrying her and i go for the latter here so i can begin my wife collection so back to the abbott who now recognizes me as someone important and continues to showcase the brutal divide between the cool mechanic of the game actually slowing your walk speed down to match his pace while you walk with him and the incredibly horrid ai pathing as he takes four different cracks at trying to figure out how to exit the two-person wide door the abbott then explains that he's trying to perform a ritual to keep some big ass tree watered or some other such mystical thing but that he needed to send his daughter as she's the strongest monk that they have so i'm to accompany his daughter into this dangerous area in order to keep her safe and accomplish our goal of course teresa points out that this daughter of his is our first hero and she definitely looks the part this massive brick house of a woman compliments my character in that her head shrank while her body grew as opposed to my head starting out at a huge size in my body growing into it this massive mama is hannah and her job is to carry around this gigantic jug so that we can water the golden acorn she wants to smash faces in but her religious ways prevent her from doing so let's see if we can change that so we head off on our jug filling journey this has me standing on a switch while hannah fills the jug and protecting her from these hollow men who spawn from the wisps which circle the area i don't understand bonus experience in this game it seems to be completely random and yet the game gives you a varying compliment depending on how well you fought like you get a compliment like outstanding fight and maybe a plus 200 xp bonus but sometimes you'll get like plus 197 or plus 198 or whatever and the fight went exactly the same way to my knowledge i thought it was something along the lines with how quickly you killed combined with the amount of times that you get hit but i also got hit by a beetle once and wound up getting a plus 250 bonus for some reason it just seems like i'm spinning a wheel every time i fight who knows what's on the other side yes dog where are you going you think he's all right hannah put your full weight on the switch so that we can follow okay i'm getting worried now hannah how how are you even lifting the gate only a tiny amount doesn't make any sense but anyways we grab the water and watch hannah figure out doorways before we eventually arrive at the final chamber where a monk comes flailing in after an absurd amount of waiting time he exclaims that hannah's father is being held at gunpoint by one of lucian's men and so hannah brandishes the hammer that she's always wanted to use to bash people's faces in with and then runs off to confront the armed man i can only hear the sound of a gunshot and hannah crying out before i make it just in time to watch hannah bludgeon the guy to death in one hit and that's how hannah became known as hammer the hero of strength teresa then intercepts her after her father's funeral to escort her back to the hall of heroes not a bad story so far but i think it's high time we upgrade our gear before carrying on with it fantastic i hope you can sustain this performance how perfectly statuesque so after getting kitted out with my big pink hammer i head back to teresa and the other big hammer not much happens in the way of hammer doing anything else besides staying behind but teresa does fill me in on the hero of will garth garth is someone that we very briefly encountered at the start of the game in lucian's castle as he brushed silently past us despite being greeted by the butler but apparently lucian didn't know that he was a hero at the time and garth didn't know that lucian was [ __ ] insane when they each found out these missing gaps of info about one another they wound up getting into a violent conflict which apparently ended with both of them still alive oh boy i gotta check my hero stats and see what i can claim [Music] my wife wants sex every time i look at her stat block but always tells me that it's a biological imperative every time i move to intercept and it's really [ __ ] with my self-esteem this has nothing to do with the hero of will but i'm probably gonna sacrifice her at some point because of it anyways on my way to brightwood i fight bandits find a condom buried in the dirt and continue to look like discount russell crowe then a triangle floats lazily across the sky before dropping a platoon of enemies with all the intimidation factor and testicular fortitude of default metal gear solid guards i seek you see my way up to garth who's blocked off by wood that's on fire before he gets lightning to weigh into the pink floyd album and i have to head back to the heroes guild with my dick in my hand when i arrive back at the guild it's determined that the best course of action is to extract info from lucian's old butler who wants a thousand gold for his private diary which he buried somewhere out in the sticks these sticks have been inhabited by a forest troll which is a mini boss fight which has me shooting the weak points of the troll while it beats the [ __ ] out of my dog so i finished john wicking its ass before obtaining the illegible diary to get the thing translated guess what back to the guild at least i can fast travel well with the xbox 360 load times it's more of a medium travel but you get it so we get the translation when teresa uses the force to read the runic symbols which grants us the intel that lucian is recruiting his men from the winners of the westcliff crucible so my female companion and i are to holy [ __ ] this is just fable one's plot but slightly altered i mean it was a half joke at first but now it's starting to become gratingly similar so yeah we gotta go fight in the crucible in order to get recruited by lucian on my way to westcliff i stumble upon an xp potion trader and inadvertently discover how to potion dupe so this game is pretty laggy i mean you had to have seen that by now for some reason you have to down each potion one at a time this means pausing the game going to the items going to the potions and drinking the potion you have to do this every single time for every single potion i decided that i was going to pause and drink as fast as i could and then absorb all of the xp after well since my mind has been sufficiently dulled by the menus in this game i didn't realize this at first but if you pause the game right after downing a consumable the consumable is still in your inventory this means that you can consume it again and again actually the most times that i can consume something before the game actually removed the potion from my inventory was three but still i basically down multiple high level potions for a load of xp right on the spot hey if it still hasn't been patched i'm just using metastrats man so i wind up taking down some bandit leader for a farmer before meeting up with hammer to go kick some ass down the coastline we're basically the super hammer brothers with this setup and the fact that there's no mana in this game and no cooldowns on spells makes this whole process way easier than it already was [Music] the road to west cliff gets a little more perilous as we enter balvarine country which has us finding a woman whose husband was killed by one while her son ran off or got kidnapped or something so we escort her to a place known simply as the howling halls while i continue to make my character fatter and fatter well turns out that the lady that we're escorting is actually a white balverine which seems to be the mother of all the other fuzz balls around here so we kicked their asses before heading out to find ourselves in the [ __ ] of west cliff which seems to be a gigantic bandit holdout they're not hostile they're just [ __ ] i wind up doing some shooting range stuff upgrading my weapons and giving some dope 5000 gold to start some reconstruction efforts or the like around here before heading into the crucible to beat some cheeks [Music] so the crucible works pretty much just like it did in the last game except with the twist that you move through eight rooms to get to the end as opposed to fighting in the same arena every time there's also a trader room for potions and the like every three rooms which was unnecessary but welcome of course mf doom doesn't make another appearance at the end it's just the thing instead so i take out the last room and i'm ready to move into the floating triangle at last now at this stage the game tells me that if i have any side quests which need doing now's the time which is strange because this is rather quick but at the same time i'm close to hitting max and a lot of the skills that i want so maybe this game's just pretty short either way it's side questing time so let's start with one of my favorite parts of any fable game demon doors god i love these things they're just so unique and creepy and cool it's the reason why i went full chunk mode for the crucible so that i could maintain my corruption level for one of the doors unfortunately there are six less demon doors in the second game than the first which really sucks but oh well i got my first one done a while back as you might have noticed from the hammer appearing on my back at one point that one was pretty simple in that all i had to do was to blow the door a kiss for it to let me into its pretty nice home area and most of the rest are pretty easy also involving stuff like kicking a chicken into the door's mouth performing dog tricks the aforementioned high corruption and playing a loot the remaining four ranged from tedious to annoying as i had to gather up a bunch of expressions to put on a play escort 10 followers safely through a dangerous area eat some cheese dress up a certain way and have a haircut that matches all that and the last one involves me opening every other demon door rewards tend to be pretty good and involves stuff like pretty slick weapon augments large-scale potions a health bar extension a handful of nice weapons and a load of gold but the settings inside the doors were always the biggest thing for me you never know what you're going to see on the other side of the door and the results nearly always have me looking around and admiring the scene i think my personal favorites were this arid desert with beached ships the desaturated memory lane that reminded me of hyrule castle in wind waker and my favorite door from any fable game the winter lodge demon door [Music] of course i couldn't do all of them at the stage i was at in the game but i kind of wanted to pair all of them together in one part of the video rather than continuing to bring them up throughout there are other miscellaneous things to do besides side questing these take place in the form of collecting silver keys from the last game to open various chests scattered throughout albion and shooting down these gargoyle heads which talk [ __ ] to you nearly every time you get near them i have never been a fan of either i mean the keys are whatever i guess but the gargoyle heads drive me crazy because they're so damn hard to spot at the stunning 720p that the game is presented in even when they start taunting me to tell me that they're nearby still i actually wound up shooting down about 40 or so without actively looking for them as them talking [ __ ] does give them away the keys tend to reward augments gold and other miscellaneous items which gold is a joke at this stage with my real estate mogul thing going on it's actually funny because you can open every single chest besides the last one if you collect 20 keys and the last chest that takes 50 keys contains 50 000 gold but you have to spend 1 million gold to even access it which is the stupidest thing that i've ever heard the gargoyles on the other hand reward more of the same with the final reward being a legendary crossbow and an augment which again you'll gain access to after beating the vanilla game so it's a lot like the sword of aeons in fable one i've never been a big fan of artificially extending a game like this and the keys and heads are no exception beyond doors gargoyles and keys are the actual side quests which aren't super abundant one of them has me slaying 100 undead which die in one shot so i was just blind firing away for that one something to note here is that there are these expression statue things which are kind of fun like you have to perform the expression which would make someone react with what the statue is reacting with or you have to mimic the expression of the statue depending on which flavor of statue that you get i didn't understand what the point of it was at first but i believe this little skill shooting thing was unveiled because of it which ultimately led me to a chest which was sorely underwhelming the next quest unfortunately cuts off a portion of the game before i realized it so it turns out that the chapel of scorm has now been resurrected in another location known as the temple of shadows in this game oh i can't believe you did that it was still alive that that is the finest thing i've ever seen and this coming from someone who never misses torture tuesdays anyway yes welcome to the temple you have entered a venerable society of dark worship with a long history of wicked deeds and a progress transgression fridays is poker night and i was going to come back at some point after going full lightside to start sacrificing and seeing what the temple was all about but a quest popped up stating that members of the temple of shadows were now attacking the temple of light i figured that this would be the final step in maxing out my good boy points but didn't realize that this would permanently end the temple of shadows which really sucks i mean i kinda figured when the leader was in the final chamber that this would be the case but still it kind of sucks because i really wanted to do the whole spin to win sacrifice wheel i thought that maybe i could still do the sacrificing myself but no dice there so instead i'll run through what each of these fun options do without showing it so the top option here gives the old electrocution treatment this one over here probably turns them into stone and that one's definitely incineration there's no way it's not incineration this one turns them into the opposite sex which is less of a death sentence but still super [ __ ] up that one turns them into a shadow or something this one over here is like the shadow one but chicken that one impales them and finally we got the good old-fashioned french special it's worth noting that before we take off those diary pages of lucians actually do exist in my inventory they aren't particularly revolutionary in terms of developing his character but they do expand on the process that he put himself through so yeah his wife and kid died somehow and he couldn't accept it so he set out to study the ancient runes and what not of albion's rulers of the past he notes that those rulers didn't seem to be happy to accept the idea of death either so he took that as encouragement eventually he found the runes of the spire alongside garth who was an integral part of getting all of this to happen so they started to try to raise it from its watery grave in the ocean which they did by recruiting crucible winners and collaring them with some kind of enslavement technology well it soon became clear that forcing them to work this way wasn't the best for morale as different rebellions started to occur including a point where a couple of workers committed suicide by jumping off the spire at this point lucian is completely obsessed with getting the spire up and running and he figures that skilled labor isn't as important as sheer numbers but even that doesn't seem to be quick enough for him so he set about finding heroes to hopefully enslave or use instead that led to the night where he murdered the main character's sister which is where the diary ends alright time to head off to save garfield i gather up hammer and we head to the docks before having to hand over my weapons and dog to the hulking female the cutscene that plays out is actually pretty damn cool i really like the architecture of this thing with the galleon that i'm on moving on a single lane into the spire so now myself and a group of other people who have come to work here willingly are escorted roughly by lucian's men toward the center i'm gonna hold my tongue for now but i'm probably going to explode in a moment so out comes lucian who begins spouting on about the world being corrupt and how the spire is the key to curing that corruption then he knocks us out [Music] morning maggot welcome to the spire hope you like it because you're never leaving it's the prison sequence from the first game it's the [ __ ] prison sequence okay at this stage this has to be intentional right this is absolutely insane let me google this nope doesn't seem like anyone ever said yes this is intentional that we put the exact same story structure in both games what the [ __ ] look i get that writing can be hard but to me this is a slap in the face like i know that some people don't care about [ __ ] like this and at its core fable has always been more about the mechanics of making your guy the way that you want him to be playing him the way that you want and treating others the way that you want that's completely fine but god you're telling me that you couldn't come up with more than the character's family dies then he awakens his powers then he has to win the support of other heroes then he fights in an arena then he goes to prison i mean for the love of god even my guy's head is completely shaven like the first game despite other new recruits getting to keep their hair would it be so hard for your guy to awaken his powers immediately go and find lucian in act 1 kill him and then spend the rest of the game dealing with other heroes the way that he wants like imagine you gain everything that lucian's been working on you find out that there are other heroes out there and that the jack of blades has been resurrected into something seemingly harmless he encourages you to meet these other heroes and either push them into being more ruthless and evil or benevolent and holy in this case hammer would be the hardest one to push into being evil and the hero of skill would be the hardest one to push into being holy and then when you finally build your empire of either good or evil the jack of blades reveals his true form after using the spire and your own efforts against you he seizes control of the other heroes and you have to defeat them all in combat either killing or sparing them in the process i mean yeah some stuff would have to be workshopped but that [ __ ] was at the very top of my head and took me a good two minutes to spin up it brings continuity between the games without one being an outright copy of the other i just can't stand this laziness and it's a travesty to me that this is the story that we got hell i would say i can't even relate to my character in fable 2 as much just because of how much of a blank slate that he is there's hardly any focus on his reactions to things whereas fable1 constantly had your character falling to his knees or showing signs of remorse or aggression or whatever the game has happening at the time i don't know i just really despise how stupidly this game is written at least so far i mean maybe it'll save itself but i highly doubt it i have to ask this at this stage do you guys think that fable 3 is worth covering i mean i had good memories of two but they're slowly being consumed by incompetence at this point i've heard so many people state that fable 3 was easily the worst game in the trilogy of games and at this stage i'm afraid to do it i don't know what do you think should i skip it anyways so yeah i'm told that my life is hell now and that i must obey those above me i'm apparently a guard of the other prisoners so at least there's that i meet garth in one of the cells who telepathically tells me that unless i can get the exploding saw collar off my neck that i can't save him so i report to my superior who makes me thank him for hitting me and then has me beg him to stop of course you get the option not to if you want to resist your tormentor but i just want to get this [ __ ] over with i imagine that lionhead thought this whole process would make the player feel some kind of indignity some kind of drive for revenge down the line against their aggressors but i really don't feel that at all because this entire experience is a mirror of the first game's prison sequence so 38 weeks pass and my hair is still shaven clean which means that i'm doing it myself or someone else is doing it to me for some reason in this leg of the journey i have to choose whether to starve prisoners or pull the magic feeding levers on their cells i decide that i'm going to feed them before realizing that disobeying means that i straight up lose experience [ __ ] that [ __ ] so i watched the rest of them starve and gain like 150 or so evil points which is a drop in the bucket with how good i am so whatever now we're on week 137 i i think still shaven i imagine my multiple wives probably miss me it is worth noting that these collars eventually drain away memories if you disobey enough as displayed by the other new recruit that i met at the beginning going from non-stop talking about his wife to forgetting that he had one this time i have to kill that guy who forgot about his wife since he's now a mumbling husk when i go to equip the cutlass for this task instead of simply taking it into my inventory i automatically strike the overseer so i lose xp at this stage i say [ __ ] it and i hit the guy a couple more times which has me losing 13 000 or so xp which is horseshit i mean isn't fable supposed to be about crafting your character the way that you want so if you're playing an evil guy this is like the easiest non-factor cutscene ever there is no downside for you you're just being your character but good characters get punished which severely upsets the balance and goes from the game being neutral about big events like these and makes it geared way more towards being good as the correct route with personal sacrifices i mean this has been an issue in nearly every fable game to my knowledge the big bad villains tend to be well evil and you're against them as either the greater evil or the good guy your punishment here only reinforces that being good takes a toll and that it'll all be worth it by the end what these games need is two antagonists per game or one that shifts between being good and evil the way that you do that way the impact of you being good or evil really does change more than just the ending cutscene as far as the story is concerned so anyways the guy winds up sith lightning the guy on the ground because that's evil right and then several years pass i guess they really committed to the prison scene this time bigger and bolder that's what fable 2 is about baby so anyways it's back to the overseer guy again who tells me to check in on someone who was supposed to be torturing garth or something while garth killed the guy and proceeds to knock my collar off which means it's finally time to get the hell out of here i wind up killing the overseer and his men before garth absorbs their life juices to become useful again and then he blows up all of the ships save one and we hightail it out of the spire before getting back to oakfield it's here that we learned from teresa that i had spent 10 [ __ ] years in that shitty tower of course my dog is still alive at the ripe age of 22 or so so looks like we got a good breed still as spry as ever too then again it changes appearance based off of your character's morality i believe so it's probably just magic and my wives are still waiting for me so polygamy quest is still a go well there's a decent chunk to do now that i'm back firstly westcliff is no longer a pile of [ __ ] turns out that that 5000 gold investment that i dropped before i left has paid off as the place is now a bustling town of commerce which of course i promptly buy up not a huge amount of actually decent housing unfortunately but there is a single prostitute now which is a great sign for the town's health beyond this there are a couple more quests which i can grab on the side before meeting up with hammer the first one has me returning to the temple of light which has really seen some slick upgrades during my absence i meet up with a person who has clearly lost their mind who goes on to explain that hobbes have moved into their cave so i go to clear them out while discovering via journal entries that the person escaped from the temple of shadows before hiding out in this cave they stumbled upon the hobbs who treated them like one of their own so they eventually lost their mind completely while becoming more and more hob-like in behavior all while killing and eating people alongside the hobbs this whole thing was meant to be a trap which i obviously wind up foiling at the end the person runs in to attack me themselves before dying in one hit it's actually not too bad of a little side quest the next quest has me trying to find a suitable woman for a farmer's son the issue is that the sun is gay which leads into a quest with a particularly poor taste option like yeah you can go find him a guy instead which is fine i guess but the evil side to this quest is setting him up with a woman which is [ __ ] it's not so much a woman it's more of a well a man really what a man of course i should have known i mean the way you ran out on sonia and there was me thinking she didn't fancy you are you kidding she was all over me i had to fight her off with a rake i had heard she was a bit forward that's why i set you up with her oh dad it was the most traumatic night of my life so you really don't like girls whatever you choose the man winds up selling his farm and moving out to the city with his son after his son comes out to him and tells his dad that he has no interest in farming and now it's time to meet up with hammer to discuss the next move actually it'll probably be more of a mini reunion type thing seeing as the real info is probably going to come from garth and teresa i imagine and sure enough it's more of hammer talking at my voiceless character about how long it's been before teresa mind whispers me to tell me to check out how the land is changed in my absence so i run off to buy the temple of light before teresa tells me to meet with everyone at the old tomb turns out that hammer has completed her 10-year reconnaissance of getting drunk and asking about the hero of skill before determining that our last hero is named reaver he's actually a pirate who's a genius when it comes to pulling off impossible shots against enemy ships i like this background a lot but we'll see how he develops when we actually meet him so the main issue here is that he's in a port town called bloodstone which is surrounded by the hellscape of wraith marsh so to get to this marsh we have to take a teleport thing from brightwood which involves fighting off a metric load of lucian's men as garth tries to get the portal open eventually i enter it but some malfunction knocks me out then some old [ __ ] runs over to my body and puts me in a cage which is stupid on multiple levels you'd think that a hero who's as built as i am would be able to escape a rickety old wagon first of all and second of all this old dude goes ah yes bloodstone is horrible it should be burnt to the ground anyways now i'm gonna burn you instead and then the fog gets really heavy all around us and he decides i need to be in that [ __ ] right now he dies from banshees i imagine before my dog runs over and grabs his key to free me why was this old dude even in the marsh it's not as if he had any wits about him to survive it there's no other civilization in the marsh that actually lives i don't know the whole scene is injected into this game for the sake of oh look how scary this place is and nothing more so now i'm stuck in this godforsaken swamp hoping to claw my way out to bloodstone on my way through louisiana i encounter a couple of banshees which are invincible until you dispatch their minions and tire them out plus a troll which doesn't notice me shooting at it for a while the coolest part about this swamp is the ruins of oakvale which has been swallowed by the swamp after the town was destroyed a second time after the events of the first game so what do you think a town would look like when it's surrounded by ghost-infused swamp exactly what bloodstone looks like this place is a dump people are screaming the infrastructure is decaying and prostitutes litter the street but at least the homes in bloodstone are bigger than they are in westcliff which share the same size as my apartment of course with new area comes new side quests which has me helping a guy who claims to want to make bloodstone a better place but then he has me steal some meat some wine and a pie from people around town for him to perform a sacred ritual with the crowning jewel to this ritual is a single prostitute which was already following me around to tell me how god damn impressive i am after this someone tells me that old toby here might be taking me for a ride so i knock on his door until he opens it and then i bark at him like a dog for two minutes straight [Applause] this understandably frightens the tobester into leaving town once and for all there are actually quite a lot of side quests which have opened up now so let's run through them quickly before we get to reaver so the first one after the whole toby escapade has to do with a granny who lost her grandchild after they ran off which sounds suspiciously like a side quest in the first game this time around though the grandchild appears to be in his 30s or so and is taking a crack at being an adventurer unfortunately for him his treasure has already been taken by two guys from earlier these two guys were the ones who caused the undead to rise from their graves earlier in bowerstone using the treasure in question known as the normanomicon after successfully escorting the grandchild to safety it's actually time to go find these two again to see what trouble they've gotten themselves into now well almost when i head back to bowerstone i'm promptly blackmailed by someone for 2000 gold which is absolutely nothing if i don't do this the blackmailer will tell one of my wives about the other wives well [ __ ] i've only collected six wives so far but this is starting to get hairy still i do it for the good of the video anyways so these goofuses have made their way to wraith marsh while unleashing a powerful banshee which floated over the bloodstone and killed specifically my wife so now we're down to five god damn this backwards progress at least i reported them to their mother who forces them to be bakers after this unfortunate incident and next up we got a doozy so this crazy [ __ ] out in bowerstone cemetery is experimenting with body parts as you do he wants you to grab some very specific parts from a cave away from here so i head through the hop nest and lo and behold we find lady gray from the first game's lower body hot so yeah this guy wants to res her because he read up on her and fell in love so now i gotta get her torso and head to get her working again this takes us through twinblade's tomb which is pretty damn cool i don't know why i'm like this but boy do i like references to older games the tomb itself is pretty straightforward and while i wish there was some kind of cool item of twin blades in his coffin i'll settle for the three silver keys a gargoyle head in the torso the head on the other hand is in a different tomb smack in the middle of the rich part of bowerstone so i head down to where wolnir typically resides and grab her head while fighting off beetles when i get back to our guy he sticks her in an electro coffin before explaining that he isn't an incel and that he simply fell in love with her after seeing a picture of her you know completely average he also notes that this reanimation process is infused with a love spell to make her fall in love with him of course when she does get reanimated she sees me first so she falls in love with me to which the guy tells me to leave immediately so that he can re-target the spell his way the good ending to this quest is leaving the evil ending is staying which i found a bit odd this dude just forced this lady to fall in love with him after she just woke up but that's the good karma route then again i've already got a plethora of wives so i guess i can give her up so while you can proceed to marry her if you stay i decide to let him do whatever with her so i can buy the mansion from him after he leaves it this whole quest was okay a lot of busy work with allusions to mary shelley's frankenstein i could take it or leave it to be honest but it is worth noting that i'm completely maxed out as far as strength and skill experience goes at this stage i know i've been doubling or tripling up on a lot of my xp potions but i do think it spells out that there's some kind of fundamental issue with the experience system in this game i mean realistically even without the glitch i could have kept hitting up shops every time they restock across albion for potion after potion there isn't a limited quantity it would just take longer to do so really the glitch just saves me time and i'm not even through the third act the side quest the final bit or the dlc and i'm just totally jacked on strength and skill it just doesn't seem like a great way to even out your perk system and i wish that buying out all of the abilities in one category would unlock some kind of master abilities that were worth grinding towards even if they were a million xp each it would lend a lot towards continuing to collect those little bubbles of xp anyways after buying up the mansion a mini quest unlocks which has you spelunking through a crypt which you gain the key to upon the mansion's purchase basically you head to the end of it while a ghostly voice tells you to turn back when you get to the chest at the end there's one of the most valuable gemstones and albion within it now i don't care about money at this stage i mean i have nearly a million gold just from having the console off for a day since you do make money while you're not playing the game so i don't need this rock but after picking it up and going to leave the ghostly voice explains to you that the gem is what's binding the hollow men to this realm and that taking it would put them through eternal torment then i get 30 evil points what there wasn't even slightly an implication that this would happen which is kind of stupid i mean it doesn't really matter all that much but given the option i would have put it back hell i even tried to but no dice there oh well okay so we got a couple side quests left first off we head to rook ridge inn to complete a quest called trolls are stupid which of course showcases how poorly designed the troll enemies are then we go on a treasure hunt i'm not gonna lie i'm getting pretty annoyed with most of these quests like okay so they're not bad per se like i have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to money experience and fame and these quests aren't bringing enough to the table story-wise to make me really enjoy them so when you have me go on some pirates of the caribbean theme park ride so that i can fight some ghost pirates and press a switch and get a lever and commandeer a ship to sail it to treasure island i'm not super enthralled the 10 chests on the island accumulate to 15 000 gold and i make 20 000 every 5 minutes just from passive income i don't know i think i'm just at the end of my rope with filler content in this game so let's hit the last thing that i want to scope out before just getting to reaver finally so heading back to the tower where we initially went to rescue garth from yields the fact that we can now purchase that tower with this purchase comes a note from garth stating that there is something wrong with the bed at the top of the tower after jumping down a well which leads us through a mini dungeon and a kick-ass sword at the other end i decide to take a rest up in the tower bed when i wake up i'm the big headed child version of myself with my weapon still intact i don't have any access to any of my other weapons items clothing or quests and i can only follow this nightmare realm to its end well the first thing we run into is a chest which talks to us stating that its name is chesty and that its hobby is killing people oh boy well chesty wants to be our super best friend which means killing us so that we can stay here forever he does that the only way that the game knows how to by sending beetles hubs hollow men a banshee and some balvarines at us the best part about this quest is the environment and the feeling but again there's nothing super satisfying about the gameplay no twist where you have to run away from the enemies to get to safety nothing where you can kill a bunch of hobs only for their corpses to turn into human villagers lying on the ground after no innovations on the basic kill everything formula which the game has thrown at you repeatedly which is really sad it just feels like a squandered opportunity after such a cool setup alright so it's finally time to meet our pirate friend who's a lot more well spoken than you might have assumed based off of his description yeah he's pompous and arrogant but he's also pretty insightful and cunning everything he does seems to benefit him which he promptly makes apparent when he states that he knows why you're here and that you can do him a favor before he'd be willing to join you of course this favor revolves around returning an ancient tablet to wraith marsh so that's great be careful there is more to this task than riva lets on yeah no [ __ ] as soon as he said he wanted something returned to the citizens of wraith marsh i knew this was going to be a hellish ordeal so we're off to the shadow court which was said to be the cause of oakville getting annihilated showing up to this court reveals that river has actually been sending people with this seal down here to give their youth to him so as to keep him young the twist is that there's a woman down here who sounds like she got here through an unfortunate series of events probably revolving around tweedledee and tweedledum messing around with the normanomicon again so i consented to have her youth zapped instead which is the evil route obviously now i do remember doing that before because let's be honest it's easy to flip between good and evil in this game and taking that 50 point hit is no problem but i wanted to see what would happen to my character if i were to take the punishment myself well after the game stops lagging it's revealed that my character is now uglier and more wrinkled with white hair and red eyes actually it looks kinda cool like i went through quite a bit of this game building up my cash stockpile by being corrupt as [ __ ] so my face kinda looked like this before except with jaundice eyes so this is actually the way cooler look i know this is supposed to be a punishment but it ain't all that bad when the sacrifice concludes the council notes that if these intermittent sacrifices do happen to stop that they would come after reaver so either our pirate friend is completely okay with sending people off or he's learned to accept it to save his own skin i'm gonna guess it's the former but let's go have a chat with him to find out after i dye my hair well i'm told by teresa via the force that this is the end of the game more or less if i do choose to run in and give reaver a piece of my mind which if you think about it without side quests this game is really short with them it's probably about two to three times as long well kind of it's not just the side quests it's the villager interactions the demon doors the other side bits but yeah kind of interesting i forgot it ended this quickly anyways i'm told to finish up any lingering side quests which i basically have zero of besides the dlc now i'm almost 100 sure that i can do the dlc after the game concludes because it wouldn't make any sense for this to not be the case in fact upon doing a little research it seems like some of it can be done fully before the game concludes but some of it can only be completed right after so let's finish this thing and hit the dlc afterwards so you roll up on reever who seems completely unconcerned with your new aged appearance he then states that lucian offered him a heap of gold if reaver turned me over to which reaver obviously obliged being the piece of [ __ ] that he is then lucian's men attacked the town looking for both of us so we escaped through reaver's escape tunnels okay i have so many issues with this that i don't even know where to start first off why wouldn't lucian wait until reaver captured me and marched me to him before attacking us both or why wouldn't he wait for us to fight and weaken each other before moving in he literally had us both where he wanted us secondly in a game where player agency is king a game where you can kill people in hideous ways or stand up for them and sacrifice yourself for greater good why can you not choose to turn on reaver i mean the guy just flat out told you how big of a piece of [ __ ] he is why can i not choose to kill him i know that the game wants to tell its story but is it really that hard to include an alternative i mean say you get ready to kill him and teresa warns you that it'll be near impossible to take down lucien without reavers help and you can still do it but the game's difficulty spikes because of it it just seems ludicrously silly to just follow the guy without question when a bunch of men with the caliber of cardboard show up to capture you even a choice to go face them alone while reaver flees would have been preferable here and finally i despise the one-dimensional nature of reaver it is so easy to write these one-note characters this one selfish this one smart this one's strong and likes drinking at least with the last two we got some insight into why they fight i mean i guess reaver fights for himself but for the most part we get a guy who on the very surface is just an [ __ ] who is vain and self-absorbed had the devs given him some redeeming quality any redeeming quality i'd be more content to follow him in this sequence some kind of secret reason why he fights some kind of background information as to how he got to be the way he is just anything like that i mean with hammer you got the whole deal with her dad and how she basically rose up to be a hero because of it with garth you got the fact that he was a scholar who tried to help lucian because he just wanted to do that kind of thing before figuring out that lucian was insane and that this was all wrong but with reaver the way things stand i really don't want to escape with a guy that has the character of a piece of paper that has the word greedy written on it so eventually we get through the cave while river tells me how he has a limited production weapon and continues to harp on how great he is apparently the game plan for the writers here was to create a truly unlikable character outside of the escape tunnel we meet garth and hammer who join us as lucian sends in a shard to destroy reaver's escape plan and so we fight in another uninspired fight before the shard goes down and teresa introduces herself to reaver the prick continues to go on about how he doesn't care about the fate of the world until theresa points out that if there is no one to sacrifice that he can't keep the shadow council off his back so he reluctantly joins us for our final foray against lucian when we assemble on hero hill everyone takes their place and gives me their spirit bomb energy so that i can glow then teresa disappears and lucian shows up to capture everyone with just him and i left standing he monologues something very important at me your wife and children are dead no which ones was it the rich family how dare you do you know how much a forever ink costs oh that's fine i think i still have more resurrection dog treats this dog's taking more bullets than andrew jackson death is not your destiny today little sparrow come on little sparrow wake up come on get up it's beautiful outside oh [ __ ] this no seriously [ __ ] this [ __ ] i hate to do this again but let's run through how stupid this is 1. these idiots all lend me their power and teresa mysteriously disappears because the writers didn't know how to make a legendary seer hero interact with someone who is basically completely normal at this stage so they vanished her how much cooler would it have been if teresa was commanding lucy in the entire time and guiding him so that she can seize the power from him and restore oakville her hometown to restore her own parents and friends to maybe even restore her brother fable one's main character who isn't mentioned to my knowledge beyond a few books and rumors and two my guy just got super charged by three separate heroes and you're telling me that one bullet just takes him out i get that the sequence is going to be some [ __ ] where he didn't really die but really my character's so tough that he eats a bowl of nails for breakfast without any milk i've hidden bottles around the farm for you to shoot the chickens need rounding up or we could kill some beetles all sorts of things golly gee [ __ ] willikers your family just died your dog just died and lucian has kidnapped your friends this is quite literally the most dramatic part of the game are you ready psych go play mini games with your sister you [ __ ] [ __ ] yeah we hamstrung the most climactic moment with a chicken chasing mini-game that utilizes the movement controls of someone trying to program an 8-directional super nintendo game in rpg maker for the first time so what go find 20 bottles and appreciate the chicken chaser joke get it it's a fable one reference remember that one huh appreciate this serene day with your dead sister with a life that you and her both wanted isn't that emotionally impactful god we're so good at creating tension to impact the player's heart the worst part about all of this is that after you escape the farm the scene which plays out is actually pretty damn cool it was just in the wrong order you watch as your character went through their adventure the clothes that they wore the body that they had the events that they experienced and when you wake back up you're in the spire ready to confront lucy what should have happened was you experiencing this as the three heroes life forces transferred into you maybe even some memories of their childhood as well i mean it'd be a lot better for character development and when you wake up again lucian is there with a gun pointed at you he goes through his monologue kills your dog seemingly kills you and then you go back into that dream state where you're looking at that box teresa tells you how [ __ ] swole you are and some memories flash by over the course of 15 or so seconds and then you wake up in the spire the atrocities which lucian committed are fresh on your mind there's no need to wonder what happened to teresa and you're ready to kick ass instead the action got cooled down and is now trying to be reignited which is a much worse way to structure a story in my eyes but maybe that's just me your power is astounding twice you've cheated death what what is that what are you doing you think a mere trinket will save you [Music] [Music] oh never mind no wonder i couldn't remember there being a boss fight there wasn't one holy [ __ ] they pulled off two final boss fights against the jack of blades in the first game but they couldn't manage one in this one at the end of the [ __ ] colored rainbow is a three choice ending with slightly more impact than mass effect 3. we can choose between restoring the lives of everyone who died building the spire or restoring just the lives of my family and dog or just restoring my bank account with heaps of gold the first time i played i chose to restore everyone besides my family this time i did the opposite i don't know why those two are mutually exclusive but [ __ ] it right it sounds good on paper the gold option gives me a million gold but i literally have just under 2 million with nearly every single property in the gamebot so that's [ __ ] stupid again the game gives you this vaguely good neutral and evil option but let's be honest the evil one is really dumb imagine the possibility of ruling the world not being an option they could have made it so that you received castle fairfax that you became the king of all of albion that you could have set curfews and shop open times and taxes and hire various people to do certain jobs around the kingdom you could have decorated the towns the way that you wanted with different themes and color schemes that would have been a fantastic reward but nope here's more of something that we never even balanced in the first place anyways the heroes evacuate the chamber like a bowel movement before teresa ominously states that she's keeping the spire for herself then the credits roll and i get to watch the game lag even while trying to process a handful of 2d caricatures while noting the faces of the writers so i can make sure to take them less seriously in the future wait there are no writers listed in this game unless that's what scripting is i kind of assume that meant ai scripting but holy [ __ ] that explained so much if there were no writers credited but we aren't done with this game yet because apparently i'm a masochist so let's hit this dlc so that i can put my xbox 360 in a corner until i move it's worth noting that my objective here now is to go see my family again which they don't have a word of new dialogue so wow who cares but what can i expect at this stage also you can buy the castle which is cool on the surface but in reality it consists of four entire rooms and the entrance to an optional dungeon where you can fight bandits hobs and balvarines because that's not stupid or repetitive the funniest part about all this [ __ ] is that the bandits infiltrate the castle through the tomb which apparently has a secret entrance through the library but when you go through the tomb you wind up opening one-way gates and diving down a gigantic pit which didn't have any means of traversing it so getting into the castle would have been nearly impossible for anyone from this direction congratulations on acquiring this fine potion of highly surprising transformation the latest in gender bending technology you now have the power to change your sex what a prize now i can completely [ __ ] up the lives of my seven wives by showing up as a female what can i say in fable 2 a sex change is both a punishment in the temple of shadows and a reward as an endgame prize alright so the first dlc revolves around a place known as not hole island the premise here is that the residents of the island are facing a bit of a crisis as the island is now freezing over when you go to leave with this guy on his submarine he gives you a handful of items which are exclusive to the dlc one of these describes the history of the island which notes that the residents moved here after a rumor was spread that the island has the property of being able to control the weather this is actually a welcome concept after all the [ __ ] that we just went through so let's get to it when i arrive on the island it's definitely snowy as [ __ ] so that wasn't a lie now if you hadn't noticed i'm running out of patience and as soon as this dlc stops respecting my time i'm just gonna start blasting through this summary so first off you talk to the mayor who explains the whole weather situation stating that the ancestors used to [ __ ] with the climate and then they all died or something without passing on the knowledge i don't know and the whole place has been left in perpetual winter because of it so you have to go to the ice temple using the ice key to get rid of the ice the funniest part about all this so far is that the movement feels like it should on all of the frozen sections here but that's just default fable 2 movement so i go to these places and all of the enemies are literally just re-skins of previous enemies in the game which really shows that the devs went the extra mile here the temple itself is a mosh of fighting enemies solving puzzles and fighting more enemies when i say solving puzzles i mean following my treasure trail to the objective and putting the triangle block through the triangle hall for some reason fable 2 puzzles take about as much thought as drinking when you're thirsty so this whole thing is just a way to add time to the game eventually i get to the sun totem which begins spraying a single can of aerosol into the sky and promptly turns the land into a desert with some very thirsty trees i actually do enjoy seeing the landscape change so i have to give lionhead some credit there when i get back to the mayor i was thinking that he'd be like oh [ __ ] now it's too hot but he's actually [ __ ] stoked to be living in california i mean i personally find weather over 75 degrees fahrenheit max to be [ __ ] disgusting but some people also wear sweaters at 55 degrees so whatever the best part about this dlc so far is the sheer amount of cosmetic upgrades they finally figured out how to make more reds and greens and blues in the die section they also allow you to increase or decrease your height remove scars instantly become fatter or thinner and everything in between which are all nice additions they even have a literal loopbox store where you can trade various items for mystery prizes which i personally don't care to scrounge up random items for anyways sure enough the next quest is that the island is hot this has us doing exactly what we did but now the dungeon is hot themed we're apparently trying to bring rain to this place so i'm guessing it'll flood next i haven't ever played this dlc but i've definitely caught on to how these things tend to go you know what's fun i was looking at a villager when i left town and now she's just part of my game i can't even shoot without showing more info about her was this game play tested wait yeah i guess it was these cartoon characters in the credits supposedly did guess they never caught this one thankfully entering the sun temple makes it go away so at least there's that so yeah the sun temple same thing next the sun for millions of years the source of life but for one planet the source of its demise the temperatures climbed the vast fields of ice at its poles melted and the oceans rose centuries later few people remain on this planet once called earth in this place they know only as water world yeah same thing except i do like the aesthetic of this dungeon the most either way you freeze everything again and the final confrontation between the chieftain and the people takes place in the center of town don't do anything stupid now work with me and there's 10 000 gold pieces in it for you [Music] so yeah democracy wins here as always and everyone holds the chieftain down to take turns circumcising him oh wait no not that but you can now change the weather at will which again is a decent concept but the depth of this place is still surface level it says a lot about your dlc when the main thing that i care about is what new items that i can shop for also it's worth noting that there's this pretty cool armor that you can collect across the dlc but you ironically can't dye it at all despite getting all of these new dies alright time to get this last leg over with the other dlc is the one that you can only finish after the vanilla game is said and done its premise starts with coming full circle back to the ripoff artist who sold us the magic music box well i guess he's not really a ripoff artist but you know he thought he was this time he wants to sell us a cursed snow globe with sounds of screaming people coming faintly from within it when i use the snow globe i get sucked into this desaturated world save for a blue door in the distance further down the road a man is being attacked by blue shadows which are in the process of giving him the suck upon defeating these shadows the man's color comes back and he explains that the world has been getting the color slurped clean out of it by these monsters for a while this leads us on a journey through this black and white world while killing shadows and rescuing people the concept is again very neat on the surface but the gameplay is harrowing and repetitive for some reason lion had really got it in their heads that these switches were their magnum opus in terms of game design i haven't really talked about them much because they're very basic mechanics you hit the blue ones with your melee the yellow ones you shoot with your gun and the red ones you throw a spell at well between this dlc and the last every single dungeon or puzzle has revolved around hitting these switches it's not fun it's just a task so yeah great initial impression horrible second impression yellow shadows eventually make their appearance and they only take damage from ranged attacks continuing the primary color trend i'm sure we'll see red ones which will force me to use a spell besides time stop i just don't understand how these guys come up with these cool visual ideas and then just drop their pants and take a steaming [ __ ] on top of them right after i do have to say though the loading times are insanely fast for this particular dlc they must have figured something out because we went from about 15 to 25 second load times to one second which is a godsend eventually i make it past the yellow gate only to realize that i'm in oakvale which is an unexpected but welcome surprise alright not a bad save but let's see what they do with it from here well the reds make their appearance as expected and i've served a grim reminder that offensive magic sucks in this game you know i already regret saying that i'm sure there's gonna be a comment like oh my god i use magic all the time and it's the best thing ever but i mean to me i'd rather just shoot people if they're far away but either way i rescue some children and they give me a seal to the shadow council area in the real albion now this could be interesting i think they're gonna go with the direction of how oakville went to [ __ ] and why the shadow council moved in i mean it would make sense with these primary colored shadows moving in on this snow globe while we get to the final chamber after fighting wave after wave of shadow men before we take out some cultists who are busy doing what they do best after i take them all out i get portaled to the surface and everyone claps and that's it holy [ __ ] really like yeah that's totally it for oakville in a bubble maybe there's some readable lore somewhere but i returned to the salesman and he's like sick the curse is lifted want to do a different item jesus alright i guess anyways this time we get a cursed skull also this guy sells some dog potions which i use to transform my dog into the saddest iteration of a husky that i've ever seen so the cursed skull has a lot more interesting of a premise mechanically because it iterates on the idea of collecting and changing your outfit around and it does it pretty masterfully basically the soul of this knight is trapped in here and he wants you to escort wisps to him in order to free him these wisps don't follow you unless you dress up as a hollow man so you grab a costume and can instantly access it with the hotkey on your d-pad this leads to mimicking a statue of a hollow man to pass into the next area which has a balverine statue so you have to go get that costume next to proceed which has you running into a poison balvarine which induces an intoxication-like effect upon hitting you once you have the next costume you can proceed to grab the wisps with the hollow man costume before bringing them back and repeating the process it's actually a fresh take on the game and i'm surprisingly happy with it the last costume that we pick up is the hob costume because the game has 5 enemy types but the costume itself is my favorite and instead of mimicking a statue it gives me control of a ghostly hob which acts as a batard and clears the way for me later on it also lets me summon a caster minion which i never figured out what to do with and one of the stilt boys who's able to cross the poison river to hit a switch i'm assuming the magic lad was a red herring but this whole puzzle was pretty cool even if it was easy with the way that the knight keeps telling me all of this inside knowledge i'm starting to suspect that maybe he's the bad guy here thank you witless mortal you have granted me my freedom now i will grant you the greatest gift of all death [Music] right on but yeah that's it for the skull oddly enough way too short for my liking but i would rather it be a short and sweet ordeal than having it wear out its welcome okay so the second to last trinket here is a replica model of the spire which is said to grant any wish as the real thing does this whole thing is more of a cut scene and it explains why i had to finish the game first seeing as it teleports me back into the spire waiting inside is theresa who claims that the spire has helped her to see all possible futures she then goes on to state that the futures always converge at one point before splitting again and one of these points involves my character remember when i said that the evil ending should have had me becoming the king this would play into that so well even if i did choose the other endings either way teresa goes on to explain that i do wind up reigning as king and that it's a tough path but i do manage to do well she also explains that regardless of that the most important thing that i do is have a child which is the protagonist of fable 3. i do like this setup a lot though it is a shame that fable 3 generally seems to be frowned upon as the worst in the series regardless that's it for the spire replica as the salesman admits that teresa has been giving him the magical baubles for the entirety of the game meaning that she was the one who set everything into motion i honestly didn't think i'd find myself thinking this but this is a pretty cool revelation and i don't mind that this is all this bobble entails especially because the salesman then gives me one last model to [ __ ] around with the colosseum before i start though i'll note that i received my king outfit after the last leg of our journey and i just don't understand the stats assigned to clothing in this game you've probably noticed that i've been wearing the same [ __ ] for 85 percent of fable 2 and that's solely because it gives me the most attractiveness bonus well it also looks pretty cool with the dreadlocks but that's besides the point how the [ __ ] does the king outfit have less of a bonus in stats than the noble outfit that i've had since the start i just don't get that and of course the main parts of it just can't be died what an absolutely stupid waste of potential anyways the colosseum is about what you'd expect you fight until you either win run out of time or die while accruing points for killing enemies you gain bonuses for kicking chickens mid-fight and gain a multiplier for hitting those stupid switches that the devs love the ultimate prize of this endeavor requires a staggering 15 000 points which i get halfway through the thing you'd think that the devs would have really wanted to ramp up this challenge like they did with the shooting range but apparently that's a tall order for them the four prizes that you win consist of two random decent items from a pool of items a random augment and the royal scepter which can be augmented 4 times i guess this is a decent enough time sync but ultimately a pretty mediocre ending to the game it is worth noting that there are 10 more dies added across this dlc as well which range from a few more blues reds and greens in addition to a brown a gray a white and the most difficult dye to obtain strawberry blonde i got none of these because i don't care the dlc for fable 2 ranges from annoying to pretty damn good at times but those good moments are very few and far between if i were to change some things about all of them i'd have expanded on not whole island with weather puzzles using some kind of device to change weather on the fly would have been ideal to create some pretty fun puzzles having mini games which revolved around these weather changes would have also been cool a sledding minigame where i take on some yeti type creature for an outfit or a weapon or whatever a desert-based mini-game in which a mummy taunts you as you try to choose which mirage is the real area that you need to progress through a fishing minigame where you catch various fish in the rain the general lack of imagination in an otherwise pretty cool idea is a real letdown from knothole and i can't help but mourn its squandered potential the cursed items dlc on the other hand was where things really started to shine a bit more but i still would have added some things beyond the obvious expansion with what happened to oakville i'd have loved to have seen the restoration of color played out a bit more in the snow globe portion maybe you can restore whole parts of the town back to its rightful color you have a map that's divided into six or so areas all with different buildings and unique properties some have a bigger force of town folk some have better buildings after you pick your favorite three the grayscale part of town is sacrificed to the shadows and you have to rally your side with its unique properties to fight against the shadow side every time you win a battle your territory expands until you get to the final part which has the strongest amount of shadow activity i don't know something like that would have really made this dlc shine the skull portion on the other hand was good but it also took me maybe 10 minutes to complete so the big thing there is length additionally i would have loved to have been able to ally with creatures whose costume i was wearing so when i get swarmed by all three groups i could don a costume and make it a 2v2 rather than a 1v3 maybe the necromancer yields mid-fight and concedes to you but pleads for his life and tells you that he would at least like it if you would make the place more livable for him you can clear out every infested area and once you do he raises them all back up into a bone golem which you have to fight in a boss fight i'm not sure if that idea would serve to be just as repetitive as the rest of the game but i'm sure that it could be workshop not to be with the right direction then again there wasn't a single boss fight in this game so maybe i'm hoping for too much there but that's about it for the entirety of this game barring a few things that i neglected and don't care to mention so where do we stand man i hardly know where to start with this summary okay so the positives the gameplay is pretty fun for the first stretch i really do like the mechanics around towns and villagers quite a lot gaining their love or fear getting gifts and discounts at stores marrying and having kids and all that a lot of the economy gameplay is incredibly addicting and i found my favorite parts to be the ones where i was just rolling new money into new investments i had a lot of fun with this chunk of the game probably the most the other bits that i had fun with stemmed from good old fable concepts impressing demon doors exploring for loot hoarding xp to sink on myself and make myself bigger and better and honestly side questing and exploration was a bit of fun too for a little while but this is all pretty standard for fable i had fun with a lot of the game and that counts for quite a bit because at its core the fable franchise really does let you do a lot of things which other games didn't at the time of its inception but as far as the problems go well there were a lot the game is poorly optimized it's buggy and laggy and [ __ ] annoying to sit through at times the menus are an especially heinous offender when it comes to this particularly when you have to go into it for every little consumable unless you want to take the game's suggestion on what to chug did you know that you can just fast travel during combat isn't that the first thing that you restrict in every game's combat not that i minded that one that much movement was poor swimming was [ __ ] and barely used combat was enjoyable but hindered by little things in every category shooting ranged from useless to just broken depending on your weapon and skill melee combat was the most enjoyable but also pretty clunky samey and easy magic was well [ __ ] i only ever wanted to use one skill and so i did unless i was forced to by the dlc and even then i got the time stop skill to 5 and hardly ever casted it at 5 because it takes too long in combat if i cast it as enemies are spawning sure level 5 is great if i cast it mid combat i'm probably gonna get slapped before it goes off which is annoying the xp system is addictive and interesting on the surface hell i had it down as a positive but it also has a huge downside in that by the time you start racking up xp later those previous level ones and twos and threes become a drop in the bucket i mean i'd buy spells just because i could it's not a great system for different builds because chances are you're going to have nearly everything by the end of the game just from the sheer amount of xp that you get and they're only being four to five basic levels of skill there are no unique builds which go down different skill trees or anything like that your hero is nearly always going to be the same as every other player at the end of the game hell your hero is probably going to be the exact same halfway through the game with just how easy it is to pick up potions for xp mechanically the game becomes boring pretty quickly i initially noted the greater vertical element to fable 2 over its predecessor but that's only surface level being able to vault off of predetermined areas is nice for a bit but it becomes less of a feature when those dives may as well be a slope or a ladder what this game needed to make it mechanically more enjoyable was true vertical freedom of movement being able to jump off of slopes and ledges areas where you can balance and wear skillful movement is key it gets very annoying when you have to go down a set of slopes and up another repeatedly to get to your destination and i initially wanted to chalk this up to the game being older i mean [ __ ] it is 13 years old but then i thought about what else was available in the adventure genre around this time games that let you hurdle and dive off of things without invisible fences keeping you corralled in devil may cry in god of war and the force unleashed in literally every 3d zelda in mario game all of them have that movement where you can hop from obstacle to obstacle and fable 2's dated movement really bogs it down by the end but even without vertical movement the game really has problems keeping things fresh there was a small glimmer of it during the final dlc with the costume quest just a hint of ingenuity however even that was woefully short and paled in comparison to the non-stop punches to the face from the developers telling you to chase orbs around and fight the same stock of three to five enemy types i just really wish these guys spent a little more time thinking outside of the box which is ironic when fable was generally hailed as doing just that nearly constantly though to be fair that might have been a lot more posturing from molyneux who couldn't help but continually hype up the series as a pillar of innovation side questing starts out fun like i initially said at the start of the summary but sweet [ __ ] if it doesn't become completely redundant by the latter half of the mid-game sure it's fun to watch my little renowned number tick when i do something particularly notorious i mean god damn look at that number that's a big number i have no idea if it's big or small when compared to the grand scheme of things but i do know that it's nearly five digits and that's impressive and that's the problem i don't know why i need renown at a certain point this wouldn't have been an issue if the quest could keep up intrigue wise some kind of new mechanics or a really cool story would have made side questing a non-issue but i would say that 70 to 80 percent of these quests are pretty run-of-the-mill ways to fight some dudes get a thing and then turn it in for renown which is [ __ ] bonkers when you realize how much interesting lore that albion has to tap into for smaller things but hey why look into the history of past heroes and learn about their legacies after 500 years have passed since their heyday when we can go meet some ghost pirate captain who squatted out some sacks of shekels on an island literally named after the developers if they were proud of it even the optional tasks fall flat nearly always with the aforementioned silver key situation being the biggest [ __ ] you to the players seeing as you get back five percent of your castle purchase upon opening the one and only chest that takes more than 20 keys to open the gargoyle thing is cooler simply because i can at least use the crossbow in the dlc but i really didn't care to bother tracking them all down this game definitely needed a financial end game i mean i guess if you never put in the effort to blacksmith or reserve drinks maybe the endgame is just buying the castle but after buying two businesses or so i was basically self-sustaining i still think that buying the castle means that you should be able to start sinking your gold reserves into various towns upgrading their economies building new homes and businesses investing in new aesthetics hell even personal cosmetics would have been a great gold sink if i have to buy a set of exclusive dyes for 500 000 gold that's okay if i can transform my weapons with new skins or buy exclusive clothing for heaps of money that's fine it's the only thing that i can think of to not make money totally meaningless hell you could do this with your extra xp too if need be it just seems silly to me that this game released with exclusive weapons and locations that you could only get if you bought the collector's edition but they couldn't be asked to figure out a proper end game way to manage your riches and then of course there's the story which i harped on quite a lot because sweet [ __ ] what a crude mockery of writing like you only had to slightly twist it to make it something at least a little new and while there are some unique concepts the main foundation blocks of the game are nearly identical to the previous game and i hate it it's lazy no matter how you slice it and i can't stand that it's so one to one in how it's told and even then there are aspects that are outright worse in fable too in the first game i could relate to my character to a degree there were close-ups of his goofy ass reactions and i at least got some semblance of a human character out of him because of them in fable 2 we get none of that the age of heroes is gone and now there's only a handful which need to become activated to become heroes but is that a better story not in my eyes i liked interacting with heroes which were just everywhere the jack of blades and twin blade and scythe and maize and scarlet robe and even thunder they all added character and depth to the story and while i didn't mind two-thirds of fable two's new heroes their existence as the only heroes left made a lot of these side characters in the game lacking i can't get emotionally invested when my enemy is simply known as commandant and he looks like what your mom tells you is darth maul at home the lack of any boss fight besides trolls and banshees only further hammered the point home that this game didn't know how to ramp up those key moments and the laughably easy combat only made this phenomenon worse and i don't even want to start back on the ending how do you give the player the concept of a wish only to restrict those wishes to these very stupid ideas that embody the very fringe concept of morality it just makes no sense to me how you [ __ ] up a story this badly but maybe i'm just more sensitive to shitty storylines than the average person so was fable 2 as good as i no [ __ ] no i mean [ __ ] i don't want to backpedal but yes the game was fun to play yes it's amusing yes it has moments where i want to keep playing but oh my god my standards and thoughts on what makes a video game the best that it can be must have changed because i really can't get over the amount of shitty decisions in this game i know that's going to piss some people off but i really can't help but feel jaded by the direction that this franchise went after the first game i shuddered to think about what happened with fable 3 because truth be told i really liked it when it came out it actually kind of makes me think that the next fable will bring back some semblance of gameplay and writing which will actually rejuvenate the series i mean it's been forever and i believe an entirely different team is working on it seeing as lion head collapsed but i guess we'll have to wait and see thanks for watching did i want to spend about an hour and 35 minutes on this video anyways next video is probably going to be dragon age origins which i'm pretty pumped about there might be a filler video in between i'm not sure yet until then i've got a twitch where sweet [ __ ] do i stream a video game or two that happens nearly every monday tuesday and friday i've got a twitter where i know how it works but i just don't know what to say i've got a discord where everyone knows what to say and that's not always a good thing oh actually we ran an art contest recently for this video which was fable theme so that was pretty fun and i've got a patreon and that's it have a good one

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 1,651,108

Keywords: Fable II, Fable 2, Lionhead, Microsoft, Xbox, Hammer, Hannah, Garth, Reaver, Theresa, Bowerstone, Albion, Wraithmarsh, Bloodstone, Demon Doors, Rose, Murgo, DLC, Knothole Island, See the Future, Oakfield, Oakvale, Twinblade, Lucien, The Spire, Lionhead Studios, Peter Molyneux, Castle Fairfax, Skill, Will, Strength, Hero, No idea what else to put, It's hard to find good wings in germany, Families, dog, Hobbes, Banshees, Trolls, Balverines, Bandits

Id: 3bCshLeNSpY

Length: 95min 51sec (5751 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021