Fable 2 is an ideas man. It’s a network of big concepts mashed together by a thin web of nostalgia with few transitions for every event to work. Though it unabashedly rides the coattails of its predecessor, Fable 2 has an okay understanding of fairly holistic game design.
Set around 400 years after the events of Fable: The Lost Chapters, Fable 2 is a decidedly darker and grimmer look at the role of Heroes. Over the course of time, Heroes aren’t celebrated as people of legend - they’re fairy tales. Over time, Heroes have become drunk with power, fueled by ego, and completely uncaring of the people they once helped. Considering the inconsistent moral fabric of the Heroes Guild, it was only a matter of time before the people of Albion rose up against them.
In an increasingly Dickensian Albion, you and your big sister Rose, at the advice of a blind seer, dream big. By doing several small quests for five gold pieces, the two of you buy a music box and make a wish.
Hoping to live in the tall, imposing Castle Fairfax, Rose becomes incensed when the music box seemingly breaks. Hungry and angry, the two of you go to bed. Later that night, you’re approached by the guards at the request of Fairfax’s owner - a secluded man named Lucien. Your wish came true.
What begins as excitement quickly becomes fear as the soft-spoken, snarl-prone Lucien entombs you in light. With remorse in his voice, he shoots the two of you, killing your sister and sending you flying out the chamber through glass. Falling several stories, you’re found by your dog and Theresa, the blind seer.
Fable 2 is a story of revenge, with the goal being to find a way to bring down Lucien. Having fled that night, the foreboding, inconsistent jabbering of the Lord of Bowerstone cast him as a threat to Albion. Theresa, the seer that saves you, raises you in the presence of Gypsies, and over ten long summers you become one of them.
Revenge underlines your motives. However, in the time that you’ve spent recuperating and training, Lucien has been building an army. With a force of immeasurable might, he seeks to construct a Lovecraftian construct known as the Spire.
To stop him, you need to find the few Heroes remaining, scattered throughout Albion. Only through their collective efforts can you stop Lucien, have your revenge, and save the world.
From the beginning, you’re cast as the underdog. In The Lost Chapters, your might complemented an impressive martial force via the Heroes Guild. When Jack of Blades is racing across Albion to find the focus sites, you’re besieged by his minions. Even so, you’re still aided by the Heroes, even if some of them were NPC footsoldiers. It was an all-out war. In Fable 2 though, Lucien has an oppressively large advantage for the vast majority of the game. The task of killing him seems insurmountable, as he’s hidden behind the wall of light erected at the top of his massive tower. His minions are everywhere, his machinations dot Albion’s landscapes, and his soldiers are endless.
Though there are Heroes there to help you, there’s no coordination until the last sequence of the game. For much of it, you’re stuck by yourself. There’s no Grand D’Armee of Heroes.
And that’s what defines Fable 2: since Heroes no longer dot the landscape, there’s no sense of community among them. In The Lost Chapters, you were simply another Hero (albeit a powerful one) in a sea of Heroes, and they responded to you in that manner. To them, you were friendly competition and to the people of Albion you were a savior or a monster. In Fable 2, people don’t know what you are, they don’t know who you are, and while they have a good idea of your name and exploits, the word Hero has a different, archaic meaning. It’s a loaded term, exemplifying men and monsters alike. You’re alone.
Though there’s the Hero of Strength and the Hero of Will and the Hero of Skill, they’re not necessarily Heroes. They’re specialists who’ve self-identified as the brawler, the scholar, and the pirate. There’s no central heroic identity that underlines you all other than a desire to stop Lucien, and no matter how much Theresa espouses the centrality of Heroes, wishing to stop Lucien isn’t something that’s unique to them.
In many ways, Fable 2 challenges the definition of a Hero that The Lost Chapters has already challenged. While your actions can be considered heroic or not, your goals are aligned with a personal, selfish, human, normal desire for vengeance. You aren’t choosing nor do you choose to judge and punish Lucien for the people of Albion until the end.
And it’s the same for many of the Heroes you come across. The Hero of Strength, Hammer, wants her own revenge against Lucien for the murder of her father. Garth, the Hero of Will, wishes to see Lucien’s madness undone. Reaver, the Hero of Skill, finds Lucien’s desire to dominate Albion as a threat to his own immortality and control. You’re doing it for revenge. Aside from Garth, none of their motives are necessarily heroic.
Additionally, not only have we lost the identity of Heroes as a whole to the passage of time, but their heroism as well. In The Lost Chapters, there was still the romanticism of doing the good thing, helping out people with cards from the Sanctuary map, the pomp and frill of ceremony in the Chamber of Secrets. There’s none of that in Fable 2.
It marks the end of an era. Fable 2 is much more Machiavellian in its story: you aren’t doing things for the glory of Hero-ness and the wellbeing of the people of Albion, but for the sake of moving from one goal to another. You’re driven by the thought of vengeance, to see Lucien taken down. You don’t help people because you want to help them or because it’s your nature to do so, but because you have to be well known to get what you need.
The Abbott isn’t going to trust you unless you become more well-known. The Crucible isn’t going to become available to you unless you become more well-known. Reaver isn’t going to talk to you unless you become more well-known. Though the externalities of your actions may be positive (or negative) in Hero-like fashion, the actions are products of accomplishing steps to a larger, personal goal. The tale runs on renown, and through your fame or infamy you can become closer and closer to taking down Lucien, not becoming a Hero of old.
In many ways, Fable 2 casts aside much of The Lost Chapters to herald in a new, greyer, darker era. This Albion is a world without Heroes, and its many roads have fallen in disrepair. Only Bowerstone, Westcliff, and Bloodstone remain the last major vestiges of safe, human civilization. Throughout the first Fable, you can find guardsmen on dangerous paths, brothels in dark swamps, and traders nestled together for safety.
In Fable 2, several locations are completely bereft of safety. The road to Westcliff by way of Brightwood is infested with Balverines. The best way to Bloodstone by foot is through Wraithmarsh. Though Albion was never safe to begin with, it’s become much more dangerous in Fable 2.
All this comes together to tell a tale of an Albion that has to come to grips with the fact that it is dreary. It’s a very Hobbesian portrayal of various groups jockeying for power. In many ways, the Heroes of old represent mini-sovereigns, and aside from the walls of mighty Bowerstone, everything else is subject to the State of Nature.
But it’s through that State of Nature, through those Machiavellian motives, and through that insistence on the obsolescence of heroic romanticism that the game shines. Fable 2 boldly espouses that your decisions matter, your choices matter, and in lieu of narrative complexity, your agency matters. For a good amount of the game, this is true.
While games that preach choice like Dragon Age are cosmetic or emergent in their significance, Fable 2‘s choices… well, they do matter. Whether you choose to help out the Temple of Light or not determines Oakfield’s fate. Whether you choose to help out Farmer Giles or not determines Brightwood’s fate. Whether you help Barnum by investing determines Westcliff’s fate. In Fable 2, how you play the game and what sort of moral compass you adhere to (if at all) can determine how sizable portions of the game plays, which characters you run into, and what sort of shops and personnel are available at any given time.
Though far from Project Ego’s boastful claims, Fable 2 is truer to Molyneux’s lofty vision than The Lost Chapters was. It’s a semi-organic world that’s ripe for a Hero, ready for mending and modification.
This choice - this real, tangible choice - aims to build a stunning atmosphere in Fable 2 that was evident in only some parts of The Lost Chapters. Music underlines much of the mood, but the game also uses bloom, vividness, and oversaturation to effective artistic design. The contrast between various Demon Door rooms and the Albion around them creates phenomenal juxtaposition, emphasizing a surreal otherworldliness.
Nowhere is Lionhead’s mastery of atmosphere more visible than in Wraithmarsh. A secluded, dead, husk of a place, Wraithmarsh is the gutted and dangerous remains of Oakvale, your hometown in the first Fable. Though Oakvale was a vibrant hamlet on the coastline, terrible forces have twisted and destroyed it by the time of Fable 2.
To the Hero, Wraithmarsh is a haunting journey through eerie bogs and hostility-caked swamps. To the player, Wraithmarsh is something else: it has a soft, stirring, halcyonic feel. Even though the skeletons of trees and homes alike are dark shadows and fiendish things trek its familiar paths, you feel it. There’s a calling there. It’s the call of home.
As you walk through the dangerous fog, you can see the bridge, broken. As you peer into the houses, you can find a twisted, macabre mix of torture rooms, toys, dirty beds, and unsacked cupboards. Even as you fight off the Banshees that rule it and wade through the Hollow Men that populate it, you can still hear the whispers of lost souls. The music here is deft, but twisted.
And it’s that sort of atmosphere that Fable 2 does with incomparable excellence. There’s an insidious undertone in much of Fable 2, with a good portion of Albion having deeper, darker secrets than its lush enviroment lets on. In many ways, it feels like a video game truer to a Grimm Brothers fairy tale than anything else. Communities of Hobbes litter the dungeons, with intricate shrines built to commemorate teddy bears. Hanging skeletons can swing lazily in the Howling Halls like cattle in a slaughterhouse. A cavern may have a small crib, and tucked into its small sheets is the skeleton of a baby. The place is littered with tiny stories, none of them told in journals or codices. So much is shown, not told.
Aside from its atmosphere, Fable 2 is still a game with considerable faults. While it excels in its atmosphere and its backdrop, the story of Fable 2 is one that’s ultimately simple and uninspiring. This isn’t to say it’s bad, but rather you won’t find much cleverness. Though the characters mesh together well, and they’re more likeable than those in the original Fable, they aren’t very active.
For the first major arc of Fable 2, the Hammer is the Hero you’ll be working with. However, despite Hammer being your travelling partner, she’s oftentimes unable to help. Only for a short stretch in Westcliff will the two of you work together, and for the rest of that she’s sort of a non-element.
Likewise, Garth is too bland, Reaver is not given enough time to develop, Lucien veneers into megalomaniac too brusquely, and Theresa is too functional to have a clear character. Though vengeance is the game’s central focus, Fable 2 doesn’t effectively consider the weight of those actions. The game plays the vengeance trope straight: it doesn’t critically evaluate your protagonist’s motives, and never does it question the shaky moral argument of doing it for the sake of personal justice.
But it tries. One quest has you woo the ex-lover of a ghost, only to break their heart. After doing so, you can choose to give them a scathing letter that mocks their decision to fall in love with you. While the decision is quite callous, I chose to give the ex-lover the letter anyways. The ex-lover shortly after committed suicide. It’s wierd. It’s an out-of-place escalation where suicide was never considered an outcome. And even as shaky as that evaluation is, it’s a rare evaluation.
For the most part, decisions to take matters in your own hands are met with inconveniences at best. You aren’t faced with moral dilemmas, and nobody questions your desire to enact your own brand of justice on Lucien.
This setpiece-based nature of the story exacerbates this lack of evaluation. Fable 2 moves from place to place, without giving time for the player to rest nor the story to effectively transition. It moves at an uncomfortable breakneck speed, with little to no downtime in the later moments of the game.
To be fair, each major section has its compelling, well-written parts. Your time in the Spire underlines the uselessness of your morals in the face of institutional cruelty. If you have a family, the lost time after returning home is a sobering feeling, especially when you set out again to your spouse’s chagrin. The return to Oakvale is a cathartic, cleansing experience.
But while each of these are impressive by themselves, they’re set pieces, with actors moving in and out, punctured by long periods of time for you to get more renown. You don’t get to learn about Garth or Reaver when you meet them - they propel the story to its next stages, giving you little time to breath. You don’t sit down and talk to Theresa that much - she directs you from place to place. You don’t get much time to think about Lucien until after you’ve defeated him.
When you compare games that tell stories about people - exceptional people - there’s a lot of back and forth. Mass Effect‘s conversations are exemplary cases of much needed quiet time. Through your companions, you find out about Saren, about Benezia, about the Geth. In Fable 2, you don’t really learn about Lucien - you just need to know what you have to do to stop him, and while there’s small snippets suggesting his motives, they’re cast aside for more vengeance, more justice, more righteousness.
Fable 2 also has some difficulties balancing its combat mechanics. While the beginning is challenging enough, once you learn the ability to roll (one of the first skills you can learn), the game becomes laughably easy. In fact, most of Fable 2’s combat is mash-heavy - for the most part, you’ll be shooting, swinging, casting, and dodging.
Because the game doesn’t have a toggling difficulty setting, the game’s more advanced components arn’t necessary. Zooming, flourishing, and targeting are all nice, but they’re extraneous. They don’t solve difficult problems because the problems don’t become more difficult. Everything is emergent, and wishing for more of a challenge requires the player to adhere to a change of personal habits. The game doesn’t become more challenging. It scales disproportionately.
Additionally, while there has been a culling on the spell count, I question whether this culling is necessary. Balancing the spells in Fable 2 requires being able to illustrate cost and benefit, and Fable 2’s rehauling of its spell system makes dominating the game even likelier. Without mana, spells can be spammed, and destructive spells such as Time Control allows a player to play through the entire game unmolested.
Even more egregious is the fact that the lowest tier spell can be activated by simply pressing the button. Charge-up frames aren’t high, meaning stunning and slowing spells such as Shock and Time Control can be spammed on its lowest tier, giving players more time to charge up progressively higher tier spells for more damage. By removing a mana limit, it hampers the game’s ability to prevent players from spamming spells, thereby making combat feel more tedious and repetitive than exciting.
In addition to the blandness of its combat system, Fable 2’s denizens aren’t any better. Though they’re a little bit more complex, the people of Albion are incredibly boring. To be fair, they aren’t compelling people to begin with. It’s for this reason that the “Sacrifice” ending is unappealing: while the Spire has taken so many lives over the course of its construction, you’re only exposed to a small number of them. It’s difficult to conceptualize the damage the building has done and the toll it’s taken on its people. It’s also difficult to imagine it the toll because its people are incredibly bland.
And yet, despite its issues, nothing stands out to me in Fable 2 more than its ending. While it’s drawn a lot of criticism for its non-existent boss fight (the Great Shard being the closest to a boss the game has), it’s ending isn’t supposed to be a challenge. It’s supposed to be a cakewalk.
After Lucien catches and shoots you, you’re transported to a bloomy, bright, over saturated world where you live on a comically idyllic farm with your dead sister Rose. Apparently, Rose is alive after all. After a bunch of inane and optional quests, you go to bed, whereupon you’re awoken by the sound of the music box from the beginning of the game.
As you get closer and closer to the music box, the scenery around you turns into a hellish landscape of corpses, blood, fire, and smoke. Upon reaching the music box, the game goes through the major stages of the Hero’s life, whereupon you awake and defeat Lucien. It’s an understatement when I say that I love this sequence. Though it’s pretentious and falls flat on its face, it’s a really experimental challenge and critique of explicit win states in video games.
An ending boss fight is supposed to be the accumulation of the player’s suffering. All that grinding, working, fighting, questing: that comes together at the end as players use everything at their disposal to defeat a powerful opponent. But Fable 2 does this a bit differently: by focusing on the music box, it doesn’t look at your mechanical choices, but rather your story choices, as limited as those choices are. Though there’s few moments of differentiation, its transitions signify a passing of time in the Hero’s life that summarizes his or her tribulations and how these tribulations have been conquered.
It’s at the end that Fable 2 disengages the player from the Hero, establishing the Hero as something completely different. We expect a boss battle, a strong, triumphant, exciting victory over the forces that oppose us. But it’s not something that’s relevant to the Hero of Bowerstone, to Sparrow.
Here, the music box makes sense. At the very end, the Hero’s most important experience is recalling the events that led him or her there, not some big battle. And while it’s not perfectly delivered, its poignancy still shines. It’s closure.
The end scene summarizes everything about Fable 2. It’s inconsistent. At many points it lacks wit, cohesion, and a clear, holistic sensibility. At many parts it’s a work of passion, of high ideas and concepts, birthed out of excitement and long nights. The music box is the Hero’s great tribulation, the summation of all he or she has learned and experienced. Fable 2 is Lionhead’s, and though they walk past the gates and bravely wade into the fire, oftentimes I wonder if they’re best left staying on the farm.
Joe Yang
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