JJ on Fable 2

   Are you on the light side, or the dark side? Now, I'm not talking about Starwars here, I'm talking about Fable 2. This game is one of the most interesting games I've played this year. Growing horns from your head, or gaining a halo around your head. Turning corrupt from jacking up your rent prices, or becoming pure from being kind to all sorts of people. Fable 2 is probably the one RPG game where I really feel like I can customize my character to my standards.

      Fable 2 lets you explore the land of Albion, lets you set off on a multitude of quests, and lets you control your characters social behavior along the way. That's the thing I like about Fable 2. It's a humorous game, you can kill anyone, people will say funny things, and your social expressions that you can preform are just awesome. Moving on though, the land of Albion is quite large, though I can argue with many friends that other RPG's (Namely Elderscrolls IV, Oblivion) have a far greater landscape. The quests you encounter in fable 2 are fun, very easy to solve quests that usually let you decide between being good, or evil. An example would be: A group of slaves has been captured, you can either free them, or let them be taken my bandits. Each choice effects you and the people around you in someway. Your choices can even destroy towns, or rebuild them, let them flourish, or make them a pit of desperation.

   Your companion in this game is a faithful dog. He will tromp around, find treasure, sniff out buried items, and alert you to enemies. He can be taught how to do tricks, and how to get better at fighting and find items. He will be virtually everywhere with you, except on certain quests and at the end of the game, if you make a difficult choice. His appearance changes with yours, be evil and he will look truly fearsome, be neutral and he will look like any normal dog, be kind and good and he will look as shown in the picture above (Golden and dashing). After playing this game, I really do hope that a dog, any dog, will be your pet in Fable 3!

   

   Magic looks awesome on the screen, and swordplay and archery are totally cool. The third person view fits perfectly for fighting tons of enemies. Yet if Fable 2 were to have been made in a first person mode, then you could never have been able to fight the quantity of enemies that come at you at one time on this game. The team that made this game understood that, so they made the wise decision to make fable 2 a third person game. Battles on Fable 2 start out as mere skirmishes, but later on into the game, they turn into large, very destructive, clashes. You get xp from every kill, and you can use that xp to buy new abilities, like being able to shoot people in the head or groin with a rifle. 

  Fable 2 is a great game. It lets you customize your character to the greatest you can. It makes you the head of an impossible, and epic adventure. It brings the best out of a third person RPG. And almost everything Fable 2 lets you do, it lets you do it perfectly. Yet, sometimes I found myself wondering how many times I could hit a bandit on the head with a HUGE hammer without him dieing, it seems the answer is "many...many times". 

 Overall Score: 8.25

 J.J.

 Phantom's Media