Thoughts of Fable II *Don't enter if you haven't finished the game*

[TheSteve]

Bitmap Frogs said:

TheSteve said:

My wife was impressed with it as well, called it "very Molineuxesque"... I thought it was trite and forced, and along with The Spire was the biggest waste of time in the game.  There was no story...  It was a series of pointless mini-quests running around with your somewhat annoying dead sister (I guess to remind you what the game was about) that you were forced to wait through if you wanted to continue the game.  I left the room and made a sandwich to pass time until night fell and the game continued.

That singular event in the game took all the advancements they'd made in the morality system (which, in the first game, boiled down to "kill your sister for the sword or don't") and said "as evil or good as you've decided to be in the game, deep down you just miss your sister forcing you to do stupid things".  I suppose it would have been effective in a "one more reason to kill Lucian (that was his name, right?)" way, but then it just compounded the completely unsatisfying final confrontation.  One more "congratulations...  you accomplished nothing".

One Perfect Day was teeth-grindingly stupid.

 

It had a lot of story, it's just that instead of being fed to you in expositive non-interactive fmv's, you lived the story.

One Perfect Day was a videogame storytelling achievement.

 

 

Negatory... Tough to counterpoint you, since you're just saying "yeah it does!!  It was the greatest!!", but: You lived running around a farm for about 10-15 minutes of nonsense to give you a little "this is what a perfect life could have been if you hadn't been homeless orphans", but it was an absolute failure in having any meaning, ESPECIALLY if your hero in the game wasn't a "good guy".  Someone that was going to chose the "needs of the one" wouldn't give a damn about that sequence, it would just be an annoyance.  Someone who just killed his wife so he could get remarried to a better looking chick wouldn't care.  Someone that had a burning urge to kill Lucian and Reaver (and, possibly, Theresa) would not enjoy wasting time running around doing pointless fetch quests rather than pursuing justice/their path of vengance.  One specific character would, whoever Peter envisioned when he designed that part, and that's it.  It effectively hamstrung any sense of freedom by pigeonholing your character.  That and the poorly realized "decisions" made at the end (the "needs..." choices) were some of the biggest dissapointments in the game.

I understand what the hackneyed "story" of that segment was meant to be, but I took offense to the presumption that, regardless of who you were in this game that was supposed to more closely meet the hyperbolic "total freedom" goals of its predecessor, this was your motivation.

I didn't touch Fable II again for months due to the utter failure that was pretty much everything from the Spire onward.

drpunk said:
TheSteve, can I borrow your wife please? She sounds awesome.

Heh, she's gotta be trading hero dolls with somebody while I'm at work...  Does that count as "borrowing" her?