Game of the Year: Fable 2 edition

Your wife? A prostitute? Yourself?

So, I figured I'd be original and post about the best videogame of the year. Since no one else does this, I think it would be a good way to kick off the blog. I will profile a different game for a few days, then make my choice at the end. I know, everyone is waiting with bated breath. These aren't necessarily my favorite games of this year, but they are what everyone else seems to be talking about.

Fable 2

Man, where to begin? I was really excited for Fable 2 and its promise of a world in which your choices had far ranging and potentially devastating impacts. Let's just say that's not exactly what we got. I find the love for Fable 2 a little surprising. The RPG elements simply do not deliver on their promise. A big deal was made about being able to get married, have kids, own every building in the game, etc. Which, in practice, became more a question of "Yes, but why?" Why would you want to marry someone who blindly follows you around and annoys you? Why would you want to spend your time doing repetitve in-game jobs to save up enough money for a house? It seems as though the most hyped features of Fable 2 exist only to serve themselves and not advance the game experience. Sure, it sounds cool to be able to cheat on your wife and kill her, but is it? Is it really?

Well, it might be if you could forge some sort of connection to her. This is where, I think, the premise of Fable 2 begins to fall apart. Your character is a mute, unable to express himself other than through "emoticons". There is no dialogue system (a la Oblivion or Mass Effect) but rather a series of actions or emotions that serve as your conduit for expression. And, while farting and flexing seem to get the ladies riled up, after a while you want to have something more. Trying to bang that cute pub wench would be a lot more fun if it involved more than endlessly choosing the "flirt" option on the emoticon wheel.

Really, the only relationship that lives up to the hype is with your dog. Your dog is an ever-present companion that helps you during combat and sniffs out treasure. The dog itself is actually quite an accomplishment, as it moves and acts realistically. Even after a short time you begin to feel for your dog and try to save him during combat (even if it should be the other way around). Again, though, the limitations of the game crop up, as the dog eventually becomes little more than a glorified metal dectector, scrounging up sacks of gold inexplicably buried in a forest somewhere.

The streamlined combat was another selling point for the game, and it is one of the aspects that holds up the best. Stringing together combos of different fighting types is fluid and easy to do, creating cool looking fights that both keeps your interests and (moderately) tests your skills. The ability to upgrade your various skills presents some light RPG decision making, but really, once you master the mechanics, fights become pretty easy.

The world is also not quite as open as one would hope. There are plenty of places to go and things to do, but there is a definite linearity that doesn't exist in other recent open world RPG's. You can almost feel the invisible hand of the developers showing you what to do and where to go. The story is standard fantasy stuff (no qualms about that) and has some great NPC dialogue that helps make the world feel more real.

In general, the problem that Fable 2 faces is that it doesn't know what kind of game it wants to be. Is it an open world RPG with action elements, or is it an action game with some light RPG fare? In the end, these distinctions don't really matter, but it does show the weird balance the game tries to strike but fails to achieve. I kept wanting it to draw me in and show me what I was missing, but it never did. Maybe I'll go back to it at some point...