I've been playing Fable II slowly, and a little late to the party. I've enjoyed the game's palette and lighting. Wandering the world at sunrise can reward you with some breathtaking vistas. The world has an almost campy, super-saturated, medieval-England-by-way-of-Maxfield-Parrish look that invites play. Even the W, who gets motion sick at the merest mention of 3D movement, watched for a while and commented on the pretty look.
Last night I accepted the Spire quest and went to the docks, where I promptly boarded the H.M.S. Ennui and disembarked into a completely different game. It was as if a bondage flick got spliced into my Care Bears cartoon. Suddenly I'm being yelled at to submit and obey, the game controller is throbbing to an everpresent foreboding heartbeat in a citadel of evil, I'm forced to choose between letting captives starve to death or losing experience points when my obedience collar shocks me. The game makes me run from point A to point B in a monotonous citadel for no apparent reason. The W pauses from her online sudoku puzzle long enough to give me a sidelong look and ask disgustedly, "What kind of game are you playing?" And when the sequence finally ends and I return to the game I wanted to play, ten years were stolen from my character's life (but I received no commensurate income boost from my various retail properties).
Boooooooooooooooo.
Aside from the heavyhandedness of the entire sequence, I think what I most object to is the notion that my character was in that hellhole for ten years. It took control away from me, when the whole essence of Fable is that you're in control-- your actions have consequences, you can be good or evil, who are you going to become? So it gave me two choices-- feed or starve the captives, kill or don't kill a friend (but when I spared him, an NPC killed him anyway)-- but otherwise, the arc of my character's story was removed from me. And in those ten years, the rest of the world hasn't really changed. The story jumped forward in time, but the world isn't selling that time shift to me.
And so our story continues.
Posted by Peter at April 21, 2009 12:35 PM