Reviews// Fable II

It is also very pretty. Set 500 years after the first Fable, in a time that has no heroes but many guns, there are a few lovely vistas and cheerful quarters in towns all of which you have the opportunity to see change over time. All the houses in each town are for sale as are the caravans, businesses, stalls, and the castle itself if you can get the cash up. If only our real life ‘credit crunch’ could be solved with some assiduous alterations to our 360 clocks.

“Pretty”. “Lovely”. Let’s go there, I fear no-one, Fable II is nice. NICE. Not even in the original sense of precise and accurate – just the modern, overused type. Like a mildly fetching jumper or getting the hot water boiler fixed when you expected to and not two week's after. Nice. Not important, not a relief, not controversial in the slightest. Fable II will not let you kill children, have sex with the lights off and it won’t go giving you wondrous treasures in chests around the kingdom – only rusty necklaces or 300 gold.

It is not a Lord off the Rings epic; it is a game that encourages you to settle down with a life partner, have a baby and get a reasonable job instead of gallivanting around the world fighting huge creatures. The main quest has a remarkably short lifespan.

To go back again to the first trailer Lionhead shared with us, we are told of its hopes to create a game that loves and that we will then reciprocate with in adoration. It’s the ultimate answer for lonely or unsatisfied geeks around the world (and surely, that is the common state of humanity) – all your wishes and hopes can come true, be revised, redone: you can marry the sweetest girl in the village, then have unprotected sex with a whore, not just save up for the latter option as in the real world.

People’s appearances are dictated by their lifestyle choices, deeds and dealings, not unfairly tweaked by genetics or poverty. Everyone can become a master blade, shot, bowman or magi within a couple of hours, famed and loved throughout the land by farting gregariously or flexing one’s muscles.

Lionhead was hoping to create a “slow” and presumably therefore, “realistic” (not 'real') journey to love, whereby people would find characters who matched their own hopes for a mate. Those people would then put in the effort to make that barman, stallholder or gypsy their own through old fashioned wooery.

Lionhead also tried to make the connection between inner and outer beauty-or-ugliness clear so that this would, in (Creative Director ) Dene Carter’s words, “make sure the player realises that all the things he does while out adventuring have a really, really big impact on the rest of the world and how the rest of the world sees him.” “

There’s a lot more to it”, the aforementioned Mr Shaw said, than the “sexy expressions” of the first Fable.