The game has been out for about a year, so I've had a lot of time to ponder whether or not I should really be offended by this game, or if it's merely disappointing. I've finally decided that, yes, this game is so unnecessarily horrible that it actually offends me.

Now, I want to clarify that. I wouldn't be saying it if my only problem with the game was that I didn't have fun, or because I felt ripped off. There are lots of games I don't enjoy, but most of those games have reasons for being bad. They had a tiny budget, creative differences with the publisher, schedule limitations, inexperienced developers, all the above...whatever. But Fable and its sequel had the backing of Microsoft, and because his name is a brand, Molyneux was given free reign to make pretty much whatever game he wanted.

And apparently what he wanted to make was a game where distractions like making your character have implied sex, buying real estate and making funny faces at little kids are more entertaining than ACTUALLY PLAYING THE GAME.

Now to be fair, the distractions are all very well made. Social interaction is all designed to be very cute and charming, and it mostly succeeds at this. The dog is very endearing. Buying property is a nice and easy way to make the player feel like they're getting somewhere, even if it's only superficial. The art design of the whole world feels very cozy.

Which would all be well and good if there was any actual game to attach this fluff to. To begin with, it's described as an action RPG, but there's no role playing to be found in the game. All the character upgrades for combat are so absolutely necessary and linear that the only way you could possibly make a unique character is if you specifically went out of your way to avoid upgrading anything just to make the game more challenging.

The action is barely there, because while I suppose you could use a variety of strategies, you'll never actually HAVE to use anything beyond tapping the gun button to fire from afar, backing up as more enemies approach, and shooting some more. Tap that Y button until it jams. Occasionally you'll have to stop just to absorb all the experience you'll be racking up. (Way to go guys, make something that should be done automatically by the game into a chore. That's innovation for you.) If you're completely surrounded you might have to use a health potion, but the previously mentioned property system will be providing you with so much gold that you'd have to be a complete moron to ever run out of health. Not that a strategy would even help in those cases, since the only time the game ever tries to challenge you is when it's just throwing wave after wave of respawning enemies at you. But just keep tapping Y, maybe throw in a tap of the X button here and there for a melee attack to spice things up, but why bother?

Beyond the art design, the environments are so linear you might as well be playing in a hallway. No matter how big the environment there's always basically one entrance and one exit with a few boring grind fests in the middle. Maybe a better analogy would be...a 2D beat-em-up. Except I think Captain Commando and Alien VS Predator might have had more depth. Landing attacks in those games actually feels like you're landing blows, providing at least a superficial satisfaction to the combat. In Fable your sword just kind of swishes right through people until they fall down. The only time you'll get any real visual feedback for attacking is when the bad guys decide to block.

There's also the really tedious and annoying job system that basically amounts to a single mini-game. It's really repetitive, but you'll only have to deal with it for about an hour or two before you start buying shops and houses so that the game will give you heaps of gold every ten minutes anyway, so...

What else is there? Oh yeah, the fluff. The only stuff Molyneux put any effort into. Once you get bored of actually playing the game (which you WILL), you can get married, have little virtual sex, catch little virtual STDs, and have little virtual babies. Slap random people on the street and they'll get mad at you. You can toss a ball and your dog will chase it. Except...why would you even bother? There's no reward or punishment for any of these things, but apparently you're supposed to be awed by the sheer novelty of it.

And this is where the bulk of the creative energy got put in the game! An entire big budget, super-hyped, well marketed exclusive was developed for the sole purpose of allowing Peter Molyneux to screw around and make a game where you can sleep with hookers and a little stat in one of the menus will say you caught an STD. REVOLUTIONARY!

I've also heard some people claim the story is one of the draws of the game, which I can't figure out to save my life. It's your standard revenge story, except it's so compressed and bare bones that all of the dialogue in the entire game would probably only take 30 minutes to listen to. I don't know, maybe an hour. Either way, it's not exactly deep stuff we're dealing with here. Bad guy kills big sister, bad guy tries to take over the world, kid grows up and kills bad guy. There are also 3 or 4 support characters that have about a paragraphs worth of lines each. Which in retrospective is actually kind of a lot for a game as short as Fable II is.

There's no excuse for this! This didn't happen because Lionhead is a small company with budget limitations. It didn't happen because they HAD a real game planned, but then they had to scrap a lot to meet a deadline. It didn't happen because they had a big concept that they had trouble executing, because this is a sequel where they had every opportunity to add everything they couldn't include before. It didn't happen because the publisher thought the original concept was too risky. It happened because Molyneux is an asshole that spends more time thinking about what sort of novelty bullshit would be neat to say he's crammed into a game the next time he goes to E3 than he does thinking about what would make his game worth playing. Real games with real quality and real innovation fall by the wayside due to a lack of consumer awareness while this guy sticks his thumb up his butt and gets a paycheck for it.

The highest praise I can give the game is that it contains one of most powerful and honest metaphors that speaks to the heart of the human condition that I've ever seen in a video game.

The game opens with a video of the main character being crapped on by a bird. This is an even more effective use of the main character as a metaphor for the relationship between the game designer and the player since Kojima used Raiden to tell people to quit wasting their time pretending to be Snake and go live their lives in the real world. Except in this case the metaphor is that Molyneux just took a crap on you, because you're wasting time playing his game.

This game is downright obscene. PERIOD.