Generally, I’ve been ambivalent to Fable II. I’ve played through it, at once enjoying the experience and finding so much just generally wrong with it. I still enjoying occasionally booting it up and running around and chopping citizens in half for the hell of it, buying up every building in town and considering chasing down all the gargoyles for about three minutes before deciding that I don’t care that much. But I still realize how dull and stupid the plot, how obnoxious the humor, and how unbalanced the combat system is. It’s an enigma.
So when I was given a legitimate reason to start playing again, in the form of the “See the Future” DLC package, I jumped back into the boots of Sparrow to see where the adventure would be going. Unfortunately, the answer seems to be nowhere interesting.
Read on after the jump
The downloadable content adds a familiar jerk to the world of Albion, the traveling lying merchant Murgo from the game’s opening, who is all too willing to sell you stuff that shouldn’t work, but does. These items provide you with a small string of quests, as youventure into the cursed items, or something, to do what heroes do best; muck about.
The first quest has you in a village that’s been drained of all its color…most of the time. A graphic glitch restores the color around you when you do the ‘sucking in orbs’ thing, which kills the aesthetic a bit. You have to defeat shadows of the blue, yellow, and red variety, each of whom can only be injured by one form of attack. It’s surprisingly predicable in its advancement, as you’ll know exactly what’s going to happen each step of the way. It’s only made worse by there being a crapload of hidden treasures throughout, and since the area seems to have more homes than Bowerstone, it’s a bit difficult to navigate.
The second quest has you helping a cursed guy who is trapped in a giant skull in a graveyard, and you have to recover wisps to help him. This area features a lot of “hilarious” costume changes, providing you with several non-convincing outfits to make the world around you mistake you for a wraith, a balverine, or a hobbe. This allows you play charades with a bunch of statues to open up new zones within the graveyard. Luckily the costume changes are keyed to the D-pad in the quest so it isn’t obnoxious to switch between them, but otherwise a pretty maudlin task. Also, three guesses on what happens when you finally free the guy in the skull.
The third quest is the titular trip into the future, and I’ve got nothing to say here. It’s obvious, it’s dull, it tells us nothing we didn’t already know, and is so unsatisfying that you’re better off finding a site to spoil it for you. I’ll offer the only word of the whole thing that I found mildly interesting: Aurora. You can find the rest.
After this chain of predicable events, the game finally offers the meat and potatoes of the whole affair, the coliseum. The event is basically the Crucible writ large, but takes it to such a level that you need to work your butt off to complete it. The arena fills quickly with enemies, boasting nearly twenty circling you every second, and you have to kill them all while occasionally hitting switches to increase your multiplier and avoid death without the convenience of potions. After five minutes, you get a prize based on how well you did, and considering this event is very challenging, getting grand prize is going to feel like an achievement.
The expansion also features some more dyes, some funny hats, and some charmingly pointless Murgo statues. You can also buy potions that provide different skins for your dog, changing its appearance. In response to those who finished the game; no, they don’t. The new items are cute, but cute doesn't really cut it.
While it’s mildly entertaining, I find the expansion just so…pointless. There’s no reason to play the quests, as they have no connection to the storyline and don’t provide interesting rewards, you gain absolutely nothing from your unnecessary foray into the future, the coliseum is cool but becomes frustrating quickly, and the new items and outfits are blander than bland. I’m actually hoping that this vision of the future is going to end up inaccurate, because if this is what we have to look forward too, let’s just wave goodbye to the franchise now.
Final Score: D
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