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nano_mooseAn RL friend of mine is in the hospital. It's fortunately not very serious - just apparently miserable and unpleasant. This hasn't stopped me from worrying, of course, so I'm going to write about Fable: The Lost Chapters, which is shiny and cheerful and nice.
...All right, look, before playing this, and Dead Space, and Okami, I'd had a six month game drought that I broke with Mirror's Edge which turned out to be a colossal disappointment. My standards are low. It sucks, and I don't like feeling this way, but maybe something will come along to change my mind; in the meantime, competent fun is all I'm hoping for. (Come on, team Ico, come on, come on....)
I'm sure it's been said before, but Fable definitely isn't a bad game. It's just not revolutionary. The clever gimmicks and high production values simply don't change the core mechanics much, and the core mechanics are pretty standard, as is the story. On the other hand, it has a distinct visual style that I like, and it's, well, fun. I don't know, sometimes I'm just in the mood for saying "No! My beloved peasant village!" and killing stuff with big swords.
Another reason I am inclined to feel kindly toward it: the Hero's parent that is a member of an epically powerful bloodline left over from the end of the previous civilization, a badass slayer of wolf monsters, nationally famous, has statues raised to them all over the country, withstood years of brutal torture, returns as a spirit to demand you take vengeance on their murderer when killed, gives up their soul in the name of said vengeance and carried a huge fucking axe is his mother. His father was a kind and compassionate stay-at-home sort who encouraged you to do good deeds and reminded you of your sister's birthday. I got slightly annoyed about the hero being male no matter what, but they do remedy that in the next game and it is always quite possible to be not only gay, but gay and polyamorous. Or bisexual.
I liked the combat system – having a Hero that couldn't just stab his way out of every problem lent it some strategy. Not much, admittedly: it boiled down to 'run pursued by enemies so as to concentrate them into smaller space so as to knock to the ground with Force Push to as to reduce them to free-floating molecules with Divine Fury without them all ganging up and chopping me to bits,' with some time off for sneaking around, drawing them out one by one and shooting them full of arrows. I did get a lot of milage out of Assassin Rush. God bless short-distance teleportation spells.
As usual, I ended up giving my Hero more character depth in my head that the game perhaps intended him to have. Like, I've decided he's determined to remain absolutely stone cold serious as a Hero in a fantasy universe where one can be the Legendary Paladin called Arseface, and this can sometimes create...conflict. (Like being grouchy and condescending and a gigantic drama queen. And reacting badly to being teased or patronised. And snarky genre-savviness sadly coupled with humourlessness. And the urge to fall to his knees and scream that he's the only one taking any of this seriously.) Also, he has a scary laugh, because I had fun abusing the 'Scary Laugh' Expression, and a slight tendency to kick chickens when frustrated, because I did that once or twice, too (and then felt really bad about it). Also, I chose his nickname based solely on the fact that 'Reaper' could be an injoke on 'Farmboy'. And I was delighted when the Hero had no goddamn idea what to do after defeating Jack of Blades because, the way I characterized it, he wouldn't - being a Hero is everything he has.
All this roleplaying meant that although by the end I was the saintliest saint ever to have a real, honest to god halo and butterflies following me around, I was tempted to wear Jack of Blade's Mask, because the Hero in my head did want power. But he wouldn't have given it that name; he would have said it was to better the world and make sure that all the things that happened to him would never happen to anyone else...
I didn't, of course. But it was a temptation. (I wonder if I can still get good points if I put on the Mask? Maybe I'll reload and try it sometime.)
You know, for all that this game doesn't do much new, it does have a go at doing interesting things with its status as a game - for example, once you return to the arena, Jack of Blades basically does a re-enactment of your fight there and taunts you with the Navi-esque helpful hints, only twisted around. It felt a bit like if SHODAN had managed to break the fourth wall:
"Your combat multiplier is disgraceful."
"Try and get your combat multiplier even lower!"
"(In a mocking tone) Hero, your health is low. Do you have any potions? Or food? (cheerfully) Well, do you?"
I like that. Jack of Blades is in all else your average villain with an awesome name, though. I don't think I ever understood precisely why he wanted to burn the world, other than that it apparently annoyed him somehow. Maybe the Heroes he'd possessed over the years all had memories of the Guildmaster saying "Your health is low!" and he got tired of it.
Overall it was a cute game with a reasonable amount of fun, enough lore to keep me intrigued, and enough self-awareness to endear me toward it. I'll probably pick up the sequel at some point.
...It is slightly weird that the shopkeeper in the Hero's Guild insisted on calling me a whippersnapper when I was 63 and looking every day of it, though.
...All right, look, before playing this, and Dead Space, and Okami, I'd had a six month game drought that I broke with Mirror's Edge which turned out to be a colossal disappointment. My standards are low. It sucks, and I don't like feeling this way, but maybe something will come along to change my mind; in the meantime, competent fun is all I'm hoping for. (Come on, team Ico, come on, come on....)
I'm sure it's been said before, but Fable definitely isn't a bad game. It's just not revolutionary. The clever gimmicks and high production values simply don't change the core mechanics much, and the core mechanics are pretty standard, as is the story. On the other hand, it has a distinct visual style that I like, and it's, well, fun. I don't know, sometimes I'm just in the mood for saying "No! My beloved peasant village!" and killing stuff with big swords.
Another reason I am inclined to feel kindly toward it: the Hero's parent that is a member of an epically powerful bloodline left over from the end of the previous civilization, a badass slayer of wolf monsters, nationally famous, has statues raised to them all over the country, withstood years of brutal torture, returns as a spirit to demand you take vengeance on their murderer when killed, gives up their soul in the name of said vengeance and carried a huge fucking axe is his mother. His father was a kind and compassionate stay-at-home sort who encouraged you to do good deeds and reminded you of your sister's birthday. I got slightly annoyed about the hero being male no matter what, but they do remedy that in the next game and it is always quite possible to be not only gay, but gay and polyamorous. Or bisexual.
I liked the combat system – having a Hero that couldn't just stab his way out of every problem lent it some strategy. Not much, admittedly: it boiled down to 'run pursued by enemies so as to concentrate them into smaller space so as to knock to the ground with Force Push to as to reduce them to free-floating molecules with Divine Fury without them all ganging up and chopping me to bits,' with some time off for sneaking around, drawing them out one by one and shooting them full of arrows. I did get a lot of milage out of Assassin Rush. God bless short-distance teleportation spells.
As usual, I ended up giving my Hero more character depth in my head that the game perhaps intended him to have. Like, I've decided he's determined to remain absolutely stone cold serious as a Hero in a fantasy universe where one can be the Legendary Paladin called Arseface, and this can sometimes create...conflict. (Like being grouchy and condescending and a gigantic drama queen. And reacting badly to being teased or patronised. And snarky genre-savviness sadly coupled with humourlessness. And the urge to fall to his knees and scream that he's the only one taking any of this seriously.) Also, he has a scary laugh, because I had fun abusing the 'Scary Laugh' Expression, and a slight tendency to kick chickens when frustrated, because I did that once or twice, too (and then felt really bad about it). Also, I chose his nickname based solely on the fact that 'Reaper' could be an injoke on 'Farmboy'. And I was delighted when the Hero had no goddamn idea what to do after defeating Jack of Blades because, the way I characterized it, he wouldn't - being a Hero is everything he has.
All this roleplaying meant that although by the end I was the saintliest saint ever to have a real, honest to god halo and butterflies following me around, I was tempted to wear Jack of Blade's Mask, because the Hero in my head did want power. But he wouldn't have given it that name; he would have said it was to better the world and make sure that all the things that happened to him would never happen to anyone else...
I didn't, of course. But it was a temptation. (I wonder if I can still get good points if I put on the Mask? Maybe I'll reload and try it sometime.)
You know, for all that this game doesn't do much new, it does have a go at doing interesting things with its status as a game - for example, once you return to the arena, Jack of Blades basically does a re-enactment of your fight there and taunts you with the Navi-esque helpful hints, only twisted around. It felt a bit like if SHODAN had managed to break the fourth wall:
"Your combat multiplier is disgraceful."
"Try and get your combat multiplier even lower!"
"(In a mocking tone) Hero, your health is low. Do you have any potions? Or food? (cheerfully) Well, do you?"
I like that. Jack of Blades is in all else your average villain with an awesome name, though. I don't think I ever understood precisely why he wanted to burn the world, other than that it apparently annoyed him somehow. Maybe the Heroes he'd possessed over the years all had memories of the Guildmaster saying "Your health is low!" and he got tired of it.
Overall it was a cute game with a reasonable amount of fun, enough lore to keep me intrigued, and enough self-awareness to endear me toward it. I'll probably pick up the sequel at some point.
...It is slightly weird that the shopkeeper in the Hero's Guild insisted on calling me a whippersnapper when I was 63 and looking every day of it, though.
