Whhaaa-aaa-tttt? Working together to achieve a goal? Oh ho ho ho ho…how delightfully absurd! That, sirrah, is simply too much!

Main, people just keep taking jabs at Telious. No one seems to like him. He must go around gluing privy doors shut or something. I’m starting to feel a little sorry for the guy, since even people who are supposed to be his friend like Alustan are bad mouthing him.

Okay, Fable 3…I’m going to be talking about some endgame stuff here, so fair be warned.

I have to admit, the endgame of Fable 3 kind of pissed me off. Not only did it seem criminally short, but it seemed far too…simple. Yeah, yeah, Lionhead-stroke-Peter Molyneux always aim higher than they can reasonably achieve, but the whole king portion of the game came down to making a Boy Scout decision and losing money or making a Fu Manchu decision and making money, or at least not losing it. There’s no subtlety or nuance to it…nothing really comes back to bite you in the ass later, nor do you get unexpected bennies for adapting “good” policies. What particularly annoys me about it is that it all comes down to the gold pieces…after two and three quarters games where money was virtually useless. And since I was playing the “good” route first time through, that meant quite a bit of time with the QTE jobs in order to expand my real estate empire (due to the aforementioned previous uselessness of gold, I had only acquired minimal holdings on my way through the game), and then just letting the game run for the periodic updates, checking occasionally to repair any houses near 0% durability and buy new properties.

Now, let me clarify: I have no problem with the “good” option in this case being more difficult to achieve. The game was pitching that from the second promise you had to make, and flat out tells you that you’ll have to supplement the royal treasury if you decide to not be an asshole while on the throne. My problem comes in with the binary nature of the system…as I mentioned, the “good” options always cost you money. That’s what gets my goat…the goal of acquiring the massive amounts of gold you need to “win” isn’t really achievable within the confines of the monarch system as presented. There’s a few adventures you can go on to supplement your income, but otherwise you pretty much have to finance the entire damn kingdom by yourself. I did manage to do it, avoiding a RROD presumably through the intervention of some passing deity, but it certainty wasn’t all that fun.

My bitching about the endgame aside, I still had fun playing Fable 3, and I’ll almost certainty replay it at some point. Excepting that the second time, I’ll know to be a real estate magnate from the start.