Man Beast Resolved.

This weekend I downloaded the Knothole Island expansion for Fable 2. Knowing this expansion was on the immediate horizon, I started playing Fable 2 a few days ago just to get back up to speed. And like I said in a post a couple days ago, I still like it. More than ever, actually.

I'm totally happy with the content included in the expansion. The location is pretty unique, and there's multiple versions of the same space depending on the weather (which is explained in the story). There's a blizzard, a drought-ravaged and a flooded version of the island, and not only do they look drastically different but each one limits and grants access to different parts of the environment.

The new quests are pretty basic dungeon crawls, but they are pretty involved and have some puzzles to solve and loot to grab. I've already finished the quest content in the expansion (as far as I can tell), but I still feel like there's some stuff to do. Mainly thanks to a new type of store that uses a bartering system (money is basically worthless in Fable 2 since you accumulate it even when you're not playing).

But the reason I might be most excited about Knothole Island is that it solved one of my main gripes with Fable 2...

I've said it before, possibly many times, girls in Fable 2 are ugly. Really ugly. I stand by my previous statement where I called my character Helga, the super-chuck feminine man-beast.

It's not just that she's ugly, though. It's that she's not purposefully ugly in a fun way. I think it's just bad design. I almost think they designed the entire game around a male protagonist, and at the last minute said "Holy crap! We forgot girls!" and threw a female skin over the imposing, bodybuilder-esque male character model.

I don't want her to look thin and sexy. I just want her to not look like a man-child with a steroid addiction. Up until now, the terrible clothes don't help at all. The the options seem as bulky and cumbersome as the futuristic styro-clothes from the beginning of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey (sorry, I tried to find an image, but you if you've seen the movie, you know).

I was ready to start a new character when I picked Fable back up, just so I wouldn't have to look at this monstrosity any longer. But that would have meant having to replay a whole lot of game.

Thankfully, on Knothole Island you can find an the Knothole Knight armor, piece by piece. And it looks totally awesome! It makes me look like a normally proportioned bad ass. So now I actually love how my character looks (I just ignore the hideous mess that I know is lurking beneath the armor). And that's a special thing.