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  • Anti-Climax Boss: You don't battle Lucien, and you may not even get to kill him yourself if you listen to him rant for too long.
  • Anvilicious: Belief makes you stupid or helpless. Hammer's whole point is to drive this home, and Theresa and Garth will weigh in in her favor. Furthermore, Barnum seems to be quite happy to be rid of a religious organization he joined up with once.
  • Difficulty Spike: The Spire because the Hero is stripped of their usual weapons and can only rely on three healing potions while being up against Spire Guards. Returning to Albion ten years later also means that most enemies are tougher than before.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Reaver. Some fans like to portray him as a Woobie who cries nightly over what he's done, or that he has been abused in the past to excuse his awful behaviour. He's often in love with the Hero of Bowerstone, but sees himself as a monster. Granted some of Reaver's diaries imply that he might feel guilty about what he did to Oakvale, but he also claims that he's no longer that man.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Barnum is well liked for his single minded determination, his somewhat shady ideas, and his surprisingly good inventions. He's also very funny, and is unfailingly kind towards the player and keeps his word when it comes to giving them gold for posing for a photograph in their childhood, and improving Westcliff if you loan him some start up gold; which he returns with interest. Unfortunately Reaver kills him when Barnum mentions it will take time for his photograph to develop, something even the more devoted Reaver fans were upset about.
  • Even Better Sequel: Many consider Fable II to be the best game in the series. It streamlined the best features of Fable but kept the same charm and humour. The graphics are improved, the battle system is a lot more fluid, and there is much more of Albion to explore. The addition of a dog companion was also extremely well received.
  • Event-Obscuring Camera: The camera tends to whip around to look at whatever the game thinks you should be looking at. This leads to a particularly irritating moment about two thirds through the game, where to bypass an unnecessary enemy, you're running directly sideways and almost backward with no way to look at what's in front of you.
  • Evil Is Cool: Reaver is an incredibly popular character which is why he was bought back for Fable III.
  • Fanfic Fuel:
    • What happened to Theresa between the events of Fable I and Fable II and how she effectively became immortal.
    • Reaver's backstory post Oakvale and before the events of Fable II.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • Combine "Raise Dead" with any charged spell. Since the enemies usually attack the summons instead of you, the player can load spells without worrying about being attacked. This can result in a player being able to destroy waves of enemies without taking a single hit.
    • Co-op in general is this since the game just isn't quite balanced around having two player characters destroying everything. Also it's possible when playing local co-op to have the second player drop all of their EXP, leave the game, and then have player one pick all of the EXP. Then have the second player join again and rinse and repeat, giving more and more EXP each time since the co-op partner will always be identical to the main player's level and abilities. You can max out a new character within the first half hour of the game by doing this.
    • The "Time Control" spell is extremely powerful even at level 1. You can either slow down time, or target an enemy and teleport behind them, as well as resetting their attack for free hits. You can use this to repeatedly teleport behind powerful enemies over and over, preventing them from even getting attacks off.
  • Goddamned Bats: Hollowmen. They attack in large numbers and they are absolutely everywhere that resembles a tomb.
  • Goddamned Boss: Trolls. Their weak points only pop out for a short time between attacks, and each one is destroyed when hit, so the last hit is often a tricky shot. For added irritation, their attacks knock you back and stun you.
  • Good Bad Bugs: There's a house in Bowerstone Market called 'Monster Manor' which temporarily gives your character an extra star in Physique if you sleep there. However, unlike in other houses with the Bodybuilder bonus, you can infinitely 'unlearn' the ability to get free experience points. You can max our your Hero's stats in under an hour using this method.
  • Informed Wrongness: Several "evil" actions are actually by far the most sensible, and the "good" actions would be suicidally stupid and make no logical sense in story:
    • Obeying orders at the Spire. Since your goal is to infiltrate the group as part of a rescue mission, disobeying would be a good way of being imprisoned/killed/tortured and undermining the goal. Bear in mind that it even gets pointed out that someone was tortured merely for saying they missed their family. Other than Plot Armor, there is no justification in story why insubordination would be tolerated to the degree it is, or why any trust would be placed in you after repeatedly disobeying.
      • Feeding starving prisoners that have been sentenced to death does nothing other than prolonging their deaths; they are still going to be starved to death either way, even if you give them a meal. You have no way of rescuing them, and in the best case scenario are signing up for a ticket to the torture chamber. Most likely, you will be immediately joining them when this is discovered.
      • Killing a guard who is obviously going to be killed either way. Tangent: this also shows what happens when you disobey the local Evil Overlord and you don't have Plot Armor. You are immediately executed!
    • You're The Hero out to save the world. You have a lot of fighting to do. You have the choice between undergoing Rapid Aging or letting some random villager who was already kidnapped and would have undergone this until you happened to turn up by coincidence suffer it. Undergoing this would put you at serious risk of not being able to fight effectively, and Theresa even comments that it is a difficult decision implying there are good decisions to not do this. Gameplay wise? Nope. It makes no difference to your stats and fighting ability, and means you are Satan himself!
    • A quest either forces you into marriage, or going along with a pretty spiteful revenge plan. While this last one is pretty evil, "you must marry someone whether you want to or not, or you're evil" is... an interesting take on things. Especially if you need the renown from the quest to progress and therefore have to do it. Even funnier when with high enough attractiveness a character can fall in love with you without any interaction, so your only crime is listening to what a character says to get the quest to begin with (which you have no in universe reason to even guess what the quest will be beforehand), and potentially telling someone you've never interacted with you don't want to marry them. Or constantly ignoring someone in love with you is somehow the most moral option?
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • The original Commandant ordering you to kill Bob, the poor guard. This is after the Commandant's methods have reduced Bob to a gibbering wreck.
    • Reaver tricks the Hero into taking the Dark Seal to the Shadow Court, where they'll rapidly age in order to 'top up' Reaver's eternal youth. However the Hero meets an innocent girl there, and has the option to give the Dark Seal to her instead. Interestingly enough, Theresa will admit that it was a difficult choice if the Hero chooses to let the girl age instead of them.
  • Most Wonderful Sound:
    • The crack of stone when you shoot a taunting Gargoyle in the face.
    • The bark of your dog, since it usually means he's found some treasure or a dig spot.
  • Narm Charm: There's something just plain silly in the way Alex from the quest "Till Death Do Us Part" greets you with so much depression and then, after two or three "seduce" actions from the Hero, declares that they're madly in love with you and that they're "the luckiest man/woman alive," to the extent of killing themself if you take the route of revealing that the romance was faked on your part.
  • Obvious Beta: On launch, the game lacked much of the promised multiplayer support, though a patch was available to add much of it. More serious are the instabilities and bugged quests that can make the game unbeatable, of which Lionhead has presently acknowledged two serious ones.
  • Player Punch:
    • Towards the end, it starts to seem like Lucien is spending his off hours thinking up new ways to piss your character off. Especially when he shoots your dog.
    • The Spire can also be an example. If you had a family before getting on the ship, you won't get to see them again for ten years.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: Many people consider that Physique at maximum level made the character too muscular and Accuracy at maximum level made the character too high, so some decide to keep it low on both for aesthetic reasons.
  • The Scrappy: Sam and Max (Not to be confused with the duo of the same name) aren't well-liked because their sidequests include them doing something stupid, and the Hero having to clean up after them. They're never all that grateful when you save them, either, and their supposed humour is hit and miss for most players. They return in Fable III from the grave to screw things over for the Hero of Brightwall too.
  • Tear Jerker: The "Perfect World" sequence is heartrending as Sparrow lives an illusion of a perfect life, with the player knowing very much that reality shall ensue.
  • That One Boss: The Commandant is the hardest boss in the game. You only have access to three healing potions, weaker weapons and if you chose the 'good' options while in the Spire, you might have even temporarily lost an ability or two. He hits hard, spams long range will attacks, summons Spire Guards to help him and the fight is in a very small area.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Most were upset that if you choose to resurrect Rose at the end, she doesn't physically appear in person. All you get is a letter detailing that she's living in a forest somewhere with Scythe.
  • The Woobie:
    • Any player character is set to lose their sister and their dog regardless of how you play. This can be the case even more if you have a family, as Lucien will kill them himself.
    • Farmer Giles has his wife murdered by Ripper, just because she found out about his gang being crossdressers.
    • Rose. She struggles to look after Sparrow while living on the streets and is propositioned despite being in her mid teens at the most. Then, when she thinks that they're going to get to live in Fairfax Castle, she's shot and killed in cold blood. If the Banshees are telling the truth, Rose also didn't die right away from the first shot. She had to listen as her younger sibling was shot out of the window, heard their body hit the ground, and cried before Lucien finished her off with a final shot.

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