To provide just a sampling of the sorts of things you can do in Fable II, let's run through a sample day in the life of Albion's greatest hero. At the crack of dawn, you may head to a nearby bandit camp to collect a bounty on their heads. Through the strength of your swordarm, your uncanny aim, or powerful magic, you'll take them down, and head back to town to collect your reward.
It's a Buyer's Market
You can then stop at the local shops and look for sales that change from week to week, buying low in the hopes of selling high at another shop to make some extra cash. You can then work a job, bartending for instance, or toiling away at a blacksmith, playing a timing-based mini-game that rewards you with ever increasing cash bonuses for chains of successes. You can buy up some books to learn new expressions, and potions that add to your experience totals. You can interact with a few NPCs in town with the expression system, gaining their favor by dancing and posing, or making them fear you by growling or otherwise behaving rudely.
If you've amassed a small fortune, you can invest in property, starting small with market stalls, and eventually buying up taverns and larger shops, setting yourself up with a tidy regular income. Money is a valuable asset in Fable II, as you'll need cash to purchase new weapons and expensive gifts for your love interest, or you'll just want spending money for a night on the town of booze and gambling. Inventory management is an issue, though, as the game hiccups and briefly stalls when sorting through long lists of items, and there's often a delay between when you interact with an object and when the detailed menu comes up. Since you're very often working with your inventory as you play, it's a constant, though relatively minor nuisance.
Continuing your day, you can take that love interest on a date if you like, bringing them to a favorite spot and wooing them with your most seductive advances. Every character in the game has a specific set of likes and dislikes and personality traits, and your interactions with characters are dependant on taking advantage of these. It doesn't hurt to just be attractive, though, and a haircut and a shave or a splash of color on your cheeks from the local stylist can help here, as can a new outfit purchased from a tailor. If things go well, you can then invite your companion back to your place for a sleepover.
The main storyline quests can be played through at your leisure, allowing you plenty of time to take in all the sights and sounds of Albion. Running through the core missions from start to finish would only take a handful of hours, but depending on how diligent you are at trying to find everything the game has to offer, you can spend dozens of hours exploring. There's not an incredibly large amount of content to go through, and it feels like Fable II pads the play experience by requiring you to venture multiple times through the same areas at different times throughout your journey to collect everything there is to find.
You may even get bored of having to use the expression system countless times in order to curry favor with the denizens of Albion, which gets quite repetitive. On the plus side, the voice work on the whole is very well done, with plenty of Monty Pythonesque british humor that fits the game's setting perfectly. The touching moments, though few and far between, are also well conveyed.
