Michael the Farmer has a bag of gold for you. Do you a) slice him in half, b) shoot him in the groin, c) light him on fire, or d) fart and do hand puppets until he gives it to you.

Fable II is made up of choices like this, all of them part of a long process of defining your blank slate hero, and the game is a major improvement over Molyneux’s first fairy tale simulator.

Combat is fun and occasionally strategic, with combat, ranged, and magic attacks. Quests offer diverse, story-driven objectives, from “clear the mine” to “break the girl’s heart.” Minigames, town interactions, and a robust bartering and land-buying economy fill the gaps and make Fable II’s world of Albion feel complete and realistic.

This world is a sandbox for your hero, who starts out an orphan and is raised by gypsies. Through actions and behavior — what you eat, what you wear, how you deal with an angry ghost or a group of slavers — you define what that hero is like and how the world views him.

Your actions swing you between good and evil, pure and corrupt, with many possible variations, and your appearance changes along with it. You also become funny or frightening depending on how you deal with people, and attractive or ugly depending on your clothes, tattoos, scars, and purity.

It’s a complicated system, but so’s life. In the end you’re left with a character who feels entirely unique and who was slowly simmered over 20 hours of gameplay and choices rather than 10 minutes in the character generation microwave.

As in the first Fable, the populace of Albion responds to your characters appearance and actions. Heroes have to fight through a mob of fans, adoring women, and kids asking for autographs, and villains send everyone running. If you’re ugly they’ll make fun of you, and if you just got married they’ll congratulate you.

Unfortunately, the only way for the player to respond to and interact with the Albion’s populace is through grand public demonstrations and gestures selected from a menu a la The Sims. You can flirt and fart and show off trophies, but there’s no way to personally interact with anyone.

A way to converse with people, to ask questions and make choices that extend beyond “Yes” or “No” is sorely lacking at some points. However, part of Fable’s appeal is its simple gameplay and structure, it’s reduction of the fairy tail hero to a culmination of many simple choices.

The present voice acting is good and the dialogue works, with occasional bouts of Shrek-like comedy. There’s a golden scene where spirits summoned to defend the Stone of Myr’Bregothill complain about the length of every undead-related name.

The story structure remains true to open world RPG tradition, with a main quest line to follow and a lot of optional side quests to enjoy. The main quest culminates in a voyage to the archvillain’s dark tower where the hero must face many choices, and all of them boil down to taking the high road or the easy road. A very anticlimactic ending follows.

The main story is weak, but the hero sandbox aspect of Fable II is compelling and fluid and makes this one of the many must play titles this fall.