Fable: The Lost Chapters

"Albion's newest form is a suitable upgrade from the original"

I was eagerly anticipating Fable's release ever since I first read about under the name Project Ego. I'm a huge RPG fan, and Fable's previews described a game I would love. Unfortunately, they didn't describe the game that actually shipped. My copy of Fable never left the bottom of my game stack once I finished it once. When I saw The Lost Chapters at the store, however, I decided to give it another chance, and the game redeemed itself. Mostly.

I'll just take a quick moment to let any 360 users know that Fable: The Lost Chapters is backwards compatible. I played it on my 360 without any problems, though some users are reporting massive problems. If you're looking into getting this game, be wary.

Fable: The Lost Chapters contains the original game of Fable in its entirety, but also includes additional content not included in the first release. Some of this content is placed at various points throughout the game, but the vast majority of it occurs after what was the ending of the original game. This is fine for players that have never played Fable before - the transition is seemless, so I'd doubt they'd even notice. Since you cannot simply continue a game started in the original Fable, veteran players will have to replay the all of the original segments in order to experience the new content. Depending on how they enjoyed it the first time around, that might be good or bad.

Story wise, Fable is fairly simple. The game begins when the player character (I'm going to call him the Hero from now on) is a young child in his hometown of Oakvale. The Hero does some tasks around town, then gives his sister a birthday present so she can have a very happy birthday. Unfortunately, Bandits choose that moment to attack Oakvale, and his entire family, except for him. He's rescued by the head of the Guild of Heroes, who takes him to the Guild to be trained. You (the player) experiences bits and pieces of his training, but you soon find all grown up into a well-trained killing machine.

At that point, you're free to do whatever you want. The game world (Albion) contains a number of different towns to explore. Some of these can be traveled to from the beginning of the game, though others can only be reached by progressing in the main storyline. While in towns, you're offered a tremendous amount of freedom. You can go to a tavern to drink and play cards, or you can try to "borrow" a few items from people's houses. Each towns contains a marital house. Once you have one of these houses, you can get married and live there. Marriage really does very little; your spouse will occasionally give you can item as a gift, and will sometimes ask you to go bed. The sound effects of what follows are rather distinctive, although you can't see anything (which is probably a good thing). Once you get past the initial amusement, the marriage process gets very boring (in the game, at least). In addition to the marital homes, you can buy any of the other homes in town by killing the owner. Once you own a house, you can either rent it and earn some money or you can live in it, which does nothing but give you a free bed to sleep in. Although these appear really enjoyable at first glance, they lose their charm rather quickly.

When you're not in a town, you find yourself in the wilderness. Don't be fooled; these seemingly open regions are really very linear. There are strict paths between various towns that are split up into a number of loading points. Most areas are infested with bad guys to kill, who respawn every time you enter the area. Besides battling them, your time in these regions can be spent searching for hidden items, either buy fishing or digging, or attempting to solve the riddles of the Demon Doors, which only open to reveal their hidden items if you can do what they ask for. Unfortunately, merely wandering the countryside isn't a very enjoyable activity. A single pass through an area will often be enough to gather all of the secret items, with only another occasional visit required to open a chest or door that cannot be opened yet. Once you have the items in an area, that area serves as little more then a place to kill enemies and gather experience, and one area is largely the same as another.
The third category of non-structured playing is NPC interaction. The towns and wilderness of Albion is home to many NPCs, only a few of which have any structured purpose. The rest of those NPCs can be used for many different things. All NPCs but the quest-essential ones can be killed. Some NPCs will trade with you; you can buy weapons, armor or potions, or you can buy sell equipment you already have for some extra gold. the NPCs will have interact with you differently, depending on your fame and whether you're good or evil. If you're not well-known, they'll mostly ignore you. If you're famous but evil, they'll be scared of you. If you're famous but good, however, they'll clap and cheer and fall in love every time you walk by. Sometimes, they'll be talking about what you've done. This can be quite satisfying, as you actually feel like your working for the good (or ill) of the land. You can interact with them more directly using a number of expressions, ranging from a tap dance to a pelvic thrust.

The real joy in Fable comes in the form of structured quests. Quests come in three forms: Gold Quest, Silver Quests, and Miscellaneous Quests. Gold and Silver Quests come from the Guild of Heroes (your "home base" of sorts) and you get gold and renown for completing them. Gold Quests are quests essential to the main storyline that you have to do to beat the game. Silver Quests are optional quests that can be done for money and renown, but have no effect on the overall story. The third category, miscellaneous quests, are side quests received from people out in the world, and are similar to miscellaneous quests: optional and done solely for gold or renown. A great deal of care obviously went into designing the quests, as they're all very unique. Some times you might be disguising yourself as a bandit to sneak into their camp, while other times you might be escorting a prisoner to the chopping block. Some quests don't involve combat, too: you might take part in a fishing competition, or you might try to see how hard you can kick a chicken. My only gripe with the quest system is only applicable for Gold and Silver quests. For most of those quests, you're unable to save your game. When you start the quest, the game autosaves. If you fail in the quest, or if there's a power failure and your console shuts off, you have to start over. This might not seem like a problem to some, but sometimes those quests are quite long. The beginning portion of the game, for example, is one long quest, meaning you need to set aside a couple of hours in your first sitting. The save feature available while doing a quest, Hero Save, saves your equipment and experience without saving your progress. In the original version of the game, players were exploiting this feature to become very powerful very easily. The developers didn't like this very much, so they made using the Hero Save option a bad idea. If you Hero Save more then about 15 times over the course of your game, the file gets corrupted. This could lead to some very unfortunate situations for new players. The only other problem with the quests are that there aren't very many of the them. I finished all of them, and did quite a bit pointless wandering, in about 20 hours, even with the extra content not included in the base version of Fable.

Your hero can be heavily customized. Although his initial face is not customizable, he will change depending on your actions. If you do lots of evil deeds, he'll grow horns and look very demonic. If you do lots good deeds, he'll get a halo. If you get hit a lot, he'll get scarred. As you level up, he'll get older and older. When you gets around age 50, his hair will turn white, and he'll look like a, well, 50 year old. This aging causes some significant problems with the storyline. The Hero ages, but nobody else does. Therefore, if you marry a young wife when you're age 25, you'll still have a young wife when you're the age of 65 (the maximum age). This also means that certain characters who are older then you (and often remind you of that fact) will, at a certain point, look younger then you. This doesn't cause any actual problems, but it detracts from the experience. In addition to aging, you can change your character's hairstyle (including facial hair), clothes, and even their tattoos.

The final area of consideration are the technical things. The controls are fairly good; there's two buttons for attacking, and a button for blocking. Pulling the right trigger will allow you to cast magic spells with the ABX buttons, and Y will allow you to switch between different sets of spells. I found the magic system to be quite awkward; you can't block or dodge while casting spells, so I kept switching spell sets in the middle of combat. The D-Pad is used quite well, allowing you to quickly use items or expressions. The graphics in the game are so-so; they're good enough to not bother you, but they're not something you're going to want to brag about. The sound is great. All the various actions have appropriate sounds, and the NPCs are all voiced well (albeit reptitively). The music is incredibly good and fits perfectly to the situation most of the time.

Fable: The Lost Chapters is defintely a game to look into if you're haven't played Fable. The quests, though they won't last you very long, are quite fun. You can actually mimic a real life in the game to a great deal of success, though that gets old as the novelty wears off. There's a number of ways to build up your character, though the differences between good and evil aren't really enough to warrant replaying the game. At $20, though, even a single playthrough is well worth the price if you're an RPG fan. Non-RPG fans might be better off renting if they have enough free time in the next couple of days.

People returning from the original Fable, however, might want to consider passing this one up. The new content is only a fraction of what was in the original, and isn't really worth replaying the entire game unless you want a bit more backstory on the various characters, mainly the final boss. If you're thinking about replaying the game anyway, however, then it's worth your time to shell out the small amount of money and grab this game. If you like the Fable engine enough to play the game again, more content is always good.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/22/06