Fable

"Fable is an excellent role-playing game, and is one of the best reasons to own an Xbox."

The Good: Solid gameplay; excellent controls; gorgeous graphics; great soundtrack; quite a few extra quests; freedom to develop your character however you wish; adult-themed fairy tale story is enjoyable.

The Bad: Main storyline is somewhat short; NPC interaction is limited; the game feels like it is lacking a little bit in the weapons and armor department.

Despite what some may have stated about Fable, it is actually a very fun and enjoyable game. Sure, the character interaction isn't exactly entirely fleshed out, and certain aspects of the game leave a little to be desired, Fable is simply a game that is just plain fun to play.

You begin your adventure as a young lad, performing good deeds in order to earn money to buy your sister a birthday present. The good and bad aspect that Fable focuses on is present right from the beginning of the game. You can either do good deeds to earn money from your father, or perform bad deeds. The choice is ultimately left up to you, and these choices will follow you for the rest of the game. Whether or not you are good or evil, Fable's storyline pretty much unfolds in the exact same way. The only real change that occurs is the way people react to your presence. Your character's appearance will also change over time, depending on what you do throughout the game. If you are good, you will eventually bear a halo with butterflies flying around you, and people will praise you as a true hero. If you are evil, you will grow horns and have flies swarming around you, and people will fear you and be in disgust at your presence. Even though it is a huge part of the gameplay experience, being good or evil essentially does not really have that much of an effect on the game itself overall, besides a few critical decisions that happen at key points during the story.

The storyline in Fable revolves mostly around a young farm boy, who is taken into the Heroes Guild as a young child to train and ultimately become a hero. The heroes of the guild then go off and perform quests for the citizens of Albion, the world that Fable takes place. During the game you will discover things about who your character is, and the mysteries surrounding him and his family, as well as learn about the history of Albion. It can basically be summed up as an adult-themed fairy tale. Because your character does not speak, the game tries to make you feel as if you are the character, since you are the one creating him, and whether he will end up being good or evil. So essentially, Fable is the players story, even though it follows a distinct path, it lets you decide what who and what the main character of this fairy tale is, and what key decisions he will make during the story.

The gameplay itself is actually quite entertaining, as Fable has a very solid combat system, as well as a fully fleshed out magic system. The basic combat has your hero equipped with two weapons, a melee weapon such as a sword or an axe, and a bow and arrow, which can be used to take out enemies from afar. Instead of developing just one of these aspects, Fable encourages you as the player to develop both of these traits, instead of just focusing on one of them. However, you can develop only one if you want to, but you may have some slight difficulties with certain enemies and bosses, so Fable actually does a pretty decent job of making you realize you can't ignore certain aspects of your characters development, and even encourages you to explore them both.

The magic system is the same. As the game in a sense, actually separates you between either a combat character, or a magic character. You can fully explore both aspects, but it is easier to choose just one of them. For example, many of the magic abilities you can learn seem to be split into two different categories. There are magic spells that severely augment your combat capabilities, and then there are magic spells that are used primarily to use to attack your enemies. If you wanted to be a magic-oriented character, choosing an ability such as multi-strike or multi-arrow would be kind of pointless, as they are spells that enhance your abilities in combat. Whereas a magic character might opt more towards spells such as lightning, enflame or fireball. Lightning simply shoots out an arc of lightning towards your enemies, and can actually be one of the most useful spells in the game, even for a more combat-focused character. Enflame is also a useful spell that shoots out flames around your character to blast enemies, and fireball seems geared more towards a more magic-oriented character, as it blasts your foes with a ball of fire, and is not exactly useful to a more combat oriented character who would opt for a more upfront approach by slashing them, or quickly blasting them with a bolt of lightning, or shoot them with an arrow, rather than a charged fireball.

If fireballs and lightning aren't really your thing, there are many other magic abilities that you can explore as well. You can learn to sap life from your enemies, mind control them turning them into temporary allies, or even summon creatures to aid you. You can even learn a spell that summons ethereal swords to fight by your side, which is incredibly useful for distracting enemies when engaged in a large group, and they can do some decent damage too. There are even more really cool spells like slow time, where you can slow down time to a crawl and easily dispatch some enemies, and you can even combo some special moves together for great added effect. Slow time is a perfect example, if you are confronted with many powerful enemies, you can slow time, and then use multi-strike repeatedly to deal out severe damage and they have little time to react. There are many other useful defensive spells as well, such as magic shield, which is heavily similar to the mana shield in Diablo, where when attacked, you simply lose magic power instead of health. There is also a handy heal life ability that you can use to heal yourself if you lack potions and food, or you can use it to heal NPCs that have been attacked, as well as NPCs that are important to a quest. There are times where you will need to protect certain NPCs from harm's way, and having the heal life ability is indeed handy. When it comes down to it, Fable gives you nearly every option to explore magic wise, from offensive magic, to defensive magic, to summoning magic, Fable has a great selection of spells to choose from that really does let you play pretty much however you want. You are not confined to the limitations of many other role-playing games where you can only learn skills and abilities relevant to your class, in Fable you can create any type of hybrid character you want to, or a full fledged magic caster, and no matter what you choose to do, your character will always be able to handle any situation.

The way that you level up your character works slightly different in Fable than it does in most role-playing games. You level up your character by earning experience, depending on how you defeat your characters. During the game you will earn general experience, strength experience, skill experience, and will experience. Naturally, general experience can be used to level up anything. Strength experience can be used to level up attributes such as physique, health and toughness, which all make you a better fighter and able to last longer. Skill experience allows you to level up things like accuracy, speed and guile. Accuracy makes you a better bowman, speed makes you attack faster, and guile makes you sneakier and gives you the ability to steal items like a pro. Will experience allows you to dabble in all of the different diverse magical spells that the game has to offer.

Character interaction is available in Fable from the beginning, and some of the actions you can do are quite humourous. You really only start with a few social interactions, but later on as you progress through the game, whether good or evil, you will earn new expressions based on this factor. If you are evil you will learn mean expressions that frighten people, if you are good you will learn friendly expressions that let people praise you. You can do other things like give people gifts, but this is ultimately pointless, unless you are trying to get married, which is something that you will probably have to do to help someone like you. Depending on the attractiveness of your character, and the expressions you use towards them, you can get people to marry you, and Fable does not discriminated against sexuality, as you can get married to women or men. And that's right, you don't just get married once, you can get married as many times as you want, as long as you have an empty home that you own in one of the many towns. In order to get someone to fall in love with you, you will usually have to rely on expressions like "sexy hero pose" or "manly arm pump" and giving them gifts like chocolates, perfume and roses. Although as fun as it can be to get married in Fable, it doesn't really serve any purpose. You can sleep with your spouse (you don't actually see anything) and they will give you gifts sometimes. Other than that, it doesn't really go anywhere, as you can't have children. You can however, buy the marital homes, and instead of getting married and using them, you can rent them out and collect money, which is a nice way of increasing your profits if you are in need of gold.

On the visual side, Fable looks fantastic on the Xbox. The great thing about Xbox-exclusive games, is that they generally almost always have much superior graphics than games that also appear on the PlayStation 2 or GameCube. Fable is a perfect example of this, as it truly has superb visuals. The character models look great, the armor and weapons all look fantastic, and levels are designed wonderfully. The great thing about Fable is the wide diversity in the level design, as there are many unique areas of the game that all have their different looks. Such as the eerily dark and creepy darkwood areas, which are covered in grey, black and dark blue, whereas you have the witchwood areas that have rain, lightning, and a lot of green and brown. The areas in Fable fit in wonderfully with the medieval fantasy setting, and they all feel quite unique. The only thing that really felt like it was missing from Fable was a snowy area, although there is one later on in the game, you don't spend much time there and there isn't really anything to do there either. There are little downsides to Fable's graphics department, as the magic effects all look great, and pretty much everything from the enemies all looks fantastic. The only real downside to Fable's graphics, is that there is some odd instances where you might notice a tiny bit of slowdown, but it is usually for a split second and doesn't do anything to hinder the game in any way. And with visuals like these, it's surprising that the game doesn't run like a slideshow. Fable truly is one of the best looking Xbox game I have seen, if not the best.

To compliment Fable's fun gameplay and superb visuals, there is also a very nice musical score to go along with it, and it really does sound great. The town theme will become distinctly familiar to you by the end of the story, and the music that plays in each area you visit is wonderfully distinct and suits them all very well. The voice acting in Fable for the most part is also pretty good, although some repeating voices can occasionally be annoying. All of the main characters are appropriately voiced, and their lines are delivered well by their voice actors. Most of the random villagers sound pretty good as well.

Fable isn't the longest role-playing game on the block but it's length is pretty decent, however you might feel like you wished it was a little bit longer when it ends. Although you can't really feel too bad when Fable is over regardless, because whether you played as good or evil, you can go back and play the game all over again being the opposite character of what you were the first time. This adds quite a bit of replay value, as many of the quests you take on will be different if you do the evil version of the quest, and you are essentially doubling the length of the game, by playing it twice with the game panning out differently the second time. There are also quite a few decisions you make during the game, and playing through the game a second time can allow you do take the alternate decision and see what happens. There is also quite a bit of extra stuff to do, such as finding all of the silver keys, so you can open up all of the silver key chests, as well as figuring out what you need to do to let the the varying demon doors scattered throughout the land let you through to reap the rewards that they safeguard. You can also keep playing after the game ends, as long as you don't skip the credits, which most people will probably do. It is also worth mentioning that Fable has some fun minigames you can participate it, and even be money on. Some of the character stuff is fun too, as you can always change the way your character looks with things like haircuts, different types of beards, and a wide variety of tattoos.

Ultimately, Fable is an excellent role playing experience, despite it's somewhat short length. It's hard to really say Fable has poor value, because it doesn't. It's just that your main playthrough's length will ultimately depend on how much of the extra stuff that you do, as well as the extra quests that you take (and there are quite a few of them). There is also the fact that you can play the game twice is what will be different gameplay experience, through the quests that you do, and how you do them. There is also the fact that Fable's character development system will grant you quite a bit of versatility, so the second time you play you can try something completely different than the first time. Fable isn't exactly the most revolutionary role-playing game ever conceived, but it gives you some cool choices throughout the game by allowing you to truly develop your own unique character, and when it really comes down to it, Fable is just plain fun to play and is one of the best reasons to own an original Xbox. That being said, it is highly recommended that if you wish to play Fable, you get Fable: The Lost Chapters instead, as it is the same game as the one reviewed here, but with expanded content and a longer main storyline. This makes the game have much higher overall value and makes it a better experience overall.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/15/07

Game Release: Fable (US, 09/14/04)