Fable

"Just another mediocre RPG"

Fable is an RPG designed by Peter Molyneux, a name well-renowned in the gaming community for such games as Populous and Black & White, and developed by Big Blue Box, a fledgling developer with no game to their name but Fable. It was in production for four years before its release, an exceptionally long time, and, unfortunately, the results do not appear to have merited such a Herculean effort. It was supposed to be a game in which you could, essentially, live the life of a hero; in which your actions, good or evil, would have consequences; in which you could immerse yourself in your own self-made heroic tale for hours on end. Fable has succeeded at none of these things, and this is, specifically, why:

Gameplay: The controls of Fable are unintuitive and difficult to get used to, as well as downright poorly designed. You press L to target and R to bring up your magic menu. The X button is your basic attack, B is used to run or flourish, and Y is used to block. X, A, or B to fire specific magic spells while holding down the R button. The Y button is used to switch magic spells while holding the R button.

Now, can anyone see a problem emerging with this system? Well, aside from being just as complicated in practice as it is on paper, you also hold down the R button to collect experience orbs, which drop when you kill an enemy. I cannot count the number of times I've pressed R to collect the orbs and then accidentally fired off a magic spell. Also, the buttons used to switch between your melee and long-ranged weapons are very close together, and let me tell you that pulling out your bow in the middle of a group of thugs gets annoying. The targeting system is also very finicky; to target an enemy you press L, as I said, but to switch between targets you need to slightly depress the L button and then press back down again. It becomes very frustrating when, say, you're trying to target a white balverine out of a group of balverines, or a spellcaster or archer.

The leveling system is very basic; you get general experience from the experience orbs dropped by enemies, which can be used to advance any skill, and experience for using your melee, archery, and magic skills specifically, which can be used only to advance skills in those areas. When you visit the Heroes Guild, you can spend that experience to advance your character. There's nothing particularly exciting or innovative about it.

As for difficulty, it would be difficult to reach the game over screen if you tried. You see, you get resurrection phials throughout the game. Now, the game is easy enough as it is – you're almost always completely out of your opponent's class, even against bosses – but it's still possible to die a few times, maybe two or three. However, you will possess, easily, nine resurrection phials after the first six hours or so of the game. I think you'd have to actually be trying not to find them to not end up with at least five. In other words, it is nearly impossible to lose if you're putting in even a minimal amount of effort. Even for a modern RPG, this game is absurdly easy. The combat itself is of the hack-and-slash variety, with very little skill or strategy required.

Story: The main plot of this game is extremely, extremely basic and predictable. I could easily sum it up in a short paragraph without leaving anything out. Of course, I won't, since reviews are spoiler-free, but you wouldn't be missing much if I did spoil it for you, because you likely know a twelve-year-old on your block that could come up with something better. I'm not exaggerating when I say that; the story is a very basic medieval tale with pathetically little characterization. None of the characters, of which there are very few, are developed at all. This is the kind of story I'd expect from a game of the NES or early SNES era. It's that bad.

Graphics: Ah, the one category in which such a game could not possibly fail, correct? No; even in this category, Fable disappoints. The graphics, taken as they are, are exceptional even for the Xbox, this is true. However, the game environments are bland; the towns look virtually the same, and outside of towns, you have forests and creepy dark places to look forward to. There's very little variety, and what there is tends to be sparse in content; you'll have grass, trees, shrubs, and the road, and that's pretty much it. The NPCs are also very homogeneous, like in KOTOR, only worse because they're all human and there's only a few designs for NPCs of each sex.

There are also several graphical bugs; on one quest, a person whom I was supposed to escort kept disappearing, although I could still hear his banter as he followed behind me. Also, every once in a while when you enter a town, something odd will happen to the ground and it will become a slimy green polygon…thing. These issues are both minor; on the whole, Fable is pretty bug-free.

The one really great thing about the graphics is watching your character change as he grows or gets scarred; the developers obviously spent a lot of time and effort on it and it turned out looking great. If they had focused more on the game itself and less on the player character, this game would look a lot better than it does.

Sound: This is one category where I do not have a single negative thing to say. The soundtrack of this game is superb; every track is appropriate for the moment, and they'll never get repetitive and start grating on the ears. In this area, Fable is exactly as it should be.

Value: This game is probably the shortest RPG I've played in recent memory. Even if you do all the sidequests, loot, go on killing sprees in town, and get married multiple times, this game should take you no more than 15 hours. Of course, it can drag on forever if you want to kill everyone in every town or buy every house in Albion, but why would you? So much of the game's extraneous entertainment value gets old fast. As for replay value, once you've played through it once, you'll have pretty much seen all you'd ever want to see. Sure, you could take the same old quest in your underpants this time, but it's still the same old quest. You could marry another slightly different looking NPC and have sex some more, but you can do that as much as you want in your first play, anyway. There is little value in the first play and even less in replays.

Conclusion:

The gameplay gets a 6/10 from me for control issues, lack of challenge, and all-around mediocrity.

I'll give the story 2/10 for existing, little of it as there is.

The graphics get a 7/10; they're good, especially as concerns the player character, but the environments are sparse and uninteresting.

The sound gets a 10/10 for its utter perfection.

The value gets a 3/10 for being too short, with little replay value to speak of.

Overall, I give this game a 5/10. That's not an exact average of the scores above; I'd say the story, value, and gameplay of an RPG are more important than the graphics and sound, so the game gets a slightly lower score than it would from a straight average. I'd recommend renting it if you're truly interested; it's too short to merit a purchase.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 09/21/04