Before the time of the rise of the Tattered Spire…and the
unnecessarily dragged out game that is Fable
III, there was a game that by all accounts wasn’t all that bad. I wouldn’t know, I never actually played
it. Yeah, cardinal sin of gaming, blah
blah blah. But Peter Molyneux’s first
offering from the world of Albion has been enough to get two sequels (not
counting spin-offs), so clearly there was something
to it that made people such diehard fans.
So what was it? Apparently, Lionhead decided to bring out
their answer with Fable: Anniversary.
Eh, it’s alright.
You take on the role of the young Hero of Oakvale as
referenced in Fable II and more
indirectly at Fable III. It’s the same storyline from the original Fable so far as I know: young man gets birthday present for sister,
young man gets village burned to the ground by angry bandits who were
apparently in no particular rush, young man spends several years training to be
a badass unhindered by the people who were after him in the first place. However, instead of the gypsy camp of Fable II or the…running around in a
tunnel of Fable III, the Hero of
Oakvale gets to train at the Guild of Heroes before they were left as nothing
but a dilapidated ruin....and unfortunately, you have to come back to it to level, which is breathtakingly stupid. Something I'm rather glad was taken out of future installments.
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| Yet another guy who hasn't read the Evil Overlord List |
Here, the player learns the basics of melee, ranged, and
magical combat. Melee runs exactly as it
does in the other Fable games. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, well
done. Ranged can be done as in the other
games in the series, as well as with an over the shoulder third-person mode
that allows manual aiming. I’m not fond
of this mode and I rarely used it in Fable
II to hit the gargoyles and never in Fable
III where I think it was removed, and that’s definitely for the better. The main problem with that mode is when you
use it, you’re completely stationary.
The left stick, usually reserved for movement, goes into aiming your
crosshair so you can shoot – which is a problem when you’re unaware of this
and enemies get a little too close.
Also, another thing is the ability to charge up a shot, dealing more
damage. Another feature that was removed
from later games, and definitely from the better. Of course, with Fable II, firearms became the dominate form of ranged weaponry in
Albion, so I suppose that would have just been overkill.
And then there’s magic.
Very much the same, though there’s a great deal more variety than in
later games and spells are tied more to the “good/evil” karma meter so that
only certain spells can be mastered by certain alignments…which in some cases
makes sense. No paragon of all that is
good, right, and minty fresh is going to even think of using a spell that tears
out and rapes the souls of his opponents, is he? Naturally not. It’s also clear with some of the spells that
they were clearly working on ideas about what worked and what didn’t, and it
shows.
Oh, and no area of effect yet. It makes me sad.
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| Maze: He's like Dumbledore...but gruffer. |
Apart from that, it’s not bad. Okay, really, but that’s just it. It’s kind of strange going back and looking
on the first game in the series, having started with the second. Though it’s fun as a curiosity in seeing
where the series has progressed from, that’s pretty much all the enjoyment one
might get out of it. There’s little else
here. I can’t really say what has
changed between the original Xbox version and this one, but if it’s just a
graphics upgrade, then I suppose it’s nice to be able to have the first Fable on the Xbox 360, but there’s
little more that I can say beyond that to either it’s credit or detraction.
Fable: Anniversary is now available from Lionhead Studios for Xbox 360.
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