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| Xbox 360 Box Art |
Lionhead, you guys messed up on this one.
And, to be fair, I like III,
I really do, but they made just a few problems in the mechanics department that
kind of distract me from your polished (if cartoony) world. And with Fable: The Journey coming out in a few
weeks, I figured it’d be nice and topical to go ahead and review this (though
we’ve been assured that Journey is not
Fable IV…A New Hope), so here we go.
Fable III picks up
fifty years after Fable II, with the
Hero from that game having become King over the land of Albion in the time
between the last game and now, except now he’s dead and his jerkass older son
is ruling the country with an iron fist and his devilishly evil Michael
Fassbender voice. Sadly, however, you
don’t get to get his job until later in the game. You play the role of the younger brother (or
sister), who is never named, and have apparently not been paying attention your
entire life whilst your brother has been crushing the populace under his heel.
However, much like the real life British royal family,
everyone prefers William to Charles, and so your general and childhood mentor
King Théoden gets together with a man who laments his parrot being no more and
decides you’d be the perfect individual to lead a full scale revolution against
your brother. You having exhibited no signs of having the three Hero traits of
Strength (melee), Skill (ranged attacks), or Will (magic). Thus, you make a trip to rob the grave of
your parent (the game makes minor cosmetic changes if you have save files from Fable II, but otherwise remains the same
throughout) for a Guild Seal that lets you commune with a bitchy trampoline who
shows you the path before you and sends you on your way.
What follows is you performing tasks of various kinds to
gain the use of several allies in your battle to take on your brother. Most of the first half of the game is taken
up by doing this, or doing the incredibly arbitrary task of gathering Guild
Seals either through defeating foes in combat or by completing a variety of
quests in each of the settlements that you are forced to rigidly follow in
progression. The Guild Seals you need
both to progress in the storyline (apparently your leveling up is somehow
related to how much people are willing to follow you) and to level up your
character on the “Road to Rule”, an irritating and tedious system that really
has no business being in this game.
The level up system involves you travelling into a mystical
alternate dimension that consists of nothing more than a long path with a
series of gates that leads up to a faux-Bowerstone Castle. Visually, this is fine, it’s even rather
interesting to look at. But it serves no
practical sense and becomes incredibly tedious for those who want to unlock
everything and have to go back through the various gates to get those chests we
didn’t open to receive the upgrades (you don’t actually have to unlock all of them
behind a gate to progress further). If you’ve opened all the gates and want to
go back to find a chest you haven’t opened, you either have to walk from the
end of the road back down to wherever you’d like to go, or use a teleport pad
located at every gate to go all the way to the beginning and walk down.
Couldn’t this have been solved with the leveling system in II? By comparison, there was nothing
wrong with how things were (and why are EXPRESSIONS part of the leveling up
now?).
And because the spoiler warning should be kind of obvious
(it’s also been almost three years since launch), I have no shame in telling
you that you get a message from a soldier loyal to your cause that you’ll find
allies in Aurora, a land across the sea that was mentioned in Fable II’s “See the Future” DLC that was
a bunch of foreshadowing that led up to this.
In Aurora, the first thing you run into are some natives from the
neighborhood of Lovecraft, who proceed to try and consume you. Finding natives
there who are apparently peeved with your brother for showing up some time ago
- promising an army to save them from Cthulhu and never getting one – and agree
to join up.
Long story short, you come back home and kick Fassbender
right off his throne and take his place.
But you learn that you have only a year before Cthulhu comes knocking on
your front door asking if you and the rest of Albion can come out and
play. So, you have to raise around six
million gold in the royal treasury in order to combat the terror and keep the
post-main quest world from being completely devoid of NPCs (what a thrilling goal!).
This brings up a rather big question – why six million gold?
Why such a random, arbitrary number? Sure, buy up enough property (I recommend
buying only shops – in a stupid change from two, you actually have to repair
housings now, but not shops) and you can make the gold in a few hours (read: a day or two) and then some. But wait! You
have your allies that you made your promises to and you can either fulfill them
or break them in order to raise gold and…y’know, save everyone.
This is kind of a big problem I have with Fable in general. You can either be good
or bad. For a game that its developers
parade their karma system as though it’s the greatest thing ever, you don’t get
any shades of gray. It’s just black or
white. There’s no option for telling
everyone to get over themselves for a year so you can, y’know, save everyone, and then maybe we can look into your urban renewal projects. But well,
no.
The game almost attempts to try to make you better
understand your brother’s choices as King, but I’d understand it better if I
could choose more options than holding doors for little old ladies and helping
the blind to see or running amok burning down orphanages and eating baby seals
(delicious, by the way). But in nearly every situation, you only get a “good”
option and a “bad” option. It’s been
said of Fable that every action you
have has consequences. More or less, it just comes down to this game in
everyone else loving you or hating you.
No, really, you either become a paragon and either grind for
gold to save your kingdom from total destruction or just waste what resources
you have to pay for your little army’s pet projects, or you become a tyrant the
likes of which would put your dear brother to shame and crush Albion even
tighter within your grasp in order to save it.
Both of those seem so strangely not appealing.
As I said before, don’t get me wrong, I do like this
game...okay, that's a lie, I really don't. I really wish that Peter
Molyneux and Lionhead Studios would quit trying to tell us this is an RPG when
it’s not, it’s a hack n’ slash with some shooter elements that just happens to
have a decent-ish storyline attached to it. There’s no real role playing, and
I’ve seen games that can do
role-playing (Neverwinter Nights?
Neverwinter Nights 2? Baldur’s Gate? I could go on…). So why can’t Fable? Even with a voiced protagonist in
this one, he/she is incredibly bland, you get no dialogue options, and it’s all
in all just you making an almost mute man/woman a saint or a villain instead of
a completely mute man/woman.
Anyway, I look forward to Fable IV where my son and daughter (who were born at different times but are somehow still the same age) lead a rebellion against me in my totalitarian empire.
Anyway, I look forward to Fable IV where my son and daughter (who were born at different times but are somehow still the same age) lead a rebellion against me in my totalitarian empire.
Yeah, not that much looking forward to The Journey, maybe my opinion will change.
Fable III is now available from Microsoft Game Studios
and Lionhead Studios for the Xbox 360 and PC.
This review is based
on the Xbox 360 version.
