Fable Review

I hope you all appreciate this review.

Fable runs like absolute dogshit. I had an old disc lying around someone gave me from when they got rid of their original xbox. The game ran like a 200 dollar used car. It was squealing and skipping frames. I tried it on both my original xbox and my xbox 360 (of course it doesn’t work on xbone despite/ probably because other versions of the game are available). So now i go out to my local wacky retro store and buy a copy of fable the lost chapters, which is the one yahtzee reviewed anyway. It turns out that’s just the way the game is. It looks bad, it sounds bad, it plays bad. In all fairness my copy was definitely damaged unless the lost chapters fixed some sort of issue where the game makes weird pig squealing noises randomly, but cutscenes stutter when they start playing and then the game hangs when you’re out of them. So I soldiered on.

The nerd in me that hates hd jagginess on standard definition games made me play this game on my original xbox on a crt tv. This also wound up being a mistake. Guess what? My power button stopped working on my system two days in. I decided I didn't want to restart the game again, so I wound up forcing my xbox to turn on by opening the disc drive to start the system, then unplugging it to turn it off. This worked for a few days until the system started randomly resetting and losing hours of progress in the meantime, as fable has no manual save worth using and you have to complete an objective to trigger autosave.

So here is my review of fable anniversary edition for xbox 360 running on xbox one through gamepass. Its not the original version and if you don’t like it go fuck yourself. A note by the way. Now that gamepass is tiered i would advise against the core plan. It has about 12 games, most of which are 10 years old and most are indie games you can buy for a dollar. Gamepass used to be a great deal, almost criminally cheap, now you might as well just buy the games because you’ll pay for most of the library the first time you press okay to buy it.

Fable is a mediocre action rpg made by Peter Molyneux's Lionhead studios. Peter is famous for overpromising on every game and project he’s ever worked on to the point that he’s become a meme in the industry and fandom of gaming. He’s not what I would call a laughing stock, more like a lovable scamp who’s tall tales are so over the top that people can’t help but tease him about his enthusiasm. For example, he was the chief executive of gushing over the xbox kinect before it came out, promising a game with world breaking artificial intelligence back before that was something eating society alive and then had to keep very quiet when microsoft released a webcam to play dancing games on and destroyed their reputation instead. For Fable, he notoriously promised a living breathing world with rich interactive characters, options for things like growing trees from acorns, and a frame rate that was in double digits. Instead we got characters that say one of about 4 lines every time you pass them and a game that seems to think we’re in an epic struggle for our lives when I died maybe twice and was immediately brought back from the automatic extra life potions that the game gave me every 5 seconds.

At first, I was charitable to Fable running poorly. I am old enough to remember the early 2000s and I remember how cool it was just to have a game with an open world. Back then when a game had an open world it was considered a real treat. That changed when I actually started looking at dates. Fable came out within a month of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. It came out a full year after games like Tony Hawk Underground were trying to add open world mechanics to every other type of game. For some reason I thought that this game was much closer to things like gta 3 and Shenmue, which would have made it understandable that it was tougher to get things running. However, by this point open worlds were expected. They weren’t celebrated, if they weren’t there people wondered why. The fact that Fable ran on the Xbox, which was much more powerful than the PS2 and still failed miserably at it makes me think that the studio making this game started with a giant unfocused disaster that they kept having to cut so much out of by the end that it barely made it out the door.

The next place this unfocused cut down feeling shows is in the story. I wound up beating Fable. Once again, the purpose of this project/challenge is to play the first couple of hours to get an idea of the games as opposed to beating all of them. Last time, when I played The Darkness, I liked it so much I decided to keep going. This time, instead of loving the game so much I couldn't stop playing, I kept playing waiting for something to happen and by the time it did it was almost over already. It starts as a standard fantasy plot of a kid having his hometown destroyed and wanting to seek revenge. The issue here is that from that point not much happens for about half the game. The next half of the game or so is you learning to be a hero. You literally join a “hero guild” despite the fact that because the game is based on a moral choice system, you get a choice of doing both good and evil missions. This means that while one mission will say something like “go and protect the farm from being raided”, there will be another quest in the menu right next to it saying “raid the farm”. So the hero guild is fighting itself? Apparently yes, because on that mission you meet your roommate from the hero guild in battle and it's not seen as some kind of betrayal but two people having a chance meeting at a random odd job they’re both taking. This also means you basically spend the first half of your game not fighting against a big threat, you’re just sort of building up your resume. The core loop of the game is to get a random odd job in the hero guild, fast travel to the location, do the mission which is almost always beat up a bunch of bad guys, then come home and get another mission. And the mission briefings are essentially just a text box, they could have given it to you right when you finish the other one but i guess they decided sitting through two loading screens was more fun. Fable wastes a ton of time having you run in circles doing nothing and it didn’t feel like I was working towards anything until after I had already decided I hated playing it.

You actually find the people who destroyed your town in the opening about halfway through and beat them. You would think that would be a big deal, but you don’t meet the actual bad guy who’s threatening the world until a few missions later. The bandits that destroyed your entire life and started off the entire game don’t even factor into the overall story. People *in* that scene factor in, sort of. For example, the guy who saves you from the wreckage turns out to be evil, but I literally hadn’t seen him since the opening credits. So basically some random guy I didn't remember shows up and goes “it is I. the one who saved you! It turns out I was evil!” and then you kill him in five seconds. Or at least I would have if he didn’t teleport and spawn inside of level geometry and disappear off of the map, forcing me to reboot the game and hope it didn’t happen again. And that brings me to the combat.

Action RPGs are a strange genre to define. Partially because it's a hybrid genre that plays with both action and rpg elements. Because of this, it's less a genre in itself and more a set of characteristics that it can fall into. For example, is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas an action rpg? It’s got stat building, a story and character based narrative, a giant open world, and weapon characteristics and strategy are important elements. Probably not, but it shows how the argument is tricky and probably not worth gatekeeping. But it's safe to say that in most action rpgs, story takes a back seat to the gameplay to a point. For example, Dark Souls is famous for having next to no narrative and being purposefully hard to follow. I would argue the combat *is* the story in Dark Souls. It’s about the triumph over adversity and struggling with impossible odds. The Legend of Zelda, which is technically an action adventure game but specifically designs itself around being a stat free RPG, has the same stupid story over and over again. Even games like Diablo are famous for being mindless fun, and I'm pretty sure the only story in Diablo 1 is “there is a big monster at the end of this dungeon”. This is why Fable fails dramatically. The best way i could describe it is a game made out of the fist fighting mechanics in Grand Theft Auto 3. I beat almost every enemy by standing next to it and hammering on the attack with sword button. Even “hammering” is too strong of a word. The enemies fall down after one strong hit so most of the time you’re just standing there waiting for them to get up. For anything that had any sort of ranged attack, I had a magic spell to shoot lightning at it. Blocking is broken because the same button does a dodge roll that can open you up to attack or get you out of range, so I spent the entire game avoiding blocking and just tanking hits while drinking potions from the quick select. Every boss I didn't beat by essentially standing still and hitting them, I beat by holding down the lightning button until I ran out of mana, and then would drink a mana potion and keep doing it. It had the intensity of watering the flowers with a garden hose. Even the final boss went down with me barely thinking about it let alone trying hard. And the joke is that at the end of the game i had something like 80 health potions and 100 mana potions in my inventory!

My takeaway from Fable, other than its a mess, is that it's a console game made by a bunch of 90’s pc gamers. It’s blaringly obvious that their main point of reference for “story rich games” were less Grand Theft Auto 3 and Metal Gear Solid, and more Baldur's Gate and King’s Quest. They added an action battling system to make it less of a standard crpg, but didn’t understand that on consoles those mechanics actually have to be fluid and responsive to be considered good. And also like Baldur’s Gate, the characters both never shut the fuck up or say anything worth listening to.

I really started thinking about the crpg/ adventure game influence towards the end of the game. Fable’s critical path isn’t very long, and I wasn't enjoying it very much so I stuck to it exclusively except for two occasions. Once, when, honestly, I got turned around and didn’t realize it was part of the critical path, and then once at the end. They wound up being the two most interesting parts of the game. The first time was a fun little story where you help a grandmother save her grandson from a cave where he had been looking for treasure and then captured by goblins. It was a pretty standard fable “beat all the bad guys” mission, but then when you bring him back to his grandmother’s house, it turns out she’s evil and was the one sending him down into the cave to look for treasure to begin with and the boy runs away screaming. The last time, I got a side quest to investigate a murder. I had to start talking to people for a lead, and it eventually led me to an abandoned house where I had to flash a lantern 3 times (which you do by hitting a random button in your quick select menu that doesn’t show up even when you stand in the right area so i had to watch a walkthrough on youtube just to find this out), then talk to the ghost of the murdered person. Suddenly the game had subverted my expectations. Instead of just standing there bonking random enemies it had lots of interesting dialogue, and get this, at the end, instead of just giving me random experience points, it gave me the murderer’s castle! It was the first time the game had given me a single tangible thing other than a wacky trophy in my inventory that I have no use for. In most missions you don’t even get much of an ending cutscene, just a bunch of cardboard cutout npcs cheering yay and a voice in your head telling you to go back to the starting area. Both of these side missions had great stories. It's clear they made some big expansive world with lots of fun side quests like Fallout or Baldur's Gate. The problem is they ran out of time to get the main story past the first draft where the main bad guys aren’t the same people by the end of the game.

The other thing that hammered this home was the lost chapters, which is basically the add on levels after the original game ends. Now, today we just call this dlc, but before you could count on everyone to be able to download everything you’d just sell a separate disc, sometimes as a special edition version of the game. The lost chapters were more than likely made after the game was already released, and it's much better. I would argue that it's the best part of the entire experience and if it was available as a standalone expansion it would get a recommendation. It addresses a ton of issues in the original game. First off, I mentioned it briefly, but the towns in the game run horribly. They basically slow down to single digit frame rates when you move around. it would barely be acceptable for that to happen on playstation 1. They optimized things for when you’re in battle, so it's not actually that big of a deal, but it broke the immersion so bad that I felt like I was floating on top of the world as opposed to in it. In DLCville, the extra levels are much better. They use a lot of verticality, stairs, hills, and winding paths. This allows the game engine to render less of the foreground and run much smoother. This also allowed the game world to be more detailed, as each part was put into focus. It was a much smaller area, but because it was running at a locked frame rate and had more detail that mattered a lot less. For the first time I found a cozy inn and some shops that felt like places I might actually have wanted to be at as opposed to choppily floating on top of the level to get to the shop menu screens I was forced to walk to.

The other factor is the lost chapters campaign is organized around a central narrative that gives it actual weight. The main bad guy the original game eventually comes up with is back from the dead and you must collect dead warriors' souls to stop him. Every single mission you have a support npc try to decipher codes in the ruins near the town you’re in and when you get the meaning you go out and find the warrior. 100 percent of this still has battles, but it also has puzzles, and the warriors are people you need to meet and search for by finding clues at their locale. At some points you’re given options about killing one of your friends and using them as a warrior soul instead of searching for the ancient one. It's maybe the only time the moral choice system has any impact on the story. The battles themselves are actually much more challenging, although Fable screws the pooch far before this campaign and makes you so overpowered it kind of doesn’t matter. After the battle you meet the warrior’s ghost who will have a cool story specific monologue. Then instead of going back to get a quest, you go back to the ruins and let the soul inhabit part of an ancient shrine to help you along your quest. This is how the entire game should have been. It's focused, it runs better, it's genuinely more fun. And why is it more fun? Because it focuses on puzzling, searching for items, world building, and an overarching narrative. The same thing 90’s pc games excelled in. I’m not sure if lionhead will be able to scale down these games to make something better, but we will eventually be covering Fable 2, so I guess we’ll find out.

In my opinion, RPG games of any type have to have one of 3 things. They can be carried by either a good story, a fun battling system, or a fun world to inhabit. For example, Final Fantasy 7 has a drop down menu for its battling and random encounters. It's not terrible, and if you’re really into stat building it can be fun, but it's mostly just there. However, the world is incredible and the art is breathtaking (play it on a crt and you’ll see what i mean), and while the story is pretty stupid these days, it was refreshing at the time just to have something that was well translated enough to make sense and not be filled with grammatical errors. The Y’s series has one of the stupidest stories I've ever seen, but it's fun to play and the world is so darn charming you can’t help but fall in love with it. Fable wastes a ton of time with nothing stories, nothing characters, and fine but not very exciting gameplay, and gives us none of these things until the very end when it genuinely becomes pretty good. Overall. I can’t recommend this game at all. I honestly spent about two weeks writing up this review because despite playing it to completion, and also having to restart it multiple times, I have barely any feelings about it at the end besides confusion to how this game was successful enough to have any sequels.

Also, just putting this out there. These reviews have no upload schedule, but while i think they’ll be quicker in the future, i did make a huge mistake by not realizing that zero punctuation was started in 2007, what’s considered one of the best years in the history of game publishing. If you look at the list of games he covered they’re almost all timeless classics for about the first year and a half. Then it nosedives pretty quickly, but i don’t know how i’m going to just tool around with games as good as bioshock, psychonauts, and super mario galaxy and not finish them. So we’ll start slow and hopefully the heat death of the universe won't happen before I hit the turok remake.