Review: Fable - 02/06/2008 by Michael
Action-Adventre/RPG
Fable was a highly anticipated adventure RPG due to its new evolutionary style of play, where your choices formed the storyline, your personality and your appearance. Despite the fact that the major storyline was unchangeable, you were given enough choices to form your own character. Fable was the most cutting edge RPG of its generation.
Part of Fable's success is the way in which it is true to its title, the game has such a classic children's story feel to it. The cute middle ages English feel of the towns and villages evoke the familiarity to Arthurian tales of virtuous knights and evil wizards, and hence throughout the game you feel like a character from childhood memories. This is not to say that the game is childish, on the contrary, the fact that you can then choose to take your character down whichever path is what makes it grown up. In fact you should play the game through at least twice, being good, then evil to get the full scope of the game. I recommend a third game where you just try to do all the silly things..
It is all these silly things that made a good game a great one. You get to tailor your appearance with clothing, haircuts and tattoos, and you can get a fair varieties of looks down. Also your choices, good or bad, will affect your appearance. If you go always good you get flowing blond hair, bright blue eyes and eventually a heavenly glow, a halo and butterflies hanging around. Awwww nice. But if you go bad you lose most of your hair, get horns, pale skin, red eyes, a red glow and a haze of flies. Oh yeah and people crap themselves and run when you are around. This is just your appearance, but you can spend ages on just playing with it. One little trick, is to cast the enrage spell which makes you bigger, then save the game, reload, and you stay that big. Repeat the process to become a giant. Hella cool..
Next up is the interaction with the people of the game. You can charm the ladies or men with gifts, your stunning appearance and manly gestures like the pelvic thrust. Once they show interest you work on them for a bit, give them a ring, buy a house, get married and get some lovin, yes you can even get man love if thats your thing. No prejudice in 21st century gaming. Also you can be a businessman. You just kill the shopkeeper then buy his store. Fair trading laws weren't so big then. Or into real estate, buy all the houses, put some pretty trophies up and rent it out. All this to do and you haven't even played the game yet..
The game itself is centered round a single main storyline, being a classic mystery and revenge tale. As a child your village was sacked by bandits and your parents killed before you, and then you spend the rest of your life working out who was responsible and how you are going to bust em up good. You explore the land, get lots of stuff, learn to fight, use magic and generally be a hero.
But to add depth and interest there are 3 levels of quest to do. Gold being the main storyline, silver some serious action and minor trifles being bronze. When all combined there is heaps to do and probably a solid 20 hours of game play..
Fable is fun and funny but with enough dramatic stuff to keep you involved in the story. Whilst the major story can't really be changed everything else can, and that is pretty cool, and now the choose your own adventure style of play is becoming a common genre, due to the success of games like Fable. Just waiting for No2.