Fable

Fable, Fable, Fable. How ambitious a game, and how dreadfully disappointing it ended up being. By now, most people who are into the videogame scene know about Fable's history, though I suppose I can elaborate for those who aren't.

Fable had an interesting premise back in the day: the life of a boy in a medieval fantasy setting. Sounds mundane and cliche, right? The creators, however, boasted the feature of the world shaping itself around the actions of said boy, though, which was amazing. A tree planted near, say, a pond would grow as the "years" progressed, eventually standing proudly at an enormous size. Not only that, but they promised your actions could change the cities' prosperity or general attitude of its citizens. Both of these turned out to be hot air. Fable, instead, was nothing more than a standard action-RPG with chapters focusing on parts of your character's life. Yes, you could make some people turn bitter and possibly evil, yet you never widely effected the world...you could be evil, but nobody really reacted that much differently to you. By the end of the game, regardless of your previous decisions, you could still choose whichever ending you wanted! Nothing like a horned demon (a sideeffect of making cruel choices and beating up innocents) saving the world by destroying a blade or whatever.

As much trash as I talk about how unimpressed I was by the game, it still looks pretty good! I mean, visually, it's a treat. Despite all of its broken promises, Fable is still FUN, which is what I count as a game's strongest factor. I play a good guy in nearly everything-- it's just so hard to deny a grieving widow a chance to secure her threatened farm from bandits and greedy mayors, which I don't think was actually IN the game, but that's a pretty common quest in the genre. Fable, though, through charming -if simple and sometimes crude- dialog makes making such a decision as torching the farm and cackling madly seem a little...justified. Hard to explain why, but you'll see if you pick it up.

Another good point to the game is the leveling system. To clarify: there is no typical leveling system; instead you get points from stringing together combos, much like a classic arcade scoring system with multipliers helping you get a high score. In Fable you have abilities which are divided into three schools. Magic, Melee, and Ranged which rack up points through their usage on enemies. Melee and Ranged have some other name, but that's basically what they are. The melee section is comprised of strength, health, carrying capacity, weapon proficiency, and devastating close-range move upgrades. Standard stuff, really. Magic is all upgrades for the spells and a mana pool thing. Ranged, oddly enough, focuses more on stealthy junk and crits, though there are some crossbow/bow abilities included, too. It's a simple system, yet it works extraordinarily well! With the weapon proficiency ability, you don't technically get any better with or have access to more weapons...instead your character puts on about 100 pounds of muscle at its maxed-out point and you can swing your massive 2-handed mace as if it were feather-light. Character tweaking was one of the few promises Fable delivered on, and quite adeptly.

The story's cliche, the characters unoriginal, the world small and obnoxious to navigate, but even so it managed to be fun enough for me to buy the PC "expansion." While I don't actually advise purchasing the game like I did, don't pass it up if you have a chance to play it!