Fable Review

Platform: Xbox

Designer: Big Blue Box

The Idea

Since the 2001 release of Peter Molyneux’s PC hit, Black & White, the gaming community has waited with bated breath to see what revolutionary steps he would take with his jump to console gaming. Fable is his answer to that call, and as far as revolutionary steps are concerned, this game is full of them. This game takes you and immerses you in the lifestyle of the character that you create, from childhood through maturity and old age. Your character develops as you progress through the game in a simulated time-line atmosphere. You travel through Fable's third person action/RPG and face an endless series of decisions that mold your hero (or anti-hero) into the fantasy character you want him to be. Among the decisions you’ll face is the ultimate: whether you want your character to be a good guy or a bad guy. You can also choose whether he excels in physical prowess, magic, or stealth and speed abilities, and you will face many other decisions to determine more personalized affects of your character’s life.

The Actuality

On most fronts, the game delivers everything that they intended. If you played Molyneux’s last game, Black & White, you shouldn’t be surprised that my only real technical gripe comes from all of the glitches they left in this game when they put it on the shelves. However, I don’t think that they stand in the way of the experience Fable offers.

By doing good or evil you decide whether your character will look like a member of the clergy or an unleashed minion of Hell. This balance was too one-sided for me. It was far too easy to be evil, and the rewards for being a good guy were few and far between. Also, by the end of the game, there were plenty of easy ways to become absolute good or demonicly evil within minutes, leaving you with the feeling that all the hard work you put in to sculpt your character as you saw fit was completely unwarranted, as you could flip-flop between the two with ease once you gained acess to certain areas.As far as your abilities go, it’s great until the last half of the game. In addition to playing it myself, I watched several other people play through the game and was amazed that at the same exact point in the game, our characters all seemed to turn into, more or less, the same person.

Once you find a strategy for collecting experience, and there are several fun and easy ones, it shouldn’t be too hard to max out all of your character’s stats. Aside from stats and moral dilemmas, you can shave your face, cut your hair, and even tattoo your hero as you collect designs for local artists to use on yourself. You can choose between marriage, gay or straight, and you can be monogamous or have one in every village you travel to. You can drink beer until you puke your guts out to compete for the title of Insanely Dependant Alcoholic, or use the screen blurring effects this creates to add extra difficulty to your next battle. Be warned though, drinking or eating in excess leads to potbellies.

The Recap

There is a ton of replay in Fable game and as many mini-gripes as I had, the whole of the game was more than the sum of its parts. It takes a lot for me to say that about a game chop full of glitches that could have been easily avoided, but I do hope that in if we see a future title of a similar vein, they take the time needed to work out the little tweaks that would have made this the best game ever made.