Fable 3: The Gamiest Game that Ever Gamed

The goal tonight is to tell you what I thought of this videogame without making it bitter about my life and having equal to or less than 3 rape jokes. Let's see how I do....

I completed the main quest in Fable 3 last Friday right before I took off on a very long road trip. It was one of the three games I purchased from the Best Buy B2G1 deal they were having a couple weeks ago. I tolerated Fable 1 and enjoyed Fable 2 so I was reasonably excited for the third one despite the iffy reviews it got upon release.

Before I get into the game, due to a pricing mistake or something the cheapest version of the game was the special edition. Normally I avoid these because they are filled with crap, but honestly this is the best packaging I have seen for a videogame. It comes with a kind of real looking Bible-esque case which contains the game and some bonus junk. Will I use any of it ever? Probably not, but its slick and well contained. Unlike that Halo Reach set which is in a pallet sized box for absolutely no reason.

To speak of the game I will be speaking of all 3 Fable games because not much has changed in the series. Fable 3 is Legend of Zelda's ADD British Brother. It is a dumbed down action RPG which substitutes being British for being clever. The story in the series is you aint nothin' then you become something, your actions reflect how you turn out as a character. In Fable 3 you are specifically the son/daughter of the person from Fable 2 and your evil brother kicks you out for being not evil. You then go on random quests enlisting the support of the 7 or so areas of the world. Once everyone has your back you then take back the kingdom from your brother and become the main dude/lady. These are the same beats that the first two games followed and eh... I guess it still works.

Fable 3's only new idea is that after you become King you have a "year" (5 days) to be either a good king or a bad king before you have a final battle to save the kingdom. And by good and bad I mean black and white. One of your decisions is whether or not to turn a orphanage into a whorehouse. I will let you cut through the layers of story to decipher which of these is the good and which is the bad option. The way you play the game even has less to do with anything than the first two games. The only thing it impacts is a couple of story line beats and how dirty your character looks.

The gameplay is serviceable, just as it has been in Fable 1 and 2. Three different types of attacks and no limits to ammo or magic... it gets monotonous and I believe the game designers knew this because your battles are very short. In fact there are probably less than 10 "levels" and the rest are just random encounters with a couple bad guys who teleport out of nowhere. You are normally just running around town buying property and performing variations on fetch quests. Property is your main source of earning money and eventually the only thing that determines whether you "win" the game or not. The game economy can totally be broken by just leaving the game running all night while your income stacks up.... and I'm kind of ok with that.

The game world seems very small and very disconnected by loading screens and unrelated landscapes. There is no over-world, you just warp to random villages scattered throughout the map of your kingdom. If GTA can give us New York City with few loading screens then a far less detailed fantasy setting should be doable without being so choppy.

There is co-op and one great improvement over Fable 3 is not having to share the screen. It was unforgivable in Fable 2 so I'm not sure if not making the same mistake twice is something to be commended.

The largest quirk in the game is the elimination of any menu/map system. All of this has been replaced by an over-world which you warp to by hitting the pause button. Each thing you would want to look at is in a separate room. I believe what the goal was with this is to make it seem more fluid, but it just makes it annoying and crappy like doing stuff in real life. If I want to change my clothes or weapons in real life I have to walk over to my dresser or trunk of my car, but I don't want the game to be like my real life because my real life has a lot of useless crap in it. It's a pretty big pain in the butt and almost kills the game, but those who are set on playing it will get over it.

I enjoyed Fable 2, it took a lot of things from Zelda that I liked and did them at a much faster pace with actual voice acting and pretty graphics. The characters and story were worthless but that made me imagine new story lines around all of the NPC's I murdered/impregnated with my video game seed. But then I played Fable 3 and it was Fable 2 with a weird makeup that I didn't like smeared over it. Everything that was added was at the expense of something I enjoyed in Fable 2. The King stuff came at the expense of any significant levels or boss battles. The awful non-menu came at the expense of something I could easily track my progress with.

But underneath the weird stuff there is the Fable foundation, I fast paced adventure game that lets you go crazy and not care about consequences, despite the games biggest selling point being that you have to deal with consequences (consequences=what your character looks like). If you enjoyed Fable 2 I would check this out if it was on sale, if you haven't played Fable 2 I would play that first/instead.