It all begins in the wonderful town of Oakvalle, it's your sisters birthday, and you have to bring her your present. You run along town talking to the locals until you meet your sister in the field playing. You hand your present over, but something seems a little strange about her, se says she knew you would bring her chocolates. You stand with confusion but shrug it away and you and your sister walk away to go home. But as you leave bandits attack the village, your sister says that this was the other thing that happened in her dream and that you have to hide. After the terrible incident you find your father dead along with everyone else that you have passed. But a mysterious man named Maze comes along and takes you away. You are brought to the Heroes Guild where you will learn the ways to become a hero and help the people of this country. After training now its your choice, do fight along side with good or do you tread down the path of evil you decide, because for every choice there's a consequence.
Graphics/Voice Over/Sound
Fable is a visually stunning game. All the environments are nicely drawn out and immerses you into the story and role you are playing. There is a lot of detail put into the environments and it doesnt hurt to stop and admire the beauty of it. But the voiceovers do get annoying being British and all. They may not seem funny to people over there but if you sit down and listen to it some of the sentences and phrases just sound funny, and get annoying in just they way they are said. Also you know its British because of the spelling, like color and flavor. But apart from that the game also sounds good; you get the feel of the environment whether it's a graveyard or cheerful village. There are also some nice effects like the drawing of the bow and the magic sounds along with the sword clanging.
Ability System
Like most RPG's there some leveling up and battling to be done. Of course you collect experience (which experience looks like little green orbs) after battles. You have 4 kinds of experience there's, will (magic), strength, skill (bow skills), and general experience. The green orbs represent your general experience, which can be used along with the other 3 types of experience. The ways you can get the other types of experience is by using that ability. Youll get will experience by using a lot of your will power, you get skill experience by using your bow a lot, and strength experience by using your melee weapon a lot. You can learn new abilities or upgrade health and speed by activating the green node in the Heroes Guild. From there you select the type of skill you want to upgrade. In the strength skill you can upgrade your health, toughness, and physic. The skill department has accuracy, speed and guile. Finally the will section has all of your attack and defensive spells; along with the ability to upgrade your will power so you can use your will attacks longer. Each ability with the exception of the will powers can be upgraded 6 times (meaning guile, health, strength etc.). With every time you upgrade to the next level, it will cost you more experience in either general or of the ability you're upgrading. Also to note that you only use general experience when you run out of skill, strength, or will experience and that you use general experience when you have none of that specific experience above or you don't have any other type except general.
Game Play
This game revolves around missions and actions. From the start of the game to the very end, every action you make will affect your appearance and everyone's reaction to you. But this game is fun to play, it starts off simple enough you're a kid, life is good, bad people attack, your dad is dead, the bad guys want you, you escape. It is a very slow start into the game; there are cut scenes, lots of dialogue and of course tutorials. Once you get by the slow start and get into the game, the game is rather enjoyable. You start off with a bow, a sword and a magic ability. Switching between the three is simple, the white button draws your sword, the black button draws your bow, and by pressing the R trigger and pressing the d-pad in the direction of the spell you want you can cast that spell. There are a nice variety of weapons and magic spells but unless you're a real magic person just using your weapons and pressing the X button just works fine. The bow is also very handy and is good for that long range attack, but unless you bow is powerful enough to take down an enemy in 1 or 2 shots then your screwed because the enemy will sprint over with 3 more guys and you cant really rake down 6 guys with one bow.
As the game progresses your appearance starts to change, your hair turns gray and a lot of little things change too. Its kind of cool because you can view your personality in one of the menu screens. There it will tell whether you're on the good or bad side, how many times you have had sex, your sexuality, what kind of drunk you are and neat things of that nature. There are a good amount of missions to conquer and the get harder as you go if you arent leveled up properly. But this game is ridiculously short, all though its an RPG its not a long one at that. This is the major downfall of this game, with all the customization and neat personality effects you think the game would be a little longer to enjoy all that. Of course you can take your sweet time, but you can only take your time for so long until you want to make some progress. Getting drunk and killing civilians to get kicked out of town only is fun for so long.
Extras
Fable is full of side quests and little extra things to talk about so I had to do a separate section for it. In Fable you have of the option of getting married to either a man or a women or you can do both if you want. From there, nice opportunities arise like buying a house, among this large world there are houses for you to buy in just about every town. There are also different kinds of houses ranging in price that will surely empty your wallet. You can also stock your house with furniture and place your trophies on mantelpieces to show off your victories. There are also those kinky options for you uprising serial killers and sex artists, you have the ability to have sex with your wife and the number of times you have sex with her will be displayed in the personality window in the menu.
But if you're not like that hey just kill her and find yourself a new wife in the local town or venture for more wives in a new area. You can also buy and trade goods for some extra cash, and become a traveling merchant. Another option is the choice to buy shops and steal from them if you don't own them. There are hops that are displayed on your map that can be purchased for you to buy and acquire so you greedy little bastards can get more money. But if you're not the calm cool type, hell just kill the store owner and wait for the shop to go on sale because that may be how you roll. Or lets say you fear the consequences of killing a shop owner and you want to start small, well if your leveled up enough you can still things from the shop when no ones looking and get some valuable items. There's also the choice to change your hairstyle and you can get a bird or some tattoos. There are merchants walking around that do that kind of trade or you can visit the local barber in a town if they have one. This just a quick over view of little side things you can do there are probably more but to save time I covered the basics of them.
Overall
Overall this game is fun and has a lot of neat and fun features. The whole personality system is cool and whether you want to be good or bad is a neat. But this game is really really short and this is where the game falls flat on its face and even though it has the whole good/evil system there are real no consequences for your choices. Also the game has too much of a linear path and it would be nice to stray a little bit to do some of the other quests
But there are enough things there to keep it interesting until you get bored of them. Although this isn't the best RPG of all time its a good one and it will be a good game to add your collection of slim RPG's on the X-Box.
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