• Fable III: A Disappointment

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    I loved the first Fable game. I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe it was the gameplay I enjoyed, I know I liked how the game looked and I was interested in the story. I liked the roleplaying aspects, that you could get married and divorced, buy houses and shops and that your profile kept track of the farthest distance you had kicked a chicken.

    I was very disappointed that Fable II was never released for PC but when Fable III was it was one of the first games I bought after getting a new computer. After waiting so long for another Fable game, it was disappointing to say the least.

    In Fable III you play the younger sibling of Logan who is king of Albion and who in recent years has turned tyrannical and cruel. Within a sort amount of time you are faced with your first ethical dilemma and really the most interesting in the game. You must choose whether to save a group of innocent townsfolk or to save your romantic-interest. As with all Fable games, these moral decisions affect whether you are deemed good or evil and overtime change the appearance of your character.

    Your character soon sets out to bring together several groups into an alliance to overthrow Logan, with of the aide your mentor and a butler, and various promptings from a mythical seer.

    The game play has become much less interesting since the first game, with the magic simplified but made far too powerful. While you can choose to fight with guns, swords or magic, there’s really no reason you would ever consider using the sword as it is clunky and much weaker. Combat becomes very easy and in the entire course of the game I died once, and that was only because I got curious over what happened when your character dies.

    The side quests are often less than thrilling. While theoretically there’s an overabundance of them as befriending most townsfolk will lead them to ask you for a favor, they’re mostly all similar and less then exciting as they mostly follow the standard line of ‘please bring this book to my friend over in that other town’.

    There are some genuinely interesting side quests however that are more fleshed out and some of them are very creative, such as one in which you enter a bizarre after life to perform plays with a ghost, another where you enter a miniature fantasy board game and a third involving a haunted house.

    The world is a pretty large one but there’s not enough to interest you between locations to really make you want to explore much, while the NPCs are disappointingly similar to each other. There are a handful of characters central to the plot who stand apart but you can’t interact with or marry them outside of the set guidelines of the main story. The NPCs you can befriend all look very similar and all sound largely the same. The only character with any personality or real lines who you can choose to marry is your romantic-interest from the start of the game. And if you didn’t choose to save him then you’re just out of luck. At least in Fable I you could marry the Mayor (even if it didn’t make a lot of sense that this didn’t change the story or people’s attitudes towards you at all, even when you were in said Mayor’s prison.)

    The main plot line has some interesting parts and has a good twist part way through, which somewhat excuses the fact that it feels very similar to the Dragon Age: Origins plotline, in that you spend most of your time asking someone to be your ally, being told they’ll join you if you fix their problem, you go and fix it and then just move on to the next ally.

    Unfortunately the plot also feels cut short. Two thirds of the way through the game you are told to say good bye to your family (or families as the case may be) because you are setting sail across the sea to another continent and may not return for a long time. Actually you end up returning quite quickly. You complete a quest, make an ally and you’re back home. That’s it.

    Which leads us to the last portion of the game, which was incredibly frustrating. For complicated reasons you must gather 6,500,000 gold coins before the end of the year. Now on the bright side the year doesn’t progress unless you let it and also you are given choices to make which can earn you quite a bit of money. Unfortunately every choice that makes money is also very evil. Which if you’re playing an evil character is great. If however you’re playing a good one you’re hands are tied, worse is that all the good decisions cost more money. So while you start out needing 6,500,000, by the end it’s closer to 9,000,000.

    If throughout the game you’ve bought stores and houses and rented them out you might have a pretty good amount of cash by the end of the game. If you didn’t know you were going to need nine million at the end, you’re probably, like I was, broke. There’s not a lot of use for money in the game before the end. You buy a house for your family, buy some outfits and maybe a couple of weapons, but the game is so easy you really don’t need very much so there’s not much point to building up an income.

    You receive money from your rented houses and shops every five minutes but it still takes a long time to get to nine million, so eventually I just left the game up overnight. That was an easy solution but it was still a very frustrating situation.

    I played Fable III on the PC, the game was originally released for the Xbox 360, and it’s evident very little effort was put into adapting the game for computers. There was even one point where the game instructed me to press and hold the green x button of a controller. To open doors and to perform several other interactions you have to press and hold buttons, which are just clunky controls for a keyboard and to save you have to go into your hero’s ‘sanctuary’ and enter the save room. The whole thing is awkward and was clearly done with minimal effort.

    All of that being said it’s still an enjoyable game. There’s very little replay value and it’s not very impressive but it is at least fun. There are some interesting stories and characters and while the game isn’t amazing, it’s definitely enjoyable and it still tells you your farthest chicken kick.
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