Overview of the Fable series

The original Fable is one of the games I played about 20 times a year when I was little and have replayed at least yearly ever since, so regardless of what quality it possesses I could never give an unbiased account of it because the nostalgia factor is almost overwhelming to me as it remains one of my favourite games of all time to this day. The game starts with standard fantasy storytelling trope: idyllic lifestyle interrupted by absurd levels of tragedy in the space of a single day, in this case a bandit attack on your wholesome little village resulting in the massacre of everyone you ever knew including your entire family and you are left lost and alone in an uncaring world, if it wasn’t for the mysterious wizard who whisks you away to Hogwarts so you can learn how to be a fantasy adventurer and eventually avenge yourself upon the evil that bestruck your childhood (apparently “bestruck” isn’t a word, but I’m going to leave it in).

After a long and fairly tedious tutorial section you finally graduate from Hero school after learning the three hero disciplines: Strength, which is the one that everyone will end-up upgrading first because it’s most useful; Skill, which is fucking useless; and Will, which I’ve always used to supplement my Strength to almost game breaking proportions. One of the interesting things about the main quest-line is that the vengeance against your family’s murderers is more of a background story-arc for the first half of the game, mainly consisting of conversations with the wizard from earlier in the game, him having uncovered some new detail regarding the attack. Leaving the main-quests virtually of no more importance, in-universe, from the side quests. Because of this, whenever I start a new game of Fable nowadays, I start by doing all the side-quests first and doing the main quest-line only when I have nothing else to do.

Eventually the main quest-line leads you to seek out a blind bandit seeress who you have been told may hold some information regarding your sister who may have survived the night of the attack. After discovering that the seeress IS your sister, the vengeance plot takes a back seat for another few main quests that have virtually nothing to do you or your family, except maybe some tangential relation.

Later, after you’ve met and conversed with a character called Jack of Blades, regarding by some to be the greatest Hero of all time and by others to be the love-child of Genghis Khan and Skeletor, your sister lets you know that the latter were correct and that he was responsible for burning down your village, murdering your father, imprisoning your mother and blinding your 10-year-old sister and leaving her for dead. Couldn’t have mentioned that earlier by any chance? Wait, “imprisoning your mother”? So she’s alive as well? Yes, you find out that your mother is still and it’s at this point that the vengeance plot takes centre stage as you first begin on a quest to rescue your tortured mother from Bargate Prison and set the wheels in motion to kill Jack of Blades and finally avenge yourself and your family. It’s after this point that side-questing becomes more of a distraction rather than just something else for you to do, because you’ve got some clear motivation. Earlier in the game, the main quests were basically akin to assignments from the Heroes’ Guild; no different from the side missions, so to still give us side quests after we’ve received our ultimate goal of stopping the big villain, bunking that off for a few hours to go and rescue some dorky trader seems trivial.

Anyway, during this time you find that the attack on your village at the beginning of the game was simply one step in a far bigger plan by the main villain to unlock the power of an ancient sword that would make the wielder into some kind of unstoppable demi-god, but after Jack recaptures your mother and sister, and obtains the key to unlock the sword, and then actually unlocks the sword, you fight Jack in a big grand battle in the Heroes’ Guild.

After you’ve defeated Jack you get the choice of destroying the sword for the good ending, or killing your sister with it to unlock the true power of the sword with her blood for the evil ending, but whichever you choose this endgame decision is somewhat undermined by the expanded version of the game, where the main quest-line just carries on after the ending for more storyline stapled onto the end.

I have mixed feelings about Fable: The Lost Chapters. On the one hand, the new areas you travel to are well designed, mysterious, threatening, and I really love the idea of something evil waiting in the north while all of the main plot is going on, but too major complaints I have regarding the expansion is that firstly: the afore mentioned mysterious lands to the north are just kind of small and almost quaint, compared to what they’ve been described as, and secondly: the great evil stirring in the north is incredibly cheap and undermines the ending to the base game; Jack of Blades is still alive, also he’s a dragon now.

You’d think the final, final boss being a dragon would make up for it, but it really doesn’t, because the final battle is... well... shit. The Dragon Jack mainly just sits there letting you hack him repeated over the head with your sword, while occasionally taking a bite out of you seemingly whenever he can be bothered. And whenever he gets bored of that, he flies off summoning some minions for you to take care of instead. Also, as I said earlier, the entire extra regions of the game are fairly lacking, a total of 4 new regions to explore, most of which you have no reason to go back to, plus one new town and the final boss arena, which you can’t even revisit properly after you’ve finished the game.

Personally, I would have preferred to have a must more expanded region to the north, make it more of a journey to explore the wasteland rather than the brief stroll that it is, also I would have preferred the great threat to the North not just be the main villain again except shittier this time. Maybe have the great threat to the north be some ancient evil Jack set to awaken upon his death or something like that, but not just “he’s back again!”

Fable II did this right. The villain of Fable II is nothing to do with the villain of the first game; he’s got his own goals, his own plan and his own motivation. Unfortunately, the motivation of the Hero of Fable II is far clearer. Like the first game you start off as a child with a wholesome background and a street urchin with you big sister trying to survive the winter. Tragedy strikes in this case in a far clearer way, you are invited into the castle of the new villain, Lord Lucien, where he murders your sister before you very eyes and throws out of a fifteen story window to death in the streets below. While the plotline of the first Fable starts with you trying to find out what you can about who was responsible for the attack on your village, Fable II starts off your main quest line with one simple goal: Fuck this guy (umm... not in that way).

One of the main problems I have with Fable II that wasn’t present in the first Fable is a problem I have with the side-questing in this game; it is so fucking tedious sometimes. The original Fable had a lot of down-time from the main plot where you couldn’t do any more for now so you might as well take some arbitrary quest that you have no personal investment in; these were some of the main quests, remember. In Fable II on the other hand, there are very few moments in the game that you don’t have something to advance the main plot with. There are two maybe three times in the game where the next person you need to speak to won’t give you the time of day because they don’t know who you are so you need to go and do a bit of side-questing to increase your fame level, otherwise, you can always move on the next thing in the personal journey. So why, when I have to go over there and activate the portal to next important region would I blow that off to go and get involved in the personal lives of some local farmer who wants to get a date for his son? It’s supposed to a fantasy RPG about an adventurer not a fucking dating sim.

To compare Fable II to Fable I, I’d say they both have really interesting storylines but they go about them in different ways which really affects the flow of the game when you set out to do all the side questing. In Fable I, you could easily replace some of the main quests with one of the side quests and there wouldn’t be any difference, story-wise. The same cannot be said for Fable II; in fact there is one side quest that’s actually vital for completing the game, and it comes at one of those times I mentioned earlier where you expected to go and make a higher profile for yourself. So there is a simple fix: ditch all of the less adventure-y side quests and only introduce the rest when the player needs to go out and do some adventuring to impress someone important.

Lastly, there was Fable III. Fable III was shit. It wasn’t wholly without merit, I would give it that, but the bad can justly be said to out-way the good. It moves away from its high fantasy routes and moves to more steam-punk fantasy setting set 50 years after the last game. Between the ending of Fable II and Fable III, the Hero from Fable II managed to unite the land of Albion into a single kingdom... somehow. They kind of missed over something important there. But anyway, in Fable III, the player takes the role of the Prince, brother to King Logan, eldest son of Fable II’s protagonist. King Logan is a tyrannical despot and after forcing you to make a horribly difficult decision at the beginning of the game, you flee from the Castle to start a revolution to overthrow your brother with your fathers most trusted advisor, Sir Walter Beck; a character who we as the player have never come across before this game; but whatever, 50 year gap and all that.

The storyline of Fable III has a similar problem in its side questing that Fable II had; you can occasionally take a couple of side quests to raise your standing with a major character whose allegiance you need, but most of the time, there’s just no motivation to do it both in-universe and out. Shall I continue on my quest to free Albion from my brother’s tyrannical reign, or blow it off for a few hours helping this random Johnny fish his engagement ring from the sewers? NO, I want to do this main quest, I know what I need to do next and there’s nothing stopping me from doing it; this idiot can count his losses and go and buy a new ring.

One of the main reasons why Fable III is the worst of the three games is the fact that most of the RPG elements are severely reduced. The four categories of experience (General, Strength, Skill, and Will) are all cut down to just one, which comes in the form of Guild Seals. And most importantly of all, menus are none existent. Shops are just a small collection of physical items that you have to physically walk up to in order to buy, which seriously reduces the amount of stock a single shop can have, not to mention making the whole process disorganised and confusing. And your own weapons and clothing must be equipped and unequipped in a similar process in your sanctuary. This was all in the effort to eliminate menus from the game, but menus are efficient and simple, this replacement is not simple in the slightest which really brings the game down.

Towards the end of the game, you’ve amassed a large enough following to take the city and force you brother to abdicate. He does so peacefully, but then when he is put on trial for his crimes against Albion he reveals that he had a good reason for ruling with an iron fist. He reveals to the Prince, now King that an evil Lovecraftian army of monstrosities led by a demonic elder-god-like being is coming the invade Albion and destroy everything in one year’s time. And so begins the endgame of Fable III where as the king you have to prepare for the invasion by making the decisions necessary to increase the realms treasury. In doing this you have a choice: you can either double down on your brothers tyrannical, but now understandable, policies in order to raise the funds necessary for realm to survive, or you can take a more liberal approach to governance by making your citizens lives happy before being completely slaughtered at the end of the year.

This section of the game fails in three ways: firstly, time doesn’t pass in game so you can stay on the same day (despite the sun clearly rising and setting regularly) for as long as it takes to personally buy and rent out every property in the land and donate your own personal wealth to the treasury allowing you to save everyone’s lives while also allowing them comfortable oppression-free lives, and therefore breaking this entire part of the game in half. Secondly, the major governing decisions happen on certain days which only come to an end once you complete all the things that need to be completed that day before moving a small amount of time later to the next day; so for example at 255 days to go you have to do A, B, and C, and once you’ve done those things the game will then jump to 234 days to go. This way of doing things would have been fine in the game doesn’t jump straight from 121 days to go 0 days to go; I hope I don’t have to explain why that’s retarded.

The third and final problem with this part of the game is more subtle, as it almost has the one best moral choice systems I’ve ever seen in a game. Only you and a few of your closest advisors know of the severity of the threat that looms at the end of the year so your choices as king basically boil down to either being a benevolent king, while knowing that your citizens will die at the end of the year, or being a hated tyrant so that everyone in the kingdom can live once the threat emerges. Except Fable III decides to slap the labels of “good” and “evil” onto these two choices rendering the subtlety of the dilemma completely meaningless. How can it be evil to demand hardship from your citizens knowing that the alternative is genocide? How can it be good to let your citizen’s live happy lives knowing how short they’ll be?

Anyway, the Fable series had a lot of potential going for it in later games, but was let down with bad design choices; the later entries as Fantasy RPGs rather than Fantasy Dating Advice, or Fantasy Royal Mail would have improved them to no end. Sometimes an RPG game can have a linear storyline with an optional free-roaming explorative gameplay as long as it’s implemented carefully, Fable 1 didn’t do this as the story was basically not up to you to carry forward in an in-universe sense, but for other characters to discover information while you carried out irrelevant, but fun quests. Fable 2 came the closest to doing this with the stop points where major characters would outright ask you to go and prove your worth by doing some side-questing, but narratively speaking the flow of the game can come to a halt if the player decides to take some side quests whenever they like. Fable 3 on the other hand, suffered from the same problem but in addition to a number of other problems that would need to be addressed in order to improve that game. The Fable series is a great example of how having too much freedom can damage an RPG, if such freedom is not handled carefully.