Whew, Fable is a complicated game to review. I remember playing this game a bit when it first came out and my brother got it on his Xbox. I don't play a lot of Xbox games, but I like RPGs, so it seemed like the perfect game for me. Sadly, as a kid, I never got very far because I was playing on my brother's system. Fable definitely has a lot of nostalgia from me though. And I do respect it because it is one of the first games where morality plays a huge role in the story. You can do quests where you can protect people or kill them. You can also do things like steal from people's houses and make a bad name for yourself in the world. Because of that, I hold a lot of respect for this game.
Now let'st talk about things I didn't like. Fable is so boring. The game begins when you're a kid and your village is raided by bandits. You get taken to a guild where you learn how to fight and use magic. This is where you find the bulk of your quests and you can upgrade skills/equipment. I just didn't care about any of the quests I did. Fable is old, and I tried to not compare it to newer games, but it's hard when I just played The Outer Worlds and all I wanted to do was sidequests. Going from that to a fantasy game with lackluster sidequests was a bummer.
I felt like we were supposed to sympathize with the main character as he has to deal with the trauma from his childhood but, again, I just didn't care. Then, as if I wasn't disappointed enough, there's a part in the story where you have to participate in a gauntlet. I've never been a fan of any back-to-back battle system. I deal with it in games I enjoyed like Paper Mario or The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, but I absolutely hated it in Fable. This is where I put the game down and I probably won't pick it back up again. If the world was compelling and the sidequests were more interesting, then I might try to get better equipment and move the story along. But I have absolutely no investment in finishing this game. My friend said I was around the halfway mark and I just don't want to play it anymore. It's a shame. This friend also said that Fable 2 is better. I'm playing these games for free on Game Pass, so I'll probably pick that one up at some point since the stories don't really connect.
3 howls and a lot of disappointment.
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