Fable III Review

*Spoiler Warning: The following contains details about the Fable 3 ending, which will ruin your true experience of the game if you are planning on playing it.  Fair warning has been given!  Read on if you dare … or you know, want to.

Since I moved to the U.K. I have been sorely missing the old Xbox360 … especially since I saw the following advert.

I emitted a girly squeal every time it was on, closely followed by a sigh and a “one day I will get to play you Fable 3, one day.”  Well my whingeing must have been pretty annoying because a couple of weeks ago Danny brought home a used 360 and FABLE THREEEEE!  I was pretty damn excited to play it as the Fable series is one of the only game series in which I have played every game start to finish multiple times.

I beat the main story line in two days flat and then spent a whole day being angry.  I mean I woke Danny up at an ungodly hour of the morning to tell him how angry I was with the ending.  I nearly cried.  The problem?  I played through as an all around wonderful and generous princess without a thought to money or anything other than making my kingdom a great place to be and then I find out that unless I have six million and some gold in the treasury (that is AFTER you spend around five million keeping all of your promises and not giving into the dulcet tones of Reaver the industrial tycoon) everyone dies!  EVERYONE DIES!  So you spend your time wandering around a nearly empty world and when the people eventually respawn, they all hate you no matter how benevolent a ruler you were or continue to be.  GODDAMNWTF Arrrrggghh!  If I would have known that I sure as hell would have turned that orphanage into a whorehouse like Reaver wanted.

Okay, after I had a day or so to cool down my rage subsided and I decided to start over again to try for the best possible ending.  I put some time in as Albion’s lute hero and started to buy property.  In fact, I purchased all of Albion … every house, every caravan, every stall, every pub and store and slowly amassed my fortune.  When it came time for me to be crowned, I transferred my eleven million or so into the royal treasury, kept all of my promises and in the end, I saved the whole world.  Was it worth it?  Absolutely.  It took more than twice as long, but the payoff is that everyone loves me!  I am a great and fabulous ruler and people throw gifts at me in the streets!  This is the ending I wanted.

I feel that the ending is possibly Lionhead Studios making a commentary on the difficulty of being a ruler.  How you have to make money to spend money.  With great power comes great responsibility.  Heavy is the head that wears the crown and all other sorts of clichés about power.  But really?  I play video games for fun, not life lessons about the ruling class and their tough decisions.  I think that is what made me so angry.  I don’t want to be taught anything from Fable except how neat it is to light my enemies on fire with my super cool magic powers, and maybe kick some chickens just for giggles.

Even though I was pretty upset about the ending, I still love Fable 3 and am still playing it, and will continue to do so (next time I will be an evil tyrant).  Everything leading up the ending was great.  The story is engaging, the adventure is as fast paced as you want it to be, you get to shoot zombies with a mortar, and all sorts of other cool things.  Fable 3 (in its essence) is exactly the same thing as the other Fable games and if you liked them, you will enjoy Fable 3.  That is why I like the franchise so much — each game they come out with is different enough to feel new and exciting, but similar enough to remain exactly the sort of game I love to play.

You may have heard that Fable 3 has no menus, and this is mostly true.  There are a few minimal but necessary menus hanging around in the corners, but mostly it is menu free.  What you have instead of a menu listing things like your weapons and clothes, you have a sanctuary.  John Cleese voices your butler who looks after the place.  In your sanctuary are different rooms, one for your clothes and accessories, one for trophies and money, an armoury and a main room which houses a magical map of Albion which allows you to see quests, properties, and to quick travel.  So if you wanted to change your clothes, instead of going into a menu, you walk into your dressing room where you see all of your items displayed on mannequins.  You simply walk up to a mannequin and interact with it.  You can choose to put on all of an outfit, or just pieces of it.  The armoury and stores work in a similar way — you walk up to items to interact with them.  This takes a bit of getting used to, but it is all fairly intuitive and if you have a larger/better television than I do then you will find it easier to read things on-screen such as item descriptions and which buttons to push to do different things.

The only time that I have a real problem with the whole no menus thing is when interacting with villagers.  Now instead of a whole wheel of all available options, you will only get three presented each time (one good, one evil, and one silly).  So you can’t choose what you want to do, you have to go with the one option that is presented to you.  So if you are trying to be friends with someone, you just have to keep picking whichever action the game gives you for the good option.  I found this to be annoying and often repetitive.

One of my other pet peeves about Fable 3 is making friends with the villagers.  If you wish to be someones friend, before they will be your chum they need you to be their little errand girl and run and fetch a package or go dig something up or some other stupid little time-consuming task.  I hate this.  I think this is the case because some of the upgrades on the epic weapons require you to make a certain number of friends or make a specific amount of people fall in love with you (which requires them to be your friend first).  But still, if I don’t have one of these weapons I don’t friggen want to run to from Bowerstone Industrial to Brightwall Village to dig up a key you lost.  Yes, I know I can quick travel, but it still takes time and generally once you get to a place you have to fight a bunch of mercenaries or wolves or what-have-you.  I just can’t be arsed.

The Fable creators have really upped their game (no pun intended) in Fable 3 though.  Especially on some of the things that annoyed me most about Fable 2.  There are way more villager voices, and a much greater variety of lines when doing jobs or even just talking to them.  No one sounds like they are stuck in a loop and even the cast size is notably larger.  This is very refreshing.  Not only is your butler voiced by John Cleese, Stephen Fry (!!) has returned as Reaver, and you get to fight the undead with Simon Pegg (as Ben Finn) by your side.  How cool is that?!

Overall Fable 3 is a truly fantastic game that lived up to my expectations and fits in well with the franchise as a whole.  Sure it has some sore points that I don’t like, but what game doesn’t.  And yes, the ending made me fly into a rage but it wasn’t enough to keep from playing again, and if I recall, a lot of people weren’t happy with Fable 2’s ending either and at least in Fable 3 you can shape your ending a bit more than three flat choices.  I absolutely recommend this game, especially if you like running around being the consummate hero-adventurer, but just be warned that Fable 3’s ending is not all fun and games.

Tags: fable 3, girl gamer, review, video games, xbox 360