Fable III Review

Fable III

Playing a Peter Molyneux game is a little like listening to your friend's band's demo; good or bad, it's not easy to enjoy objectively when they won't stop overselling it. This often makes these games difficult to review because it is unclear how much of the review should have to do with the hype.

Molyneux himself aside, there are many promises made by Fable II that go unrealized in Fable III. Fable II was an exceptional game that was sure to keep players occupied for well over a month in its epic quest and enormous number of sidequests. The main story was huge and incredibly satisfying to finish with many twists and turns along the way, but some of the most interesting missions were only available after the story ended. The moral choices made for compelling storytelling and had dire consequences. All in all, a full RPG experience.

As a successor to Fable II, Fable III - while still rather good - is disappointing. The biggest disappointment of all is the length. Whereas its predecessor took this reviewer over a month to finish to 100%, Fable III took about a week and a half, including sidequests. Even more disappointing is the amount of loose ends that result from some of these sidequests, particularly the escort missions.

Just Can't Wait To Be King...but you could draw it out a bit longer...

Fable III's story puts the player in the role of one of the two children of the Hero King/Queen of the previous game. King Logan is your older brother who rules Albion with an iron fist, cracking down on the slightest disobedience and thinks nothing of killing innocents who are not even in his way. This prompts a rebellion among many of his generals and officers with the player assuming the lead. You must gain allies by proving your worth and promising to make changes once you assume the throne. Once you do, it's up to you whether to honor them.

The inherent danger in making a game with two separate parts is that neither is fully realized. Spore was a fantastic game, but many felt overwhelmed by the sudden space component, while Brutal Legend appeared to be an amusing hack-and-slash but suddenly threw RTS at the player with no warning. The two sections of Fable III - the lead-up to the revolution and the rebuilding - are each far too short on their own, and when added together barely amount to 15 hours. When my character became King, I thought "Wow, that was shorter than I expected, but now the real game is gonna begin! That's what Peter Molyneux said!"

Two hours later, I beat the game.

The Pros and Cons of Streamlining

Fable III does apply some very clever improvements to the series. The leveling-up of individual weapons works wonderfully and is extremely involving, holding hands makes unavoidably tedious escort missions slightly less so, and the creative take on the Start menu (pressing Start whisks you away to "The Sanctuary") is probably the most clever innovation in an RPG since Mass Effect's dialogue system. It is also much easier to be a landlord with the new overhead map that allows the player to buy, sell and manage all owned property from the Sanctuary map, eliminating needless running back and forth for hours.

However, Lionhead makes a misstep in streamlining the leveling-up system. As the game progresses, new sections of what is called the Road to Rule open up and allow the player to open chests containing new abilities, new expressions and new features such as Entrepreneur Mode. Initially this is more fun than Fable II's system of learning everything from books, but increasing weapon and magical abilities by opening chests as the story progresses ends up feeling rather cheap and easy, requiring almost no reward for diversified gameplay as Fable II does. Whereas the aforementioned changes give the player more control over certain aspects of the game, this system takes control away from what makes RPGs so engaging.

Final Thoughts

Fable III is a good sequel to an excellent game. It seems like more attention was paid to the improvements in gameplay than to the actual story, which makes the whole thing feel like a wash. The reason people endured the flaws of Fable II was that the core of the game was the story and epic nature of the thing, and while Fable III fixes some of the technical flaws, it forgets to preserve the core of what made it interesting in the first place.

B- (though DLC may be submitted for extra credit)