Let’s Talk About Fable Anniversary

When I got my Xbox Series S I made the decision to try out as many classic Xbox titles as I could. It is the reason I got the damn thing after all. I never owned an Xbox growing up, but it had a lot of interesting games in its library I wanted to try out. One of which was Fable.

Developed by Lion Head studio, Fable was one of the more interesting titles that came out of the early Xbox days. I remember it got a lot of good buzz back in the day for its gameplay and morality system, a feature that was unique at the time.

However, I also remember hearing a lot of negative things around the game, chiefly about features that were promised but never made it in. This is all thanks to the game’s director, Peter Molyneux. Molyneux, you see, has a bit of a habit for running his mouth.

The man hasn’t made a game where he doesn’t lie his ass off about features that don’t make it in. Probably the most infamous relating to Fable, was the claim that the game would let you plant an acorn and then see how the tree grew as the game progressed. Spoiler alert, you can’t do that in the game. There’s a reason Guru Larry consistently makes fun of the man in every video he ever does.

But, say what you want about the guy, he isn’t bad at what he does. I mean he practically invented the theme park management and God game genres, you got to give him credit for that. He may be a lying bastard, but he’s a lying bastard who can make a good videogame.

Plus, as someone who wasn’t really paying attention to the marketing buzz surrounding it, I’m going into this as fresh as possible. I have no expectations for Fable, so I can simply judge the game for what it is and not what I thought it would be.

Before we get to that, I should clarify I’m reviewing the Anniversary version of the game. This is a remastered version of The Lost Chapters, a rerelease of the original Fable with more content. Anniversary is essentially the definitive version of the game, though I question how “definitive” it actually is.

Fable is a very, very, traditional fantasy story. You start out as a young farm boy in a quiet village, your village is raised by bandits, your family is kidnapped, you get taken in by a band of warrior mages who teach you in their ways before you come of age and set out into the world to forge your own adventures.

It’s the standard hero’s journey story you’ve seen a million times before. Hell, you were probably reminded of a bunch you’ve read, seen or heard just by reading that last paragraph. Fable sticks very closely to the traditional formula without too many surprises or twist, and I think that’s the point.

Fable isn’t about some grand narrative or exploring interesting themes or deep concepts, it’s about the adventure. While there is a narrative, it’s more a set-up for you to craft your own story. There’s a lot to do in Fable that isn’t part of the main story and all of it is there for you to do or ignore as part of the story you want to make.

One of the key defining features is the morality system. You could play the game as a virtuous hero, someone who fights for the innocent and genuinely tries to help people, or you can be the complete opposite and be a vengeful, murderous asshole who beats children and kicks puppies. It’s entirely up to you as to what character you want to play.

Now the main narrative itself is fine. It’s nothing special, but it kept me invested in seeing what would happen next and had some cool moments. But it was all the little side stories that really stuck out to me. For my playthrough I went the virtuous route and at one point I ran into a bordello run by a complete letch called Mr Grope, which is just a perfect name for a dude who runs a brothel.

Anyway, I didn’t like Grope much and neither did the girls, so I decided to take the bordello from him. So, I got the dude blind drunk, made him reveal where he hid the deed, stole the deed and then set the girls free to run a women’s sanctuary, after I fucked them all for free. Hey, I may be virtuous but I’m no fool.

But that’s just one way that can go. Alternatively, you could seduce Grope by dressing up as a woman and get the information out of him through, less family friendly ways. And you don’t have to free the girls, you can keep the deed to the bordello and run it yourself, getting free sex and rent money in perpetuity.

You see what I mean. There’s a lot of moments like this where you can handle quests in different ways. It creates a better investment from the player since you’re playing a specific role in the story that you pick for yourself. You know, like a Role-Playing game.

And depending on what role you play, the story and how characters interact with you will change slightly. For example, if you do what I did and play the handsome hero, everyone will adore you. I would walk down the street and every women, and even some of the men, were falling in love with me just from the sight of me. It was kind of hilarious. I could have gotten married t any of them just by getting them to look at me.

But, if you were to play the villain, they’d probably look at you the same way most people look at child murderers, raging contempt. Now I haven’t done an evil run yet, but I’m really tempted to do so just to see what would happen. And that’s the whole appeal of Fable. It’s all about your adventure and how you would handle each situation.

It isn’t perfect though. While I like the morality system, it is a little too binary. I know most morality systems are like, and to its credit Fable was one of the first to try such a feature, but it would be nice to have a little more nuance with it.

Then again, I also have to give them credit that even little things will affect your morality. You know how in most RPG’s you can break into people’s houses and steal their shit with no consequences. Not this time. In Fable stealing and trespassing adds to your negative rating and getting caught can lead to a fine or even an eviction from town.

I like that. It is annoying when you’re looking for certain side quest items but having actual rules and law like this made the world feel a lot more real. Granted if you get caught all you need to do is leave and come back and they instantly forget what happened, but it’s also an original Xbox game so I don’t know what I expected.

The gameplay of Fable is what you would expect from an RPG. You do quests, explore towns and dungeons, fight monsters of various shapes and sizes, level up your abilities to tackle harder challenges, rinse and repeat for about 20 hours or so. Like with the story it doesn’t stray too far from the RPG mould, though it does have some unique ideas of its own.

I already mentioned the morality system, but one way to improve or impair your morality is by interacting with NPC’s using expressions. You’ll unlock a bunch of these as you progress through the game, though which ones you get is determined by your alignment. Some are positive like doing a cool pose, flirting, or dancing the flamenco, others are negative like sneering, letting out a blood curdling scream or… farting.

Yeah, the expressions are very goofy, and I kind of love them for that. Being able to do a random disco dance at any point is ridiculous, but it’s charming in its ridiculousness. It helps that Fable, in general, doesn’t take itself that seriously. The whole game has a very wry sense of humour that did get a few chuckles out of me.

Another way Fable stands out is its experience points system. While you have standard experience points you get from quests or defeating enemies, you also have three other types you get depending on what you use in combat. Use physical attack and you get red experience, use more projectiles and you get yellow experience, and magic will reward you with blue experience. You can then use those experience point, in conjunction with the regular kind, to boost your physical, agility or magic skills respectively.

It lets you build a character based on your playstyle. Use you’re bow and arrow more than the sword, then you’ll likely have better accuracy and speed but less defence and health. This could make things a little to unbalanced, but the regular experience points prevent things from getting too unbalanced that things become impossible. You can also find potions that grant experience to allow you to even things out.

I wouldn’t say Fable is the most robust RPG. The systems aren’t deep enough where you can make completely different character builds, you’re pretty much always going to be a spell sword, but it is flexible enough to give some leeway in how you approach it. Want to be more of an archer? You can totally do that here. Want to be a sneaky thief? You can do that as well.

There’s a lot of ways you can customise your character. You can find different hairstyles and tattoos you can use to change your characters appearance. You can make yourself look more attractive or scary which affects how people look at you. Gives you a little more to think about when deciding how your character looks.

Then there’s you’re equipment. You’ll find a lot of weapons and armour sets you can collect in this game. Some you can just buy in shops, but others will require a bit of exploration in order to find. There are even some legendary weapons and armour that will require you to go out of your way to find.

You’ll find silver keys throughout the game that can be used to unlock silver chests that, usually, contain very powerful weapons or armour. You can also find them in Demon Doors which will only unlock after you fulfil its specific requirements. It’s a bit of a pain at times as some are very specific in what you need to do to open them, and it isn’t always clear on what that is. Still the rewards for opening them are worth it for the most part so I recommend trying to get them open.

This makes exploration very rewarding. While the game isn’t open world, it’s mainly composed of segmented area’s that are often a simple pathway, there are still plenty of optional areas and hidden treasures to find. You’ll want to go off the beaten path and see what you can find as it will come in handy.

But back to the equipment. Like with most RPG’s, you can find a lot of different pieces of armour. You can mix and match however you like, though most armour comes in a complete set which I tended to use during my playthrough. The armour can obviously affect your defence, but it also affects your appearance and morality, with some armour being light and others being dark. There isn’t a huge amount of different armour sets, but you still get a decent amount to pick from.

In terms of weaponry, both you’re ranged and melee options have two different types. For melee you have light and heavy weapons with light being more for quick attacks and heavy being for slower stronger attacks.

While there is a range of melee weapons from swords to axe and even katana’s, they mainly stick to those two types. It’s mainly aesthetic as to what weapon you prefer. There are slight stats differences, but nothing too major where it makes one type overpowered.

For ranged options you have long bows and crossbows. It’s essentially the same idea, long bows are faster but not as strong while crossbows are stronger but have longer reload times. I find long bows are better when in the middle of a fight, but crossbows are better if you prefer sniping from a distance.

Both melee and ranged weapon types have their own strengths and weaknesses. Personally, I prefer the faster weapon types, though I do see the advantage in the heavy weapons. It’s up to you as to which weapon is best for your playstyle.

And if you find a weapon you like and want to make it stronger you can use an augmentation. These are essentially mods that can be applied to different weapons to give them properties, elemental damage, piercing through armour, giving more health and mana, that kind of thing. You can find these in treasure chests and shops though they are extremely rare and expensive, and once you assign one to a weapon it’s stuck there for good, so choose when and where you use them wisely.

I really like the augmentations. They allow for more customisations and I’m all for that. Later classes of weapons even allow for more augmentations to be added, allowing for different combinations. Though the legendary weapons, which are the strongest in the game, do come with pre-set augments, which is fine. The legendary weapons would be massively overpowered otherwise.

But that’s enough about the weapons. What about what you use the weapons for, you know the combat.

Most combat encounters are designed in a way where you’re free to choose how to tackle them. You could go in with the sword and hack and slash your way to victory, or you can stay hidden and pick off enemies from a safe distance with the bow and arrow. There really isn’t a right or wrong answer, giving you the freedom to fight how you want to.

While the game does encourage you to keep a balance between melee and ranged combat, there’s nothing stopping you from using one form of combat entirely. I wouldn’t recommend it on a first playthrough as it does require some knowledge of enemy patterns, but it could make for an interesting challenge run.

As for the combat itself, it’s ok. There is some skill involved with fighting, especially with trying to increase your combat multiplier, but I never got a feel for it. Mostly for the melee combat, it was fine for one-on-one encounters, but whenever multiple enemies were there, it became a bit of a mess.

I found it more fun to snipe enemies from a distance. Taking down an unsuspecting foe with a well-timed arrow to the head was immensely satisfying. Was it lame? Absolutely, but I had more fun with it than the swordplay.

It’s not a bad combat system, it’s just very basic. You don’t have a lot of combos or moves so the combat can devolve into blocking and counter attacking, which can get tedious. I ended up going into most fights hacking away like a madman. I got hit a lot, but healing items were plentiful enough that I could easily heal up when needed and still have plenty to spare. It honestly got a little brain dead near the end.

Now there is one other element of combat that does spice things up considerably, the magic. There are a lot of different magic spells you can learn and they’re pretty damn fun. You’ve got your basic fireball and healing spells, but then you’ve got spells that let you summon ghost swords, drain life from enemies, force push, no seriously they have a fucking Jedi ability here, and even slow down time.

It's a pretty fun magic system, and like with other combat options there’s nothing stopping you from focusing on magic over your weapons. You do need to keep your mana charged for this, but like with health potions, you’ll have plenty of potions to restore your mana. So, you can totally go full mage if you so choose.

The spells are all nicely varied and there’s bound to be one to fit your playstyle. Even if you want to be a melee focused brawler there are spells you can learn to supplement that. Some spells are even tied to your moral alignment, meaning you have some spells you may not use in one playthrough, but will work wonders in another.

The one big issue with magic is how clunky it is. You can only equip one spell at a time, and the only way to swap between them mid-combat is by scrolling through them in a quick select menu. It’s very awkward and can lead to cheap hits. There’s no way to bind the spells to a certain button combination like in Kingdom Hearts which would have made things a lot snappier.

You can edit the quick select menu to focus on a few spells, but this just limits your options. It also doesn’t prevent things from being clunky, just makes things slightly less cumbersome. I wish the magic wasn’t as awkward to use because I do have fun using it despite that.

One thing I really like in Fable is the sense of progression. At the beginning of the game, you’re a simple farm boy, barely able to wield a stick and only able to shoot a dinky bolt of lightning. By the end of the game though you’re an unstoppable engine of death, wielding legendary god-like weapons and armour, casting massive area of effect spells while summoning ghost swords and the souls of enemies to fight alongside you while kick boxing with werewolves.

I know this sense of progression is in every single RPG ever made, but it felt more noticeable here. Maybe it’s because the character does grow older as the game progresses or maybe the magic powers were just that out there, but something about the power progression in Fable left a much bigger impact than in most other RPG’s.

But the thing I like most in Fable is all the little things you can do. For example, buying real estate. No, I’m not kidding, there are multiple houses you can buy and rent out to earn a little extra money on the side. You can even buy shops though I never figured out how to do that, I think you need to kill the owners which I wouldn’t do anyway since I was doing a heroic run.

Hell, if you want to, you can buy goods in one town and sell them in another for a clean profit. Yes, you can be a merchant in this game if you so choose. Granted, while all of this is cool, it is lacking a bit in depth. That’s one of the key issues in Fable. While it is ambitious for its time and has a lot of very cool ideas, a lot of them don’t feel fleshed out enough.

Take marriage for instance. You can get married to any in game NPC, man or woman the game doesn’t discriminate, which is a neat feature, but you never feel like you build an actual connection with them. All you do is give them gifts and use the right expressions and boom you’re married, leaving the romance feeling hollow. At least dating sims give the waifu’s a recognisable personality.

You also don’t really get anything from getting married either. You don’t even get free sex, you still need to buy them gifts and seduce them in order to get any, which is a realistic portrayal of marriage so credit where it’s due. I had heard that you could originally have kids that played a larger role in the story, but that feature got cut. It’s a shame because it could have been an interesting idea, just look at Dragon Quest V for example.

Fable is honestly a little too ambitious. Not that I’m going to fault the game too much for that. In a day and age where game designers are too afraid to take any kinds of risks resulting in an increasingly homogenised gaming space, seeing a game try to shoot for the heavens is a refreshing change of pace. Even if it doesn’t always work out.

Despite all the side content you can do, including minigames, fishing and so forth, the main quests are surprisingly repetitive and kind of lame. A lot of them are basic fetch quests or simply get from point a to b affairs, kind on uninteresting to be honest.

And I swear to God this game has way too many escort missions for its own good. They aren’t the worst I’ve played, but they’re still escort missions, they suck by default. The worst one was rescuing the kid from the Hobbe caves, the brat wouldn’t shut the fuck up and he had the whiniest, most annoying voice in the game. I know it’s an optional side quest, but seriously, fuck that one.

There is one thing that can help mitigate the repetition. Before every quest you can boast, which is essentially an optional challenge that can reward you with extra gold if you succeed or take some away if you fail. It’s a neat way to add more challenge without forcing it on the player.

Unfortunately, even these are a little repetitive. While there are some boasts that are exclusive to some quests, and to their credit some do change how you approach them, a lot of them are shared across every quest. I don’t mind this so much, but it would be nice if the challenges were designed more around each quest to make them more unique.

Aside from main quests and side quests, you can find NPCs in taverns that will let you play a quick minigame. They’re just basic card or bar games with no real visual flair. I mean I love me some Blackjack, but I’ve played better versions of it in other games. They’re harmless enough though, just a mild distraction at worst.

Fable is also lacking in terms of polish. For one thing, the menu’s are a pain in the ass. The game does a good job of segmenting things, which is handy but leads to you having to swap between multiple pages and tabs to find what you want.

Even with this I still found myself scrolling through increasingly longer lists to find what I needed at the time. A quick sort button would have been really useful here.

Then there’s the technical problems. Now I don’t know if this is the case for the original release, but the Anniversary edition is bugged up the ass.

I had menu glitches that wouldn’t show the pictures properly, character models bugging out, voices repeating, boasts would sometimes randomly fail, load time would sometimes be way slower than usual, and I know this must be a glitch because I played this on a Series S, and the game crashed on me like 4 or 5 times.

And that’s not even all of them I found. This is supposed to be a definitive edition, how is it this bad. To be fair, most of the bugs are harmless enough and don’t affect gameplay too much. Aside from the crashes I found most technical glitches more funny than anything. Still for an anniversary re-release I expected a lot better. But it could have been worse, at least it’s not as bad as the recent Grand Theft Auto remasters.

I am glad the game at least runs at a steady framerate. I didn’t notice any dips during my playthrough or anything and that’s all I ask for. Graphically Fable is ok. It goes for a more cartoonish art style which I appreciate and for a remaster the Anniversary edition does a good job of updating the visuals, at least from what I can see in comparisons on YouTube.

This is still a remaster though and not a remake. While the visuals may have gotten an update the animations did not. The animations aren’t bad, for their time they were quite decent, but by the time Anniversary came out they were starting to show their age. It’s especially true for the facial animations, which I could charitably describe as robotic.

I can’t fault the game for this. These kinds of animations were just what most games looked like at the time. It’s like complaining about the chunky pixels in Nintendo 64 games, you should know what to expect going into it. I’ll cut the animation some slack.

My only major complaint in regard to the visuals, aside from some dull character designs, are the environments. When it comes to fantasy games, I usually like my environmental design to be, for lack of a better term, fantastical. You know big castles, ancient structures and temples, stuff you’d see in a Lord of the Rings movie.

Fable keeps things fairly plain. There aren’t a whole lot of visually spectacular areas. it’s mostly just forests, caves and fields. There are a few interesting locales like the arena, but even they are somewhat underwhelming compared to other RPG’s. The only area that honestly stood out was Grey House due to its creepy atmosphere, everything else wasn’t particularly memorable.

Same thing could be said for the music. Not an awful soundtrack by any means but hell if you’ll remember any of it when your done playing it. it’s a perfectly middle of the road ost, neither excelling nor failing in any particular way.

Then there’s the voice acting. Honestly, it’s not bad. If you’re a fan of British animation, then a lot of voices will sound familiar as Fables features a lot of prominent English voice actors. They all do a good job, well at least most of them do. Some of the NPC’s are a little cringe inducing, especially that fucking kid in the Hobbe caves. That voice is going to greet me at the gates of hell I just know it.

Fable is an ambitious RPG for it’s time that doesn’t quite reach the lofty heights it strives for. The game has a lot of cool ideas, but a lot of them feel underdeveloped. The core gameplay is well done, but I don’t find it nearly as fun as a lot of other action RPGs from the same period. Even some of the earlier ones from the 32 and 16-bit eras were a little better if I’m being honest.

And yet, there is an undeniable charm to Fable that makes it hard to put down. Being able to forge your own journey and the impressive character customisation for it’s time, make this a fun adventure that you can easily get lost in. And while many of its idea’s aren’t as fleshed out as they could have been, it still has a lot of cool ideas.

Fables can best be described as an overly ambitious mixed bag. It may not be as great as it wants to be, and it certainly has its faults, but what’s here is still a good time. And at the end of the day, I’ll take an overly ambitious game that fails at greatness, over an unambitious one that succeeds at mediocrity.

Fable would go on to have 2 sequels and a couple of middling spin-offs, but we haven’t seen a big entry in the series since Fable 3, and that was 12 years ago. Luckily, there is a reboot currently in development for current Xbox Series consoles. I’m going to be keeping an eye on that one, because if they can build on what the original did and expand on its ideas, it could be something truly special. And we won’t have to deal with Peter Molyneux running his mouth off either, that’s a nice bonus.