Fable Anniversary Review

I can still remember when Fable was released on the original Xbox. At the time, the 3rd person, choice-based, fantasy action/adventure genre was a relatively untouched class of video game. Fable seemed groundbreaking, paving the way for a future where choosing “good” or “bad” would become an industry staple. Games like Infamous, Fallout 3, The Mass Effect Trilogy, Red Dead Redemption, and dozens of others can find their roots in the RPGs of old, specifically Fable who brought this kind of game into mainstream console development. Many of today’s action-fantasy games are riffing – intentionally or not – off of Fable’s button mapping and action-based combat. Unfortunately, Fable Anniversary feels like a piece of history. You might admire an old Model-T Ford at a car show, but you would not use it pick up your parents at the airport. One can admire Fable Anniversary, as it reminds you what Lionhead Studios was doing before so many other games, but actually spending 30+ hours with the Fable Anniversary shows the game has aged poorly.

Albion, the setting in which Fable takes place, is your generic fantasy world. It is filled with royal titles, town guards, quaint shops, wandering NPCs who trust you implicitly, and other cliches of the fantasy RPG setting. While the genre has split in two ways, western and Japanese, Fable remains uniquely British in its essence. The hands of famed game designer Peter Molyneux are all over the design, from the handful of expressions that are the only way for your character to interact with townspeople – which includes farting at them – to the blank-slate lead character that seems to alter the world around him. Unlike so many fantasy games today, Albion is not built for player immersion but for player experimentation. While beautifully designed, Albion has never stood out as a wondrous place or even an interesting world in the encyclopedic-esque list of video game settings, but that has never seemed the point of Lionhead’s universe. The point has been to build a setting for players to see their choices take root.

The real point of Fable is to interact with the world in a good or bad way, then see the outcome. You can either be loved or feared, scoffed at or admired. There are multiple ways to gain renown and choose your path, the most obvious is the quests available in the Heroes Guild. The Guild, where you come of age and train in the beginning of the game, serves to upgrade your hero and gain new quests. You can also find quests out in the towns and fields of Albion, given by characters in a more organic way. Taking on tasks such as aiding bandits or fighting the town guard will give you “evil points”, making townspeople fear your character. Helping townspeople and fighting bandits will earn you “good points” and cause people to cheer when you come by. Through these quests you will earn renown which changes people’s reactions from laughing and dismissal, to emphatic fear or cheers. Additionally, you can purchase a title for yourself, starting with the classic, “Chicken Chaser” to the most expensive “Avatar”. The reactions may be a little overdone, as soon it is almost impossible to take a step without someone losing their digital mind at the sight of you, but it grows in a natural way.

There are other RPG staples in Fable Anniversary. You can buy property, romance an NPC, and upgrade your character with armor and skill. To earn additional renown you can boast and complete quests with special provisions or limitations. All in all, Fable Anniversary contains a lot of ways to pass the time and while they may not all be profound, they certainly are appreciated. Even ten years later Fable holds up in terms of its content, offering multiple locations, towns, and dozens of quests to help build your hero.

The main quest is fairly well written. Players start as a young boy who escapes a savage attack on his town and is recruited by the Heroes Guild to avenge his family. There are some twists and turns along Fable’s main story, not all of them expected and many of them surprisingly dark. The writing doesn’t stand out, nearly ten years removed from when the game was released, but it doesn’t hinder the experience either. The only lame spot of Fable’s main plot is the swelling added to the end in The Lost Chapters. The Lost Chapters main quest makes the game feel overly-long, an epilogue that overstays its welcome.

The real problems with Fable Anniversary is that for all of its charm and content, the core of the gameplay has aged poorly. It all starts with a map in the upper left hand corner that is far too small to read, you can double its size and sacrifice seeing your screen, but toggling back and forth between the small map and big map is cumbersome and annoying. The concept of the control scheme for Fable is impressive, the button mapping is great, but it lacks polish. In order to target enemies, players must hold the left trigger to target. Unfortunately, this often fails to pick the right target or – even more annoying – any target. This is especially difficult when you are using the bow and trying to keep distance between yourself and enemies; you pull the trigger and your hero won’t register an enemy or sometimes they’ll simply turn around. There are also archaic mission structures present in Fable Anniversary that – for good reason – have been banished from the majority of quest-based games, most specifically there are a handful of painfully annoying escort missions. Adding to the aged feeling of Fable’s gameplay is the lack of creative encounters. There’s a total of about five enemy types and instead of coming up with creative ways to use these enemies, the game usually just throws more of them at you with different combinations. I never found myself stuck or dying consistently, it just meant the battles would take longer, becoming boring grinds rather than exciting bouts. Some of these fights feel particularly cheap, making you wonder who thought they were fun.

Even when you look past the poorly-aged combat design, you still will have to deal with the constant crashing and loading of Fable Anniversary. While Anniversary might be a better looking game than the original, it is by far a less stable one. I lost count of how many times the game froze on me, but at least on ten separate occasions I had to hard reset my Xbox 360. I glanced on forums and the problem did not seem to be isolated to my copy. A patch was released, but did not seem to do anything at first. Toward the end of the game the crashes stopped happening, that was until I hit a glitch that would black out my screen before facing the end boss of The Lost Chapters. Even after all of the freezing, crashing, and glitches are sorted the game still boasts long loading times every time you change locations, which means you could spend a minute on a load screen, run for ten seconds, and hit another load screen. Traversing the map by foot is a chore with all of these loading screens.

Fable Anniversary looks great, but it can’t hide some of the spots that have failed to age gracefully. The game boasts improved graphics and is impressive, given its age. The character models are nicely detailed, the atmosphere is rich and vibrant in each setting. There are the occasional hiccups here and there, rigid animations still show the game’s true age, but all in all it is nice to see the game in pretty HD. However, the graphics can’t cover up the mixed bag sound design. Danny Elfman and Russell Shaw’s score is still gorgeous, and wonderfully accents each locale in the game. But aside from the score, the sound design can be terribly annoying. The game employs a few sound effects that can grate on your ears, such whistles and rumblings, and these noises are looped from time to time, not only covering up points of dialogue but also irritating anyone who might be listening. When tens of hobbs (hobgoblins) attack you, their looped noises layer on top of each other, repeating ad nauseum. Whistles ring out in the area so loud and harsh that I was forced to mute the TV; in fact I had to mute the game a few times. It is clear a lot of care went into giving the game a graphical facelift, but it doesn’t make the game feel any better when you are wincing every time the world quakes, which happens more than you would think.

As an original Xbox game, Fable is among the best. The game stands out as a triumph of the console action-RPG and spawned many of our favorite games today. Unfortunately, while you can upgrade the games graphics, many pain points stem from the game’s age. Even if you look past the age there are still plenty of technical issues. With some serious work to the game’s stability, it would be worth picking up Fable Anniversary to pay homage to a game that inspired greatness. As it currently stands however, Fable Anniversary feels rushed, and a poor example of what the game really means to those without appreciation for the series. There’s a nostalgia that one can appreciate while playing Fable Anniversary, and I could not stop thinking about how magical the game seemed ten years ago. That game, the game that introduced so many to the world of Albion, deserved a better tribute than this.