How I learned to stop worrying and love the Fable

There’s so much I want to talk about (like my recent addiction to Monday Night Combat) but I just beat Fable III and I feel an urge to complete the review that I started on c8-bit back when I first began playing. Spoilers galore downstairs so watch your step!

So, I’ll start off with continuing the good.



Orphans. There’s nothing more satisfying than buying out the entire orphanage, evicting the old bitties in Millfield, and replacing them with future criminals (thank you, Deathspank!).

The plot wasn’t terrible. It was predictable, it seemed rushed towards the end, but it was coherent and it didn’t suck. Also, I thought it was neato how the city changed during the rebellion and the darkness – it added something a little unique (for once).

I already mentioned this in my prior review, but words cannot express how happy I am that my character is a hot piece of ass and not some deformed gorilla.

Now for the bad and the ugly.



I’m not a historian by any means but the time line of this game makes absolutely no sense. Fable II took place in a medieval, maybe renaissance era at best. So I'm pretty curious how Albion managed to get to the industrial era a mere 50 years later. Also, since when do landscapes and buildings completely morph after a half a century of time has passed? It seriously looks like Fable III takes place 200+ years after Fable II, but whatever.

I already talked about the slap-in-the-face dumbed down weapon/magic system in my prior review, so I won’t rant here. But that won’t stop me from complaining about the lack of swords early on in the game. For some reason the game offers a bazillion hammers and virtually no swords save for a few crappy ones. The lack of customization is bad enough, and now I have to swing this heavy ass hammer throughout most of the game? Approximately 30 minutes before I finished the game I finally found decent sword that didn’t require me to kill villagers or do other evil tasks to boost its stats.

The money in this game drove me nuts, as it did in the last one. Yet again it’s INSANELY EASY to gain a ton of cash as long as you invest in real estate and shops. I bought out the entire map well before the rebellion, AND made it 0 rent for most of my properties (low on the rest), AND still managed to have over 6.5mil way before the deadline, which I think may have cut my game short (it went from day 291 to 1). So I probably missed out on some extra gameplay and those silly royal choices (which to be fair, were actually kind of fun). Speaking of making royal decisions…

WHY THE HELL IS REAVER STILL ALIVE? I’m queen, he’s a total asshole who tried to kill me, yet he sits in front of me for the last half of the game and has the balls to tell me what to do?! And I’m totally confused where he came from – is he the original Reaver? A descendant? A random person? Who knows!

And last but not least, my personal girly issues. Why does the game assume that you played a king in Fable II? Couldn’t it have simply read my save game? Or maybe it did, saw my hideous manly female character, and assumed it was a dude. Hm, I doubt it -- I forgot that Fable strives to be mediocre in every way. Also, I love how when I hug my orphan girl, my character calls her a "precious boy". Were they too lazy to record an alternate line where she says “girl” or is it just another glitch? And, most importantly, WHY CAN'T I MARRY BEN FINN?!

:deep breath:

Despite all of my complaints about Fable III, I enjoyed it and that's enough for me. I love it even though it's not really the RPG (or the droids) I'm looking for, even though it's restricting in a lot of ways, even though I can't marry the man I want...I love it because I feel comfortable settling, and I think that's okay sometimes.