Fable
Is Fable a fairy tale come true?

PLATFORM: Xbox

PUBLISHER: Microsoft

DEVELOPER: Big Blue Box

GENRE: RPG

ESRB: Mature

Fable, the highly anticipated RPG from designer Peter Molyneux is pretty much exactly what everyone predicted. A solid, open-ended RPG with tantalizing hints of the ground-breaking sandbox-style virtual world that was originally hinted at during the game’s extended development process.

Unfortunately, many of the promised aspects of this overly ambitious game world have been stripped away or simplified, so what we’re left with is a perfectly good game, but one that crumbles under the weight of its expectations.

The principle innovation that remains is that your good or evil acts will slowly affect your appearance, turning you into either an angelic do-gooder or a demonic bad guy. Local townspeople will also either sing your praises or run in fear, depending on your reputation. It’s similar in many ways to Knights of the Old Republic. You can also affect your look with different tattoos and haircuts, not to mention dozens of different types of clothing.

Despite the emphasis on determining the fate of your character, there’s no initial character creation at all. Everyone plays as the same little boy, who grows into the same young man during the game’s extremely slow opening scenes. It may be a good 40 minutes to an hour until you get into the main portion of the game.

Once you complete your training and learn the basics of magic and combat, you’re free to wander the game map – or parts of it at least – and choose from missions at the Hero’s Guild.

There are a ton of NPC’s to interact with, and some fairly large and involved towns. Most of the time, you’ll communicate through a series of social gestures chosen from a menu, like waving and flirting. Of course, it has been widely reported that you can marry and divorce women, as well as buy houses and trade among vendors to make money. But none of these are all that necessary to the main quest, nor are they well-explained in the game’s tutorials.

For all it’s high-concept hype, the marriage angle seems more like a mini-game than anything else, and you won’t develop much of an attachment to your not-to-chatty in-game spouse.

Most of the rest of the game is pretty standard sword and sorcery stuff. Combat and controls are fairly tight, and the graphics are impressive – even if they only accent how linear the game is by showing you gorgeous scenery, then preventing you from walking three steps off the main path to get to it. A good comparison would be Morrowind (which we admit, we always seem to be referencing), a game which has come the closest of any we can think of to providing a true persistent world in a single-player game.

Without the hype, Fable would have been an above-average RPG adventure. But thanks to the crushing weight of too much publicity, mainly the fault of Peter Molyneux, who’s never missed a chance to play up gaming innovations before anyone’s figured out how to program them; it comes off as too little, too late.