In my last post I waxed poetically about X-Men Legends, a game that consumed my life entirely for one weekend in 2004. Licensed games made up a huge part of my early gaming library not even because I was obsessed with their licenses, which I was, but because they were usually the first games to hit the $20 bargain bin. Games like Batman Begins, The Punisher, The Two Towers, Return of the King, Fantastic Four - all these games were perfectly average but more than that, they were perfectly affordable. It definitely didn’t hurt that most of the games to hit were comic book related, but I digress. Certain games deserved their full $49.99 price tag but they were few and far between for a relatively broke 14 year old working 35 hours a week as a busboy.
If I could go back and change one thing, I would make 14 year old me pick up Fable on the original Xbox. Because as I’ve recently found out, holy hell what a game.
Yeah, in hindsight I was an idiot for not grabbing this game. That cover is absolutely fucking gorgeous.
I love my old consoles but I’m really loving the backwards compatibility and library of digital titles on my Xbox One. I recently grabbed Fable Anniversary, a 2014 HD remake of the eponymous 2004 title courtesy of Lionhead Studios. It was an exclusive action RPG for Microsoft’s rookie system and the HD remake is the full game along with its post-launch expansion, The Lost Chapters. and again, I cannot stress this enough;
This is a game 14 year old me would’ve loved. This is a game that 28 year old me currently loves, and cannot stop thinking about.
The game is set in the fictional world of Albion, a fantastical place with an exceedingly English flair. The intro area is the small town of Oakvale, where it’s your sister’s birthday and you need to make money to buy her a gift. With this simple conceit, Fable introduces you to its morality system, something that has since been normalized into games but I can totally see being novel and exciting, especially for a console RPG.
Everything you do in Fable affects what they call your alignment, something that’s essentially a morality score. Good deeds will push your character to be seen one way, and evil actions will give your character a more feared, dubious, and… horned reputation.
From the original game, not the anniversary edition - but you see where being shitty and evil gets you?
The genius of introducing this early in the game is that you’re shown a wide range of acts that affect your alignment, and for every positive action there is an equal and opposite negative action you can take. Whether you decide to guard someone’s shipping crates or smash them up yourself, Albion will know you and your values and respond to you accordingly. It’s a pretty impressive technical achievement that makes the world feel like it’s genuinely responding to the nature of the choices you’ve made, large and small, obvious and obscure. Killing guards and citizens should obviously affect the way the world sees you, but since the first Zelda’s you’ve been taught to smash crates because there’s good shit in them - but if they belong to someone else, that’s not gonna fly. The game effectively retrains you on a primal level about the idea of consequences, and it’s pretty fascinating. Before long though, the smaller touches that you don’t see coming run out and then it becomes a pretty basic binary of “Do you want to help the guards or do you want to help the pirates”, but the more subtle moments highlight a pretty thoughtful mechanic that influences how you can grow your character.
And everything grows your character, for better and for worse. Food will replenish health, but if you eat too much, your character will get fat. Maybe you want to help pirates protect their hostages because there’s a higher gold yield, but it’ll literally change the way your character looks. That said, the story makes it quite clear that Albion is on the precipice of change, so evil actions don’t necessarily feel out of place, but more like a necessary change to the world order, should you feel the need to play that way. That said, I didn’t know about the food thing until after the post-game; it’s very easy to miss a lot of these mechanics and that makes the game all the more impressive.
kicking chickens - good, evil, or just some kind of Albionese flirting?
It makes the world feel alive, in the sense that every character responds to you and your current alignment. I’m really impressed by the ambition Lionhead had when they created this game. However, some content in the game is locked away if you veer to far down one path or the other. There are locations called Demon Doors, hidden locations that tell an incredibly cryptic and frustrating riddle and will only open after you meet the state requirement in front of them. Some only open if you’re good, some only open if your evil, but they’re all filled with incredible treasure and reward you for committing to one alignment or the other, and even a second play through. It’s a pretty smart incentive, and looking at it all form a birds eye view, it feels pretty ahead of its time, especially given the game’s 2004 release date
Ok, so, they’re not all cryptic or vague
One thing that does feel particularly 2004 though is the combat system. It’s basically just z-targeting and button mashing, but you can improve your defense, your attack, and very, very helpful mana abilities that admittedly add a layer of strategy to encounters with higher level, end-game enemies. The easier enemies that you cut your teeth on generally respawn in their native areas, and once you’re about halfway through the story, you finally feel like a powerful hero (or anti-hero) of Albion becoming this truly mythical figure you’re destined to become. But the higher level enemies, the ones that basically scale with you throughout the story are always, always, always sponges and do a bit more than I would’ve preferred to keep your burgeoning legend in check. Fairly early on into the game you encounter a little goblin like enemy called a Hobbe and their proficiency in both magic and physical attacks made them a very special kind of pain in the ass that wrecked me both frequently and thoroughly. Normally though with an older game, the save system would be a pain in the ass if you’re caught in an area underpowered, but between a healing spell you can learn and items called resurrection phials that do exactly what you’d think they do, the inconsistent save system was mitigated in spite of the Hobbes, in spite of the werewolf-like Balverines, and the colossal fucking cave trolls that’ll stun you right out of contention if you can’t master the dodge roll.
The games areas themselves definitely feel like they’re from a different era of game design. While it may seem like every world today is open world, Albion is segmented in different towns, cities, and the paths between them. No matter how much time I spent exploring the world though, I never felt like I got a grasp for the layout. Making things worse, the map system feels like its from an even earlier era, making almost zero goddamn sense. Certain portals open up at the entrances of key locations and those things are awesome because they prevent a lot of headaches but you can only get to those portals by finding them first and that part is never as smooth as I’d like it to be, but that’s because it’s missing one huge quality of life change that’s pretty much made every single video game better since their proliferation: waypoints.
Playing modern, player-choice-driven RPG’s, you can set quests as important and get them to pop up on the map. Hell, some games even have little markers appear above key characters heads if you need to talk to them, some areas or items are highlighted in the environment if they’re relevant to a quest, but Fable is not one of those games, and that’s what really made navigating such a pain in the ass. I try not to look up guides for games on my first play through of a game, but there were definitely a few quests I couldn’t complete without one because they just weren’t clear enough in the game. Like the assassins below. Where the hell were the last ones? I went to where it to go on the map and they weren’t fucking there.
The only disappointing bit was the DLC, The Lost Chapters. However, it was only underwhelming because of its brevity. After the main game’s pretty fantastic climax, you’re presented a followup danger to the world that promises to be larger than what you just went through but ultimately fails to deliver. That said, you get to spend more time with a character I really, really liked, and felt like was underused in the main story, so there are things to like about the post-game activity, but its parts are greater than its sum for sure.
But when you do figure out where to go, you’re treated to a genuinely interesting story that does a fantastic job of projecting scale. You get the feeling the world is in danger. You feel powerless when Jack of Blades presents himself as the main villain. And Jack is a particular kind of evil that just gets worse the more you get to know him - he’s a fantastic foil and you get the sense that he’s from some Fable prequel that we never got to play - you can see so much of yourself in him if you just let yourself make easier choices - that’s what kept me on the straight an narrow.
But conversely, you get to see just how powerful you’d become if you let yourself loose and just took power. Jack punctuates twists along the way that I didn’t see coming and I was so impressed with where the story went and felt that the revelations that happen were both earned and welcome. The main story floored me, and it’s highlighted by smaller side quests and memorable NPC’s that make the world feel lived in, and worth either taking over should you take a more sinister turn in Albion, or worth saving if you wanted to be remembered as her champion.
Albion. Shakespeare was right when he said all the world’s a continuous line with some dots here, some dots there, and some other dots and other lines over there.
Yes I’m sweet on this game in spite of its blemishes but it’s hard to be too critical because… I mean, shit, it’s now a 4 year old remake of a then 10 year old game. And at the end of the day, if you have an Xbox One and miss the way old games feel but not how they look, you’d be hard pressed to find one as fun as Fable Anniversary. The updated visuals are how you want to remember games from that era, smooth and whimsical, befitting a fantastical story. That charming art direction is brought to life thanks to a higher polygon count, improved draw distances, and other touches of modernity that highlight an incredibly ambitious game design that holds up impressively well nearly a decade and a half later, warts and all. This very well could become a yearly or every other year replay for me.