Fable

Genre:	Third-Person Action RPG
Developer:	Lionhead Studios
Publisher:	Microsoft
Release Date:	14 September 2005
Released On:	Xbox, PC

Amazing Ben Describes the Plot in 10 Words or Less: 

The longest, most pointless, most boring revenge tale ever written.

Overview: 

Picture this scenario:  You're some douchebag pre-teen kid in some crappy generic stock piece-of-shit medieval fantasy village where everybody spends all day walking around aimlessly doing nothing of interest.  One day, all of a sudden like eight billion marauding bandit motherfuckers storm your hometown, set fire to everything they get their hands on, massacre the citizenry, slaughter your father, kick your dog, put your little sister's eyes out with hot coals and then abscond with your her and your mother as their prisoners to be sold into slavery or worse.  You are saved from the bloodbath by a powerful wizard who whisks you away to a boarding school for heroes-in-training, where you spend the next several years honing your ability to stab people in their faces and harnessing the intricate magical energies necessary for you to be able to shoot huge motherfucking fireballs out of your hands and incinerate anything that is capable of burning in a pyro-tastic display of munchy crunchy chocolatey death.  Finally, after your training is complete, you are unleashed on the world to forge your own bloody destiny.  What do you do?

If you said "live for revenge" by hunting down every single person responsible for the death of your family Punisher-style and then systematically separating them from their limbs and vital organs while liberating your mom and sis in the process, you would be correct.  However, this is the set-up for Fable, yet your jackass character seems much more interested in "making a name for himself" as a successful hero than doing anything even remotely fucking useful at all.  The goal of the game, for all intents and purposes, is actually just to go around and perform apathetic feats of heroic dorkitude in order to make the citizenry like you better.  You spend the majority of the game working for the "Hero's Guild", where you basically get the privilege of being everybody's bitch all the time.  Jerks contact the guild with their bullshit remedial jobs, like "oh fuck I need someone to help me transport a barrel of pillow feathers through a forest infested with BLOODTHIRSTY BEES AND WASPS and maybe some other scary stuff like POISON IVY and bullfrogs AS BIG AS YOUR FIST!", and then your bosses at the guild volunteer you for the job because it's not like you have anything else going on or anything.  So you stroll out through incredibly linear wilderness fighting ridiculous monsters and collecting experience and renown.  And you'll do this about a hundred times, with no real overarching storyline or anything to keep you even remotely interested in what you're doing.  To further boost the excitement level to 11, be prepared to backtrack your fucking ass off, because there are only like seven areas in the entire game and you have to go through every single one of them about a thousand times.

Now if you followed any of that "OMG this is going to be the best RPG ever made in the history of humanity ever" hype generated by the game's publisher around the time of it's release, you would have thought that this game would do everything from allowing you to control eighteen generations of heroic warriors through a centuries-old conflict to having your Xbox send out subliminal messages compelling your girlfriend or wife to give you a blowjob while you're playing it.  However, in reality, none of this is true.  There are quite a few half-assed attempts at "doing things no other RPG has ever done before", but most of this shit was never done before because it's fucking stupid and contributes nothing of value to the game.

For instance, when you get hit in the face with a weapon and you aren't wearing a helmet, your guy develops facial scarring.  Totally realistic!  Except that this is a motherfucking video game, and you get hit in the face with giant rusty axes roughly every fifteen seconds.  Oh, and you don't find a helmet until like the fourth level.  So by the time you can put a goddamned helmet on (the helmets in this game are so retarded-looking by the way that they make you look like the village idiot wearing a water bucket on his head) your poor bastard looks like a mix between Freddy Krueger and something on the menu at Tony Roma's.

They also try to shake things up by having your character age as the game progresses and you gain more experience.  Sure, I guess this makes sense in a "totally realistic" sort of way, and it worked pretty well in Pirates!, but the problem here is that every single time you level up your dude rapidly gets older - before I was on the fourth board I was already like 35 and was still being called a "promising young hero" by everyone I met (it doesn't help that you are the only fucking person in the game who ages - you can age 60 years and everyone else still looks exactly the same as they did when you first graduated Hero School).  By the time I finally got the hang of the fighting system and all that shit I was like 40 something.  This is troublesome for two reasons.  First off, what the fuck?  Why the hell would I want to play a gray-haired 46 year-old man swinging a sword around like a crazy person and hitting on 18 year-old chicks all day?  (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that you can make chicks fall in love with you and marry them, but the whole concept is pretty much pointless and stupid).  Secondly, I hate the idea that it's taken my dipshit loser character something like half a century to avenge his family.  Shit, by the time my guy finally gets around to rescuing my mother and sister they've both probably fucking died of old age.  Good work, retard.  You fail at life.

Not that I would really know how it ends.  I quit after my hair turned gray and the Guild sent me to go in for a prostate exam and a denture fitting.

X-Tremeness Level: 

One of those fitness days at the retirement center where everyone sways back and forth to the tune of "Achy Breaky Heart".

Overall Badassitude Score: 

This game is chock to the brim with every trite fantasy RPG convention ever devised, yet still manages to leave out important fucking shit like "plot", "equipment" (I think I've played text adventures on the Commodore 64 that had more options for weapons and armor), and "motherfucking dragons".  The new shit they try to introduce to the genre sucks - like your dude doesn't talk, but he has "gestures" to get his point across.  Flex your muscles to get girls to like you!  If you don't like someone you can give them the finger or burp and fart at them!  LOL LOL ROTFLMMFGDAO!!!  The monsters are boring, the missions are boring, and even the combat is pretty boring since you only have three moves and just wind up mashing the attack button eight billion times in a row until your thumb turns purple and falls off.  The only thing that saves this game and gives it a blip on the badassitude screen is that there are actually some very cool-looking magical abilities and when you shoot bandits in the face with a bow their heads pop off for some reason.

I guess I should also mention that there's a "morality" system in this game, but just like every other game to ever feature this sort of thing the "evil" side involves doing stupid petty mafia thug shit like punching toddlers or stealing a pair of expensive pants when the idiot shopkeeper turns his back to you.  When are they going to make a game where you have the option to be *truly* evil?  I mean, I hardly think hardcore evil motherfuckers like Darth Vader waste their time shaking down villagers for handfuls of pocket change or mindlessly killing people for no reason like some sort of homicidal maniac.  I'd like to think that they've got their sights set on bigger and better things.  I want a game that will let me formulate diabolical schemes for world domination.  I want to be able to hire guys to shake down the citizenry instead of doing it myself.  I don't want to be a schoolyard bully, I want to be a villain.

  

SCORE:  1 out of a possible 5 badass fire-breathing dragons (of which there are none in this game).

Addictiveness: 

RATING:  Celebrating your 40th birthday.

Yeah, it's probably kind of fun for a little while, but in the end you just feel old and you're happy you only have to go through it once.

Multiplayer Component: 

None.

Hot Andrea's Take: 

"Are you supposed to be that little gremlin thing or are you the old man?"

Awesometer Score: 

-3

This game was hyped as one of the best RPGs ever.  When it was released, game review sites all over the web gave the developer a hearty round of enthusiastic consolation suck-jobs, giving Fable scores in the 8.5-9.0 range and saying "it's not everything we hoped for but it's still a great game Peter Molyneuxeuxaux please don't feel bad we're still B.F.F.!"  I'll admit I probably went into this overly-high expectations, but I was very sorely disappointed.  I kept waiting for the time when I was going to hit something that made me go "damn, OK, now I see what's so great about this game!", but it never really happened.  I just ended up quitting, which is saying something because I very rarely quit a game in the middle.

I went with the -3 here because it's really not abysmally bad or anything, I just wouldn't recommend it to anybody with a soul that, by default, cries out for vengeance.