Okay, I have now finished the game, and I am prepared to make my final remarks on the game. Be warned, this will probably, no definitely contain spoilers.
First off, I’d like to refine a few statements from the previous half of the review. For starters, another word about maps. The zones in this world really are much more interesting. They are more sprawling and fun to run around in then in any previous Fable game. The first game’s zones were all quite linear, and the second opened things up a bit, but the third has the most open by far. They’re also full of twisty paths and such, some of which are intentionally kind of hidden. Some of them aren’t, but are still pretty hidden. There was a fairly major entrance to the caverns off of one area that I didn’t find until having beaten the main story, as the bridge to get to it was just kind of out of the way. This is why, yet again, I really think this game needed to have actual working maps. At some point it just starts to seem weird that this is a universe where the people have, for some unknown reason, intentionally abandoned the fairly simple concept of the map. They had it five hundred years ago, but as their society and technology advanced, they decided to just stop making them.
The weapons are still neat, but I realized how little variation they have. The first fable game had a variety of weapons: swords, katanas, cleavers, axes, maces, pickhammers, greathammers, greataxes, greatswords, greatmaces, crossbows, and longbows. Now, a lot of these are pretty similar, but it still led to a lot of variation in what weapon you’d be carrying around at any given time. Fable 2 had fewer melee weapons, but more ranged, switching it up to crossbows, pistols, and rifles. Fable 3 has only four types of weapon: swords, hammers, pistols, and rifles. Personally, I found myself pretty much using the same two weapons all the time. The TYPO (a hammer) and Briar’s Blaster (a pistol). I was using these mostly as a way to compensate for the lack of armor. See, since you can’t do much to build your defenses, the best way to win most fights in the game is just to win quick, so that means lots of damage. Typically I’m a fan of using swords, as they’re faster, but compared to the slower hammers, the swords in Fable 3 are fantastically weak. I kept getting killed as whittled away at enemy health with my sword. Once I switched to a hammer, it was much easier, as a lot of bad guys can be killed with one hit, and few take more than three. This is almost another example of why armor is necessary, as I feel like I have to use a hammer instead of a sword just to keep form getting killed all the time. In trying to free up player choice with the clothes, they killed player choice with weapons.
Now that I’ve finished the game, I have some problems with the endgame section, which I’ll layout here.
For starters, the fight to take control of the palace back from Logan was done pretty well. It was an enjoyable uphill battle through Old Bowerstone, including meetings with the various rebel leaders you’d recruited earlier in the game. However, once we got into the palace, things take a turn.
Becoming king in this game sucks. For starters, most of the questions put to you are pretty infuriating. One of the first, what to do with your tyrant of a brother, is particularly stupid. Your options are a) pardon him, or b) execute him. It seems to me that what was really needed here was a third option, something along the lines of “life in prison.” The rest of the decisions aren’t much better.
The Fable games have always loved forcing you to make a moral decisions, and they’re rarely too tricky about it, but it’s a shame that they let this taint the latter part if the game. If I’m being put in charge of a kingdom, I find myself wanting a toolset for controlling it that is more like a SimCity or Civilization game, not the options which I’m presented with as Fable 3′s king, which always amount to, at most, three options, which can all be summed up thus: 1. Do something that is morally good but costs money. 2. Do something morally bad but gains money. 3. Do nothing and have no moral or monetary change. There are some problems with this, as the game is really far too black and white in its morality. First of all, the whole argument for sparing Logan in the beginning is that the evil he did was just to prepare for an approaching enemy that will wipe out Albion unless you can stop it. True, you can still win the game with high morality and keep all your promises by just donating a ton of money out of your personal treasury into the kingdom’s (as I did), but you can still make the case that Logan was sort of justified in some of his actions. In fact, sparing his life is considered a “good” action, although you can also make the case that he was an evil jerk and should be killed. Suffice it to say, this is a very gray area, morally speaking, and so classifying all these decisions as either good or evil is pretty reductive.
Other ones were just confusing. There is, apparently, an alcohol buying limit that is in effect, so the citizens of Albion couldn’t buy all the hooch they wanted. For some confusing reason, a bunch of the upper-class will give you 100,000 gold to make alcohol illegal altogether, but I can’t figure out why. For starters, someone has to be producing the stuff, and they’re probably pretty rich. And, what, is the upper-class in Albion all teetotalers? And, even more confusing, removing the alcohol limitation will actually cost me 100,000 gold, though why is never explained. You could make the argument that that’s the cost it will take to clean up after all the extra drunk people, but it’s not really clear. I went with no limit on alcohol, which is considered the morally good choice, and ever since then, my game is full of binge-drinking townspeople puking all over the place. Oh, and the upper-class are doing it too, which makes me unsure as to who exactly wanted to outlaw alcohol. Now, you have to figure that at least a few people would get really sick off of booze, then maybe they would dial it back in the future, remembering all the puking and the hangover they had next time they considered a drink. But no, the world is apparently just full of alcoholics, just waiting for the limits to be raised or abolished altogether. By that same argument, if you legalized heroin, everyone in America would be shooting up at the earliest possible opportunity. I don’t know about you, but I know the reason I avoid heroin has nothing to do with its legality.
Worse yet, once you make these decisions, you can’t unmake them. Even though you’re told it’s the annual budget for the town guard you’re setting, at no point a year later does anyone ask you, “so, what are you thinking of doing with the town guard budget this year, sire?”
Secondly, there’s Reaver, a ruthless industrialist who is the straw-man voice for doing any and all evil things when you’re making rulings as king. There’s the problem that all of the moral choices he presents are hopelessly simple and pretty stupid. For example, build a school for children or build a factory to force children to work. Or, build a sewage treatment plant or just dump it on a bunch of peoples’ town. It’s all very childishly good/bad. The worst part about dealing with him is that, unlike Logan, who at least has some kind of justification for his actions, Reaver is just a greedy, heartless prick. Earlier in the game, you watch him kill a man in cold blood for trying to unionize. And in the Fable universe, all unionizing means is getting more than a 15 second break from crushing labor, and I’m not exaggerating. A little later he tries to kill you by having lots of mercenaries and monsters attack you. To sum up, he’s just a plain old bad guy, and I can’t think of a single reason why he wasn’t first against the wall when the revolution was over. Instead, he’s still a captain of industry and is fabulously wealthy and comes to court like he never tried to feed me to a bunch of walking skeletons in murder pit inside his house. Seriously, why can’t I kill him?
If they’d had anyone other than Reaver arguing for the “bad” side, they could have tried to turn some of these questions into actual moral conundrums, but then, I guess they would have had to come up with some actual moral conundrums first.
My other big problem with the endgame was the big bad. It’s not, as previously mentioned, Logan. It’s the horrible thing from the southern continent that Logan was trying to prepare for called the Crawler. The big problem with the Crawler is that that’s all it is. The Crawler. What does the game tell us about it? Um, it’s evil? It wants to create darkness, or something? It’s just a monster, plain and simple. The first fable had Jack of Blades as the bad guy, a former hero who killed your family and spurred you towards revenge. I’m pretty sure he was after world domination, or something similar. The second game had Lucien who, um, killed your family, but was trying to rebuild the tattered spire so that he could wish his dead wife and daughter back into existence. Still a little trite, but a definite step up in the story department. With Fable 3 you’ve just got, well, a thing. It’s a bad thing, but it’s still just a thing, and it’s hard to grasp its motivations.
Also, compared to the battle to take Bowerstone castle, the battle to fight off the Crawler’s attack was ludicrously short and easy. Big, big anticlimax there. Very underwhelming.
Fable 3 has done a better job of providing post-climax content. There are more quests than there were in Fable 2, and as previously mentioned, the world is more fun to run around in. I haven’t tried any of the DLC, but I’d hope they’d be better than the fairly weak offering Fable 2 had.
I’ve got a major, overall problem to deal with still. The hero. You. The main character. Up until now, the hero in the Fable games never had any real dialogue, and that was okay. You started off pretty much as an orphan, ran around, solved quests, you even got married, all while keeping your mouth shut. In Fable 3, you’re a known quantity when the game begins: the prince (or princess) of Albion, second born to the hero of Fable 2, and younger sibling to the current king. You start this game as an adult, a first for the series, and the plot involves a lot of people that are already known to you, as opposed to the complete strangers you would meet in the first two games. In this game, the hero talks. Just not enough. It’s really quite strange. They’ve already made the decision that the main character has an established back story, so it’s already more difficult for the player to just pretend they’re playing as themselves in a fantasy world, and the hero does talk, just very rarely, and often at seemingly inconsequential times. You show up at a meeting of the resistance, and then just stand mutely by while everything happens around you. The worst offender would have to be when you’re in the caves where you first encounter the Crawler. You’re there with Sir Walter, your closest and oldest friend in the world, and he’s a little afraid of the dark and a lot claustrophobic. You’re running around in a maze of caverns while some kind of evil demon whispers and has shadows attack you, and Walter is steadily losing his shit, freaking the fuck out, basically screaming the whole fucking time, and you say absolutely nothing. I don’t know about you, but if I was in the same situation, I’d like to think I’d be trying to calm my friend down and keep him from going insane. But no, there’s not even “hey, relax Walter, we’ll be okay.” You just run silently alongside him while he loses his fucking mind.
Also, in a game where all of the main characters fully embody the slightly cartoony, utterly vibrant and detailed design that is the hallmark of the Fable series, the main character’s face is terrible. Sure you can put a beard on and try to hide it if you want, but that doesn’t help the fact that there came a point where my hero was sitting on the throne, trying to look sad or pensive or something, and all that was happening were the outsides of his eyebrows lowering strangely to accompany his awkward frown, for all the world just making him look somewhat constipated. It’s an impassive mask, and when they try to put any emotion on it, it just looks strange.
Finally, choice. Ever since the first game, I’ve wanted to be able to marry a character that mattered. Well, too bad. You can’t. Ever. The game gives you the option to marry whomever you want, provided their sexual orientation aligns with yours, but it has never mattered, since all they are is a few phrases wrapped inside a polygon mesh. All the characters that have any bearing on the plot disappear the moment you’re out of the mission they’re involved in. They could have waited for that option to open up until after the plot was over, so it wouldn’t screw up anything important, but no, they didn’t.
To sum up this two-part review, Fable 3 is still fun, but really, really needs to stop being bogged down too much by it’s childish and/or confusing views on morality. They also need to decide who this series is supposed to be for before they make another one: the kind of hardcore gamer that is actually likely to play an RPG, or the casual crowd who wouldn’t pick it up anyway. And since it looks like the next game is some kind of Kinect-enabled magic shooter or something, it looks like we already have the unfortunate answer to that question.
