Fable III

Ladies and gentlemen, today I’d like to take you for a small stroll down memory lane.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of RPG’s. In fact, it’s that love that led to the creation of a part of this blog that I am very passionate about, namely The Skyrim Chronicles, created because of how poorly written and constructed and endlessly frustrating unlike an RPG that game is. But although we’re not here to talk about Skyrim, it is with the Skyrim Chronicles we should start.

You see, during my pedantic and furious ranting, I made passing mention of other RPG’s, most notably Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. But I also mentioned another game series that I’m quite fond of: Fable.

And Fable is a very important game to me, because it really was my first real introduction into RPG’s as a genre.

Granted, I had played Baldur’s Gate when I was young, but I should make it clear that I was around 8 or 9 years old at the time, and played it in english, a language that I did not understand. So while I did play it, I didn’t actually get it. 

But then, a few years (and much linguistic education) later, I came across Fable for the original XBox. Now, opinion regarding the Fable-franchise is somewhat divided, mostly owing to its developers sometimes promising more than they ended up delivering. 

But I was completely oblivious to this, and just picked it up out of curiosity. And I am not ashamed to say that I absolutely loved it! 

I have described it as simplistic, and I do stand by that… but I don’t mean that necessarily as a bad thing. It’s simple and straightforward, but I still enjoyed it. Your choices were simple, but they still existed. In fact, that was the whole credo of the game. “For every choice, a consequence”. 

And I’ve said it before, but it begs repeating: the whole point of RPG’s is choice. Making decisions and having your choices have consequences. And for all the criticisms you might level at this franchise, they still understand this fundamental principle.

So Fable was hugely influential for me, because as a game, it was easy to get into and get a basic understanding of the genre.

A few years later, when they released Fable II, I was excited to play it. In fact, the reason I bought an XBox 360 was specifically so I could play Fable II. It was the first game for that console I ever owned.

Now, this may all seem a rambling and uncharacteristically positive rant, but there is reason to my madness. You see, while I do love these games dearly, there are still some nitpicks I’d like to share about the third game in the series, aptly named Fable III, a game that I do like, though I have to admit it is sadly the weakest of the three games I’ve played. I wouldn’t call it “bad” by any metric, but it just didn’t have the same… oomph as the other games.. But at least now, it’s clear that my observations, while pedantic, still come from a place of affection.

For example, unlike when I wrote about Skyrim, the risk of me smashing my keyboard to pieces out of sheer rage while writing is tenuous at best here. 

Anyway, let’s begin. The first problem I’d like to talk about has to do with this game in relation to Fable II.

You see, we’re told that the hero of Fable III, the Hero of Brightwall, is the child of the Hero of Bowerstone, the hero of Fable II.

But this is something that has bothered me ever since I first played it. While it’s never explicitly said in the game how long it has been between the two games, supplementary information claims it’s 50 years.

But if that is the case, I have to say that Albion has changed an awful lot in that time. In 50 short years, you have the city of Brightwall, with its academy hiding catacombs that look like they’ve been abandoned for centuries, despite very definitely not being a thing in Fable II. You also have the Dwellers who also were never mentioned in previous games, yet claim a long heritage of living in Mistpeak. With the exception of Bowerstone, Bower Lake (renamed Millfields) and the Castle, none of the locations from Fable II remain. Westcliff and the Crucible are both completely gone, and there’s no trace left of Bloodstone or Wraithmarsh, or of Oakfield and Rookridge. The Tattered Spire remains though, but you can’t visit it.

In Fable II, you have the option to get married and have children. One of the quests in the game has you marry someone as the “good” outcome of the quest! And yet Fable III clearly decided to ignore this, since you don’t end up with a little baby Logan in Fable II. Sir Walter talks about having been close to your hero parent… except Walter was never seen or heard of in Fable II. We’re also shown the “Sanctuary”, which Walter says belonged to the Hero of Bowerstone, but I sure don’t remember ever visiting a sanctuary in Fable II.

My point is, I feel like it would have been better to have more time between games. If memory serves, it was around 500 years between the first and second Fable games, so having it be another century or two between the second and third might’ve been better. At least then, I can understand that so much of the map would have changed and altered. I remind you, It was 500 years between the first two games, and you can still find the remains of Oakvale, as well as the ruins of the Heroes Guild, so having all of Albion radically changed in a mere 50 year difference just raises a whole heap of questions.

And really, in terms of plot, all that would really change is that Sir Walter never fought alongside the Hero of Bowerstone. But he could just as easily have heard stories passed down throughout Albion about the royal family bloodline, and used to be an advisor to the late king.

The other slight issue I’d like to discuss about this game has to do with its main antagonist. Throughout the first half of the game, it seems the main villain is your tyrannical older brother, King Logan, and your mission is to mount a revolution and take the throne. But as it turns out, Logan’s tyranny was not arbitrary, but rather actions he believed to be necessary to deal with a threat to all of Albion, in the form of The Crawler.

Now, I do like the Crawler overall, in that he’s this weird, monstrous creature who spreads despair and corruption. 

And this is, I think, something that is both a strength and a weakness. The first game had Jack of Blades as the main big bad, a mysterious man and legendary hero, who seeks the powerful Sword of Aeons, in order to wreak destruction on Albion. Fable II had Lord Lucien, who tried to control the Tattered Spire, an ancient conduit of powerful magic, in order to remake the world in his own image. 

Both Lucien and Jack of Blades seek to dominate or control Albion, though Lucien seems to be motivated by a twisted desire to make the world better. His actions, while heinous and cruel, are still justified in his mind, since his goal is to improve what he views as a cruel and uncaring world.

The Crawler, meanwhile, is very different from either of these two. To Lucien, people suffering is a means to an end. To Jack of Blades, it’s a nice bonus to acquiring his goal. To the Crawler, causing suffering and pain is an end in itself. 

In some ways, he’s similar to the main villain from another game I’ve mentioned on this blog: The Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask. Though whereas Majoras Mask seems to simply amplify negative personality traits in whoever wears it, seeing as the Skull Kid carries out increasingly malicious “pranks” while under the masks influence, when we see The Crawler take possession of people, he still remains very much in control. Him possessing people really is just another tool to torment his victims, as seen when he takes control of Sir Walter while fighting the Hero of Brightwall.

But I’m getting sidetracked. My point is that the Crawler is interesting as a villain because, compared to the other villains, his motivations are so actively malicious and, for lack of better words, alien. It’s not motivated by greed or ambition or revenge. It’s cruelty simply for the sake of cruelty.

But while this is interesting, it does also feel a bit out of place in this franchise, to just introduce some weird, lovecraftian creature and say “Yes, this has always been here, across the sea”. 

It’s apparently from the Void, the same otherworldly realm where Jack of Blades came from, but given how different the two are, this just seems somewhat bizarre. From what we see, the two have no other connection to one another, when they very easily could have created a link between the two. 

Jack of Blades was seemingly destroyed when the Hero of Oakvale threw his mask into a pit of lava, but we know Jack’s essence could separate from the mask, since it happened before when he turned into a great big dragon. Suppose some small sliver of his spirit escaped his apparent death, and has spent centuries building power, becoming more and more twisted and corrupted. After all, both the Crawler and Jack are capable of possessing bodies and taking control of them. Having Jack of Blades return, even in a horribly twisted form, would do a lot to make the Crawler feel less out of place. 

But these are my main points of concern when it comes to this. Sure, there are minor details here and there that rub me the wrong way, but they are small things like how they changed the menu to that weird walk-around-the-sanctuary thing, or changed how magic works, or other things that aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things. And the fact is, none of these issues, big or small, take away from the fact that I do still really like this game and this franchise in general. 

They’re funny, they’re exciting, they’re downright heart-wrenching at times, but above all, they’re accessible. Like I said, Fable was very much my introduction into the genre of RPG’s, and it is fantastic for that.

It only remains to be seen how the upcoming game stands up compared to its predecessors. Will it continue the story? Is it a reboot? A sidequel? 

Maybe all we can hope for is that it leads to more people getting interested in this genre. And if you ask me, if that is all it accomplishes, that’s more than enough.