Fable III

The worst interface I've ever experienced in an RPG and the mini games in addition to the dumb design for inventory, but it wastes too much of the player's time. Now the musical mini games are cool in theory and sometimes fun in practice but it ties back to the fundamental problem of inconveniencing the player and being visually tedious.

The Fable series is an easy to play RPG which doesn't take itself too seriously; with its constant humour throughout the characters, quests and the inclusion of its silly social system.

The hero from Fable 2 had two children, the oldest being the current corrupt king whose aggressive actions are oppressing the citizens. As the younger sibling (a choice of prince or princess), you flee from the castle and begin plans to start an uprising to claim the throne for yourself.

The first part of the game sees you visiting the leaders of nearby towns to gain their support. Once you complete their quest and gain the trust of their citizens you venture onto the next town. Once you mount your uprising, you have to raise gold within a year to support an army for the upcoming war.

You are presented with many choices, the good choices cost gold, and the bad choices raise cash. You can raise extra cash yourself by investing in the property market or by doing the jobs (blacksmith, pie making, lute playing which take the form of button pressing mini-games). After you are presented with these choices, the games timer skips ahead and the 365 days counts down and passes fairly slowly.

I mainly chose the good options and invested in as much property as I could, but was mislead when the game told me I had 160 days or so left, then jumped ahead without warning to 1 day. The end result is that I completed the game with many civilian casualties. It's ridiculous to put so much emphasis on raising the cash only for the game to end suddenly and ruin your time and effort.

To improve your character's offensive abilities, you gain Guild Seals by completing quests, killing enemies, or making friends. These then can unlock the chests in the games levelling screen called Road to Rule. The chests contain statistical gains to the mêlée, ranged, and magic attacks, and unlock all the usual Fable optional features like dying clothes, haggling, buying properties, stealing, social gestures.

On previous Fable games, you can perform your gestures when you wish and direct them to a group of people. This system has been simplified to one-on-one interactions and are you are only presented with a choice of a positive or negative action. Once you do one action, you get another choice. To fully make friends with people, you usually have to do a couple of actions then perform a fetch quest to confirm the friendship. This simplification seems unnecessary.

In terms of combat, your character has the option of switching between mêlée, magic, and ranged attacks, and you do not have to specialise. The magic seems the best because it can cover wide areas and attack from range. The guns are a bit slower especially when your character stops to reload which you have no visual clue to when this will happen. Mêlée attacks are fine, but since many of the enemies seem to keep their distance, it's much easier to pick them off at range. In Fable 2, the enemies weren't aggressive and many of them stand idle without even making any attempt at all, and this often happens in Fable 3 as well, particularly at the start of the game.

The pause menu has been changed to a hub with separate rooms called the Sanctuary. In these rooms you can look at your achievements, change your weapons, clothes or set up a multi-player session. The map in the hub allows you to quick travel to the cities, choose available quests, and purchase properties without having to travel. You can quickly jump in an out of the rooms using the D-Pad so it is basically a better, more interactive menu. The graphics on the game are really sharp but the games frame-rate drops in places.

Overall, Fable 3 is a decent game, but is too simple for most fans of RPGs. The changes seem to be making the game more suitable for kids, but the game still contains the adult social themes so I'm not sure which target market they were aiming for. The game also seems to build up nicely throughout, but suffers a huge anti-climax because it all ends abruptly and features a poor final boss.

Probably even more generally dumbed down and simplified than the second, if that's possible.

I like what it tried to do with an organic menu system, but how long it took to load and the generally sloppiness of it feels to move, let alone select something, made it a continual headache. I imagine the idea of silencing John Cleeves in the menu when stuff gets edgy during the desert sequence would have been effective if you hadn't been conditioned to hate the menu, and if John Cleeves or the rest (or, for that matter, the rest of the game in general) was as funny as it thinks it is.

It did a really good job with the aesthetic of the moroccan inspired southern half of the map; it really looked good. I think I just have a thing for deserty style areas, but it tickled me nonetheless.

The ultimate insult the game gives you is in the latter half of the game, where the narrative tries to make some sort of statement about politics, rulership and promises. You're forced to, as the king/queen, amass as much money as possible to stop an invading army of baddies coming in 'one year's time.' As well as through questing, the game's main way of giving you money is through giving you the descision between breaking promises you made to members of your revolutionary friends to get you onto the throne in the first place; will you keep the factory full of kids that you shut down on your rise to power closed, or will you reopen it to fight a greater evil? It's an intersting concept done abysmally badly.

Firstly, when making a tough descision there's no way to tell the noble people of Albion that changes may only be permanent so that you can scrape enough money together to let the whole country not perish at the hands of bad guys coming in a year. It never seems to get thrown around at all that potentially tough descisions are necessary, with characters reacting to short-term 'bad' choices such as the reopening of the aforementioned child labour dependant factory in the same way that they'd react to the pointlessly evil things the player can do and that compromises one half of fable's idiotic moral binary for the most part. Short term 'good' choices, such as keeping the factory closed, are met with evil character scorning the character for not amassing more money for greed's sake, ignoring the impending attack.

Secondly, even by making all the tough descisions you can, you still won't have enough money needed to protect your country. In an in-game year's time. Not nearly enough. Which means the best way to earn money is through playing the lute in the town for change. Narrative destroyed. It's more effective to busk than to open a factory and the moral dilemma is completely avoided.

And worst of all, is that the game skips periods of time until the army attacks arbitrarily and without warning, most infamously and egregiously skipping the last 100 or so days after finishing a quest and effectively saying that the money you amassed before the end of that quest is what you have for the whole year. It's backwards, stupid, and what I can only imagine is the consequence of a rushed development. It completely ruins the whole second half of the game, and feels like a cheap loss for the player who unwittlingly cemented their fate by simply finishing a quest with around a third of the supposed amount of time remaining left.

You have a dog and that's pretty okay