Let’s talk about Fable III.

With the new Fable reboot currently in the works over at Playground Games, I felt I’d be doing myself an injustice if I remained in the dark, having never played the final entry in the Fable trilogy. As I played through this last installment, I couldn’t help but be impressed, disappointed, and ultimately excited about the future of the series.

Fable III is a mixed bag of good ideas, bad ideas, some great visuals, and a whole lotta grinding, topped off with some truly awful pacing issues and one of the most disappointing boss battles I’ve ever played. There’s a lot crammed into a pretty short play-time, and it’s not necessarily a good thing.

First off, the game looks fantastic. It probably looked fine on the Xbox 360, but on the Xbox One X and especially the Series S/X the game looks incredibly clean and smooth. Textures are high resolution and the anti-aliasing is crisp (though there is a weird outline that appears around characters in certain lighting situations, but it’s easily ignored). Couple that with some great locations and Fable III is truly a looker. It’s a shame that these locations are limited in number and re-visited so often that they quickly lose their magic.

The music has always been a great part of the Fable series, and this is no exception. In fact, the sound design in general is great. There are places in the game where music truly invokes a sense of forboding and mystery, while a specific area can be downright intimidating, though kind of… out of place… for a Fable. Which is where Fable III loses a little bit of its magic. The voice acting isn’t quite as exaggerated and overly “British” as it was in the past, and in truth, it’s kind of a bummer.

In fact, Fable III loses a lot of the whimsy and satire that made the first two so memorable. Fable III is dark, and when I say “dark,” I mean dark. Not just aesthetically but thematically as well. There are some heavy themes in this game. It’s a juxtaposition that doesn’t quite work. You can interact with the NPC’s, but they’re limited to one at a time, your “emotes” only affecting the person you’re talking to. No more boasting, no more gather crowds, no more woo-ing or scaring multiple people at once. Getting someone to love you goes the same way every time. Dance and play patty-cake until they like you enough to ask you a favor. Do the favor, and you’ll be best friends. Do the process again for a compatible partner and they’ll love you. That’s all there is to it. I literally met and woo-ed and married a woman in less than five minutes. Then (had we not both been female) we would have had the option to pro-create. It’s all there… but there’s just no reason to do it. The NPC’s have very little personality, and I honestly didn’t care about my character’s spouse in the slightest. The only reason I married her was because she was the only one I found that was into women.

There is a humor in Fable III. But where before it was a crass, raunchy humor in the vein of a Monty Python or a Benny Hill, this is a dark humor, and a lot of times they’ll try both in a short span and it’s just weird. One minute I’m watching my character cluck like a chicken, and the next I’m watching her snap a guy’s neck. It was like they didn’t want to go too silly, but didn’t want to go too serious either. Instead we’re left with a dark humor that is great when it’s there, but the rest of the time it’s just brushed to the side.

For example, one of the funniest side quests I went on was for a guy who wanted me to murder someone in cold blood. I’d been a goodie two-shoes for the majority of the game, so I thought it would be fun to be a little evil for a bit. So I reluctantly accepted the quest, wondering why this guy wanted someone dead so bad. When I finally reached the target, I laughed out loud, because he was the most annoyingly loving, happy person, with this ridiculous mustache and a dreamy, goofy look on his face. All apprehension was gone and I immediately wanted to murder him. I didn’t even try to be sneaky about it. I did it in front of everyone. Of course the people didn’t like it and booed me (I thought it would’ve been clever to go that extra mile and have at least one person there be like “Finally!”). I went back to the quest-giver to notify him that the deed had been done. He seemed surprised that I actually went through with it, but then cheerfully asked me to come back later, and “thanks for the murder!” That’s the kind of whimsy and stupid humor that I loved about Fable. And there is some to be had in Fable III, it’s just spread very thin. The rest of the game is held down by its hefty themes.

Heavy is head that wears the crown, so it is said, and that is true in Fable III. The game is fine for about two-thirds of the adventure, as your character, The Hero, works to gain alliances across Albion in order to overthrow the tyrannical King. Quickly enough, though, The Hero successfully overthrows him and realizes that not all is as it seems. It turns out your brother The King has been ruling with an iron fist in order to prepare for an even bigger threat, and by usurping him, that responsibility now falls to you. Agree or disagree with his methods, the player soon learns that he or she might have to stoop to the very same levels in order to ensure the safety of the kingdom.

This is where the game completely falls apart. The game grinds to a screeching halt and your character is practically reduced to a decision-making figurehead. Hey, fair’s fair, right? I mean, it comes with the territory. The problem is that the player is essentially on a doomsday clock, and now the new King/Queen is tasked with amassing the required funds in order to save the kingdom before time runs out. Time passes after each set of decisions to make, and if you haven’t been buying properties and gaining wealth over the course of the (not as long as you’d think) game, be prepared to grind it out while slowly waiting for your rent and profits to accumulate. I was buying properties and businesses at each opportunity, and still it took me an additional five hours or so to gain the required wealth. That’s a long time to fart around doing side quests and hunting demonic gnomes.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have been as bad if the game world was larger. Albion has shrunk considerably in the time since Fable II and there really aren’t many places to go in order to level up weapons and such. Some of the requirements, like Kill 400 human enemies, get pretty damn hard to accomplish when there are only a few areas to find humans and they only spawn occasionally, other times being replaced by Hobbs or Balverines. That’s the main problem with Fable III. It’s way too ambitious for its size. For the things that it wants to do, it just doesn’t have the space for. This is evident in the multiple times you’ll have to revisit certain areas.

I recorded hours of gameplay footage for this feature, and going back and scrubbing through it, I’d be hard pressed to tell which footage was from what point in the game. You re-visit the same handful of areas repeatedly throughout the game, so that trip through Brightwall could’ve been my second, or my thirtieth. There’s really no way to know.

I was ultimately pretty disappointed with Fable III. To someone like me who remembers the hype of Project Ego, and remembers Peter Molyneaux’s promises, the series has become synonymous with disappointment, While each game is fine when taken for what it is, none of them- not even the much loved Fable II have lived up to the original premise. And that’s what got me so excited about the new Fable project. The technology is there, the budget is there, and the talent is there. Perhaps, just maybe, Fable will finally realized as the ambitious fairy-tale hero life simulator it was always destined to be.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.