Fable III

It's kind of a bummer that the Fable series is a story of throwing more money at a problem and investing in the wrong things. Fable was a terrific linear, but somewhat open RPG. It was simple but had enough depth to keep things interesting. You had a wealth of spells, different gear to hunt after, extra dungeons to do etc. Fable 2 took this, expanded the scope in pretty much all the right ways while simplifying some things like combat. Now instead of equipping different weapons you would just have a face button for melee, a face button for ranged, and a face button for spells. They reduced the number of spells but the tradeoff felt worth it because there was a bigger world and more things to do like purchasing property and investing in the economy.

Fable 3 throws more money at it and cuts off even more, losing a lot in the process. I mean look at the cast: John Cleese, Michael Fassbender, Stephen Fry, Naomie Harris, Bernard Hill (Theoden from LOTR), Ben Kingsley, Simon Pegg. It looks better. There's conceivably a bigger world though it felt about the same as Fable 2. There's a big story that takes you all over with plenty of drama added by the cast. But what do you lose? The combat is pretty atrocious for starters. Now, part of this might be I haven't played a Fable since Fable 2 over a decade ago but it seems like you basically have like 3 options for combat and they all feel weightless. There are no more interesting spells and while they add weapons that can level up, you barely feel the difference.

Leveling up your stats is no longer a thing you can do? You instead have to earn like morality points for doing quests and then you trade those in for these chests in this magical realm to upgrade your stuff. It honestly feels like garbage.

Other novel things they introduce like the inventory system should be cool end up being tedious. The inventory system is a whole pocket realm you can travel to. You have rooms to monitor your wealth and look at your weapons and try on your clothes. But after one or two times you just want to be able to hit pause and change things quickly like in every other RPG. Thankfully since every outfit and every weapon feels the same (and you can't even see the stat differences without going into this pocket realm) I just settled on whatever the hell I had and used it the entire game.

The story is a fat load of nothing. Thankfully the voice acting is awesome and the writing is often quite funny as is typical for Lionhead games. This is a saving grace because I don't think I would have stuck around for as long as I did otherwise.

Another weird thing is the game basically revolves around getting a ton of money. And the main way to do that is to just become a landlord. This is a tedious process where you need to manually click on your buildings and repair them once every like 30 minutes play time or you stop getting money. The goal is to get enough money to fund a war but the target ends up moving the entire time. They say you need like 4 million gold (which I had) and then sporadically they start siphoning away money because as the King you now need to fund every project under the sun. And then they don't tell you when the final day is so I ended up not having enough money even though all I would have had to do to hit the target was literally just leave the game open for an hour for all my rent money to come in.

It's such a hodge podge of a game. A lot of cool ideas that seem to either not be honed enough to remain fun or conflict with each other in un-fun ways. Add to that them basically destroying the core game loop of fighting stuff and you have a game that's hard to recommend outside of a Fable fan who wants to see how they ended the series. Bigger ain't always better.