Fable Anniversary Video Game Review (About In Description)
2ALL IN THE RETELLING.
When Fable first came out in 2004, it had years’ worth of far-fetched promises and frothing hype to live up to. Now it’s got rose-tinted recollections to satisfy. I’m not sure which is worse. Happily, though, Fable Anniversary gently retouches Lionhead’s original action-RPG without doing unspeakable violence to its memory. Fable Anniversary is a reminder of the things that established one of the Xbox’s most recognisable franchises - its lovely art, silly personality and playful attitude to good and evil. It doesn’t play like it was made yesterday, but this is a good adaptation, even if a few annoyingly anachronistic features remain.
Fable has aged well, partly because some of its best ideas have since become action-RPG staples - things like real-time combat, good-evil alignment and a world that reacts to your actions. Fable didn’t invent any of these things, but it does them well and uniquely enough that it’s still fun to play today. It’s easy to feel at home in this fantastical version of England’s green and pleasant land, where the countryside goes on forever and nobody is from inside the M25, and you’re greeted by cheers and applauding admirers whenever you step into the village pub for a pint. The place feels alive.
Fable is a simple and recognisable heroic tale at heart - you go from young boy to storied warrior, leaving your mark on the land of Albion, and eventually avenging your family - but the setting and sense of humour make it much more endearing than the usual po-faced videogame fantasy. Fable’s fondness for the ridiculous yields chicken-kicking minigames, Union Jack underpants, a legendary weapon in the shape of a frying pan, gloriously eclectic accents and dialogue, and a playfully disgusting range of fart and belch emotes.
Fable Anniversary looks far, far better than the original Xbox version, with beautiful new textures and updated models and effects, although everyone has a bad case of the scaryfaces. The old-fashioned looping animations date it - there’s no motion-captured fluidity here - but if you were a fan the first time around, it’s wonderful to see it looking so good. The extra Lost Chapters content, too, is worth seeing if you haven’t before. For me, though, the best reason to play again was that the first time was so long ago that I’d forgotten almost everything about it.
Everything revolves around the Hero’s Guild, where you go to pick up quests ranging from tedious beastie-bashing to epic treks across the Albion countryside. How you shape your Hero depends entirely on where you spend the experience gained from these quests - you can pile it all into magic spells and skills, beef up his melee muscle or improve stealth and ranged accuracy, or spread your experience across different categories.
This, in turn, affects his appearance, as does his alignment on the good-evil scale - magic users go bald quicker, for example – but the main determining factor is Fable’s binary and simplistic take on good and evil. It’s satisfying to see a halo and butterflies materialise around good heroes whilst evil ones sprout horns and go ghastly pale, even if those actions don’t have wide-reaching consequences in the wider world beyond making you more famous and recognisable. Without any of the shades of gray that make a morality system truly interesting, it’s more of a cartoonish fantasy.
Fable’s combat uses a mix of magic, melee and ranged attacks, and in the original game it didn’t gel together well. Melee attacks used to be on several buttons, you’d have to press the Back button to aim with the bow, and the lock-on was pretty terrible. For Anniversary, the combat controls have been adapted to be closer to the one-button system of later Fables - melee is on X, ranged is on Y and magic is on B. This is a vast improvement, and makes it much easier to use all your available skills in fights rather than brute-forcing through with melee alone.
Frustratingly, though, a few persisting control problems make prolonged fighting feel like a slog. Firstly, the lock-on still isn’t good enough - too often it targets a faraway enemy or a friendly when there’s a mob of undead right up in your face. This isn’t helped by an imperfect camera. Dodging is clumsy, and when you’re mobbed by enemies they have an irritating tendency to catch you in a hit animation loop and leave you unable to strike. Fable Anniversary’s fighting is fun in small doses, but after a while it’s tempting to just smash your way through with basic X-button strikes to get things over with, which is just about possible in many situations even if it is less fun. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the extremely long and tedious Arena quest, where you must fight a sequence of mostly generic enemies that feels endless.
Fable Anniversary also preserves the original’s combat multiplier, which builds up when you land blows without getting hit. The combat multiplier was ditched for later Fables, and you can see