With
Fable III being released soon, I thought it was a great opportunity to compare
Fable I & II and see what can be and hopefully be improved in the third game.
So basically, in both
Fable games, we are narrated through a fictional story created by
Peter Molyneux, one the most controversial persons in the gaming industry.
Every story takes place in the world of
Albion, where the main character has a backstory and a main objective with his/her adventure.
I will focus more on the second games storyline, where you play as an orphan, living with your sister and struggling each day with trying to feed both you and your sister, but one day a travelling merchant appears in the city of
Bowerstone and he carries a very special music box, which he claims to be magical.
You and your sister manage to get enough money by doing chores around town to buy the music box, the merchant also tells you that it has the power to grant you one wish.
Rose, your sister, uses the box and wishes that both you and her would one day live in a big castle, the box glows and then vanishes, with nothing happening.
Both of you think it's a fraud and go to bed dissapointed that the gold spent on the box could be used to eat for one whole week.
The next day you are woken up by soldiers, who want to lead you and your sister to the
Fairfax Castle because
Lord Lucien had asked for you.
Rose can't belive what she's hearing and belives that her wish has come true.
Your led to the castle and are greeted by
Lucien, who's been researching history from the
Old Kingdom and thinks you two are a part of great history.
He asks you both to step on a circle on the floor, a blue light amits from the edge of the circle and Lucien tells you that you are not any of the three, and one is the fourth (whatever that means), and shoots both you and
Rose.
And your story to bring down
Lucien begins.
I really enjoy this storyline much more than the first game, where you had the
Guild where you could use your experience points to buy upgrades, a very dull story if you ask me.
But this one involves great adventure, heroes and a big tower that contains great power called the
Sphere, looks a lot like
Sauron's tower from
Lord of the Rings.
From
Fable I, the combat engine was friendly for single-targets, and not friendly for multple enemies at all, and I thought the magic system was pretty rusty.
In
Fable 2, they looked over these thing and added a friendly system for
guns, but in my opinion, they made it a little to easy to just burst down the enemy with ten bullets before the enemy could even blink, the improvement was promising, but not that great.
They also revised the whole magic system and improved it greatly by adding a "spell picker", where you could choose up to five spells to with quick and effective controls.
Then we come to the combat, which I thought felt pretty similar to the first game, where you really just focus on one target, and I've heard this is going to be improved in the third game, and I really hope they hold up to that promise, because that's something
Fable lacks with, the combat overall, it's just not that fun going into combat in
Fable 2 because of multiple reasons;
one: it's just not that fun.
two: it's very easy to win the fights.
We also have the emotions system, where you can use diffrent emotions to interact with the people of
Albion. In the first game I thought that idea was just pure rubbish.
In the second game I thought... it was just rubbish. Seriously, this system is pure unnecessariness at its finest.
I really think the creators intentions were good, but just thinking that it would be fun to interact that way is just not... good...
In the first game we could use the D-pad to switch between diffrent emotions and go like "hey there neighbor, smell this" *fart*.
Not really saying the first dialog, but the fart was true. In
Fable III I really hope they remove and redo this system or just improve it
a lot.
But I'm not going to be that critic about the system, they really did try to improve it in
Fable 2 by making it more user friendly, but it still ain't fun to go around to virtual NPC's without emotions and get arrested by farting a woman in her face, no, that's not how it's supposed to work.
From one thing to another, in the first game we had armor, clothes etc that gave you diffrent stats, which is always brilliant, it gives you a lot of time to collect diffrent armors to give you diffrent cool effects.
In
Fable II they thought, F*CK YOU, let's remove the stats and cool armors and just give you clothes which you can collect to make your character look more stupid than before, I mean removing such a great part of a RPG game is like killing a part of its soul, in
Fable III they really have to reimplent the stats on armors...
One last thing before I end my rambling, the graphics of both games are very unique, and I've seen many games take inspiration from it, even
World of Warcraft,
Fable is a game you love to love, or you love to hate, it differs from peoples taste, and it's an unique game worth picking up.
Graphics: 6/10
Gameplay: 6/10
Story: 9/10
Replay Value: 7/10
Pedrometer: 6/10
Overall: 6/10
Thanks for reading!
- Pedro