Fable [Xbox]

From British game design maestro Peter Molyneux and developer Big Blue Box, much-delayed role-playing game Fable has been called many things. In fact, Molyneux has been talking it up since well before the Xbox was released. It hasn't entirely lived up to its ambitious, open-ended goals, and it's over too soon, but it's still a well-designed and deeply satisfying play.

For all its pre-launch posturing, Fable has turned out to be pretty standard fare. It's a third-person action role-playing game, set in the fantasy world of Albion, where a young boy narrowly escapes from a devastating attack on his village. He grows up to be a potential-filled novice hero, and sets out to earn a name for himself.

Unlike most role-playing games, everyone starts off with the same hero -- there's no character class system, no races to choose from, and not even the option to play as a woman. Your experience can be put towards physical prowess, speed and agility and magic power, but most players will probably choose to balance their development between them.

Albion is broken into a number of conveniently sized regions, some containing towns or teleport locations, and others containing little monsters and wilderness. The controls should be familiar to most people -- there's the standard free camera, a simple, Zelda-like melee combat system, and the trigger buttons are used as shift keys for other functions. There are some occasions when the Xbox controller just doesn't have enough buttons to cope with all Fable's options, but the game works around its limitations reasonably well.

Compared with the Xbox's other heavy hitter in the RPG department, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Fable looks like a game from a different generation. Each outdoor area is a wealth of detail and intricacy. Many locations and enemies are straight from the Big Book of RPG Cliches (authored by J.R.R. Tolkien, of course) but there's always enough uniqueness to the models, behavior, or atmosphere they exhibit to make them feel new. Fable can even pull off the old "get locked in a cell and lose all your equipment" trick without feeling stale, and this is no small feat.

Special mention must also go to Fable's score. The main theme is written by well-regarded movie composer Danny Elfman, and the background music that plays throughout the game bears his hallmark. Game soundtracks often feel like afterthoughts, so it's refreshing to see one that's clearly seen so much care and attention.

Script and voice acting are also both competent, although you'll hear the same lines from many of the villagers over and over again. None of the main cast underperforms, and the variety of obscure British regional dialects is curious and often witty.

What of Fable's much-boasted good and evil system? Your character changes his appearance to mirror your actions. Slaughter innocents, steal and generally play the bad guy, and you'll grow up twisted, horned, and red-eyed. Do the opposite, and you'll sprout a halo and inexplicable butterflies. Yeah, it's a lot like Knights -- but Fable takes it a stage further.

Fable's minor characters also react to your reputation. By the middle of the game, once you've acquired sufficient hero kudos, you'll be welcomed into each town with cheers (or, if you've taken the evil path, something entirely different). Women (and men) will swoon at your feet, bards in the taverns will sing songs of your conquests, and you'll hear the villagers gossiping about you as you walk by.

You might say this all sounds like window dressing, and that's exactly what it is. Most of it is fairly inconsequential -- taking a wife or owning property, for example, really has no significant impact on your character at all. Drinking too much beer will make you fat, but that's about as far as it goes. By altering your body shape and dress style, you can affect the way the villagers respond to you... but without any real consequences, why bother?

Although Fable follows the usual RPG convention of a linear plot with plenty of optional side quests along the way, it's rare to see one handled quite so well. Although you are being led by the hand through Fable's world, it doesn't feel like it. Revisiting of old areas is kept to a bare minimum, and there's always something else to do in the unlikely event that you get stuck or bored. This makes Fable the kind of game that swallows hours.

If only it would swallow a few more of them. Playing through with a moderate sense of purpose, doing some side-quests, acquiring a bride or two, and seeing a decent amount of the world along the way, you can expect to see the game clock reading well under 10 hours after the final battle. There's a decent incentive to play it again, taking the opposite alignment, but if you're the type that doesn't like to replay games, Fable offers poorer value.

The game's also far too easy. The fluid combat system, with its nigh-unbreakable block button and powerful attacks, isn't hard to master. With creative use of magic and a good store of potions, none of the battles present much difficulty -- not even the supposedly apocalyptic final confrontation. Some quests can be spiced up with "boasts" -- deliberate restrictions or extra winning conditions -- but that doesn't mask the fact that most gamers will breeze through Fable.

Still, it's rare to find a game that drips with such attention to detail. Playing Fable is like flying business class for the first time; it's a familiar experience that's of higher quality than you're used to. Just don't get too content, because you might be landing sooner than you'd like.