Fable: The Lost Chapters (Xbox)

Marketing, much like a game’s price, is an important consideration to make about a game when it comes to a purchasing decision, but neither truly has any bearing on the end product’s quality. While knowing what kind of game you’re getting is definitely important, prerelease publicity can raise expectations too high as even the developers aren’t completely sure what they can actually pull off in the game yet, and while I personally never really heard much about Fable before its release, some people were inevitably disappointed when they played a game that couldn’t match the developer’s pie in the sky claims of what it would turn out to be.  A year after release though, Fable would be rereleased as Fable: The Lost Chapters, an upgrade that aimed to flesh out the experience a bit more with extra content that, when viewed without the lens of prerelease promises, helps solidify it into a strong action RPG experience.

 

The story in the game rather than the story of the game begins with you as an unassuming young boy in a typical medieval village, but when a group of bandits lay waste to the place, you are whisked away from the devastation to be trained up in the ways of combat by the Heroes’ Guild. From them, you learn the ways of close-range combat, a magical power known as Will, and the art of archery. While at first this may seem like Fable is setting you up to pick a proficiency to lean into most during play, Fable actually makes each skill useful for different combat situations. Using the likes of swords and axes is great for quick and effective combat, but magical abilities come with unique effects to heal you, protect you, and deal damage in more varied ways that are only dependent on what spells you have learned and how much magic power you have to call on. Archery is in some ways the cousin of close-range combat, in that its straightforward and effective, but it has a benefit over melee battles in that you can snipe foes from afar or back away from danger while still harassing your enemies. A player can use any of these three combat types freely and upgrade them to be more effective, or in the case of Will, they can unlock new abilities that can even augment the effectiveness of the other two combat types. A generalized pool of experience points exists that you can spend on upgrades, but if you do favor a certain type of combat, you will be rewarded for its use by getting special points that can only be spent on that skill type. The enemies of Fable do a good job of making you mix up your approaches by pulling on the same three styles of combat and requiring you to respond either in kind or exploit the gaps a commitment to one attack style leaves in their defenses. They often come in groups and swarms to ensure you can’t play too passively, the game trying to urge the player to switch between their three attack types to put up the best possible offensive.

Strangely, while Fable is overzealous in handing out healing and revival items and makes many healing and defensive spells available quite early, the fact that it is hard to die doesn’t effect the enjoyability of the combat. One way it helps avoid death being the only possible failure condition is the game’s quest system. As a member of the Heroes’ Guild, your character takes on quest cards from people in need of assistance. While some are as simple as killing all the enemies and not dying yourself, many more of them have special conditions that can lead to a loss if you aren’t able to complete them. Protecting somebody or something is often how the game goes about doing this, essentially making you guard someone who can die with your sturdy body and powerful skills. If you do fail, the game will kick you back to the very beginning of the quest, an annoyance since many of these quests can be slow pushes through groups of enemies that, while the combat makes clearing them out initially a good time, having to repeat it can feel like a drag. There are ways to adjust to these missions to ensure the failure state is less likely though, but losing hard-earned progress feels bad regardless of it helping ensure the game isn’t too easy. Late in the game the quests began to give way to story missions as your character further learns about the history of the land of Albion and how their own bloodline plays a key role in its future. Bosses begin to crop up more often, and even though its now mostly your life on the line, the strength of the combat continues to show as these battles can still prove challenging. It is less about preserving your life and more about the hard fought struggle to take down a powerful or agile foe, enemies able to knock you around easily and the player having to fight well to avoid wasting their resources. Every now and again though, a seemingly important battle can prove to be unexpectedly easy depending on what you’ve invested your experience points in.

 

Albion is perhaps not the most imaginative fantasy world, with many expected creatures popping up as enemies but with slightly altered names or forms. Goblins in this game are called Hobbes, Trolls come with elemental affinities, and the fearsome Balverines are essentially just renamed werewolves. The game isn’t afraid to just throw skeletons and wasps at you without any twist though, but despite falling back on these fantasy game mainstays, there’s a progression of foes to keep things fresh as you get further into the game, with many human enemies standing in your way as well. While the mostly typical medieval setup of the world doesn’t exactly make it the freshest setting to explore, it doesn’t detract from the game either, and the game has some good humor scattered throughout to ensure the game has some character despite resting easy on many expected tropes of fantasy fiction. The world does hide quite a bit of its lore and character depth until an area Lost Chapters added blurts it all out upon request, which is a shame since there are some characters who could benefit from it being front and center like your constant rival Whisper and your fellow members of the Heroes’ Guild.

 

Areas in Albion are easily accessible by teleport and the game does a good job of mixing up where quests take place while still giving you reason to revisit areas, with optional quests, hidden silver keys used for unlocking special chests, and the special challenges of the Demon Doors. Many areas have these special speaking doors that ask the player to figure out riddles or perform unusual actions and reward them with little chambers full of loot, and even in towns where fighting isn’t to be found, there’s often a few small amusements such as card games and romancing the locals. The card games are simple betting games that can be used to increase your funds when quests aren’t giving enough, but the first city in the game has one that is far too easy to repeat and win, and since the betting cap is incredibly high for it, it can give you an enormous edge early on once you blow your winnings on amazing armor and weapons at the city shops. Thankfully, combat still keeps its edge until you’ve got the experience and stats to make you truly powerful, so that doesn’t sabotage your game experience even if you indulge in it. Marriage is a surprisingly barebones affair, often involving flirting repeatedly at your love interest and then buying a home and wedding ring before you get hitched. It’s more a minor touch than a feature worth touting, which could almost be said about the game’s emphasis on being good or evil.

While some games set up difficult moral decisions to influence a karma system that determines how characters in the world treat you, Fable has a very clear cut division between its good and bad options. Characters will treat you different in the world of Fable based on how evil or good you act throughout the game, but there’s never any major changes to the storyline based on them, and you can always choose the other option in the moment if you so wish. It’s never really a surprise which option is the evil one either, since most of them boil down to killing someone you don’t have to or doing something motivated solely by how you might gain from someone else’s pain, with some quests at the Heroes’ Guild offering a clear good and bad route like the option between protecting people or slaughtering them. The Heroes’ Guild, despite the name, is somewhat neutral, allowing you to continue the plot to its end regardless of what route you choose, and in some ways, having such a clear delineation between the good and bad choices makes it much easier for the player. Rather than being presented difficult moral dilemmas, the player instead has a clear heroic and villainous route they can pursue during their playthrough, ambiguity giving way to two clear branches to follow. Even at pivotal moments where the player can kill someone important to the plot, if you choose to spare them instead, they conveniently disappear from the rest of the game so that the storyline can still follow its set course. One issue that does come about from being able to be good or bad though is that you are able to attack and kill friendly characters, something that is welcome when you want to indulge your evil side but since the game uses a lock-on feature for combat that you activate through a button press, it can lead to situations where an innocent gets caught in the crossfire of a skirmish with the enemy. This issue tends to crop up in those missions where you are meant to protect a friendly character as well as in bandit attacks you stumble across where a passerby is being harassed. Surprisingly, killing an innocent doesn’t tip you too far towards evil unless it is done in abundance, but it can still be annoying when allies or a group of guards turns on you because your attempt to rapidly fire a magic spell hits them instead.

 

When compared to the standard release of Fable, The Lost Chapters’s additions certainly stand out as more creative and engaging. The main plot of Fable sets up the action well and has its share of developments and twists, but the post-game story The Lost Chapters adds takes a closer look at many characters and allows for some interesting battles with them. Fable Anniversary would many years later touch up the visuals and make things more accessible, but players would not be missing much for choosing to play either updated version of Fable.

THE VERDICT: Fable: The Lost Chapters takes the already enjoyable combat mix of melee, magic, and archery and gives it more interesting and meaningful things to do than the original title. Setting up some clear paths of good or evil that allows the player to experience the game in two different ways, Fable’s fantasy story is given a touch of personal flair that is also expressed through your personal appearance and a level up system tied to your actual combat preferences. Despite there being little threat of death, the quest objectives and combat structure allow things to still feel intense and challenging, with new enemies, situations, and optional activities cropping up as you explore the interesting story behind the somewhat simple land of Albion.

 

And so, I give Fable: The Lost Chapters for Xbox…

A GREAT rating. While Fable: The Lost Chapters isn’t exactly revolutionary in its ideas or concepts, the main components of the game work excellently. Combat is thrilling and values varied approaches by rewarding it with more points in the skills being used. The story has a clear division between its good and bad choices, but it makes it easier to test the two different ways your adventure through Albion can go, an adventure that attaches a decent story that allows the quest to keep delivering new areas and foes at a good pace. Marriage is a bit underdeveloped, and there appears to be a day/night cycle solely for the purpose of making you wait around in a town for stores to open if you’re unlucky, but most of the extra features enhance the game world and give you more to do between quests than just arm up for the next one.

 

With a bit more time to add meaningful content and to expand on the already strong combat mechanics, Fable: The Lost Chapters, while not being quite “the best RPG of all time” as designer Peter Molyneux purported before the release of the original title, still manages to be an excellent RPG that deserves praise for what it succeeds at instead of so much focus being on the promises the developer didn’t follow through on.