Summary [10 out of 10]:

To those who are new to the Fable franchise, this is the very first in the series. Way back from the days of The Duke and before gamer scores, this game rose up and promised to be something wholly different than anything else we’d seen. And it was. You are a Hero, but you get to see your life progress from childhood into adulthood, and your choices matter the whole way. In your arsenal you’ve got ranged weapons, melee weapons, and magic. You don’t have to use all of them, but you can if you desire. You interact with townsfolk, adventure through the vast landscape of Albion doing quests, and build yourself up with renown to become the ugliest/prettiest/scariest most evil/good Hero that you can possibly be.

The people at Lionhead realized that it had been long enough that perhaps some fans of the Fable franchise were a bit too young to have played this title (can you imagine that? There are people who never played this!) and decided to put it out solely for 360 to close the franchise’s chapter on this generation console.

What It’s Like:

Nostalgia in a box.

Exactly as it was the first time you played it. The graphics have been updated to look prettier, and The Lost Chapters have been included from the onset, already entwined with the rest of the game. Other than that, this games is exactly the game that you played the first time around. Granted that you played it then, of course.

For those that have not experienced the game, it’s like those in the Fable franchise that you have encountered already, just a little more stripped down. There’s no dog running at your heels, and no trophy room where you can go look at all your neat stuff that you’ve collected. This is the game that started it all, so you’ve got to understand that they were only beginning when it came to the world and its inhabitants.

And for those that haven’t played any game from the Fable line, imagine a great big adventure with a light-hearted narrative.

 

 

The Great:

The updated graphics are more than a little amazing. You know how you go back to a game after several years, and no matter how much you might remember loving it, something is just bad about it, then you realize that you’ve gotten wildly spoiled with how much advancement has occurred in the arena of visual presentation and it’s ruining your replay experience? That doesn’t happen with Fable Anniversary. The game was reworked in many ways, though the story and the gameplay stays in tact. The demon doors are much more animated than they were originally, the colors are more vibrant, richer. It’s amazing what a little tweak can do.

There’s also a change in the controller scheme. Imported into the game is the more advanced controls of Fable 2 onward. If you don’t like those controls, or are feeling nostalgic for the old ones (and some quest boasts actually can’t be done on the newer controls), you can always switch back. The best part is that you can do this right from the option menu and don’t have to quit out of the game entirely. It’s a little thing, but sometimes those little things can make or break an experience.

Now let’s talk save systems. The world has been largely spoiled with being able to save whenever at whatever point in the game. The games that don’t allow for this are few and far between, and gamers are generally frustrated with them. The save system in Fable Anniversary is updated so that that frustration isn’t there. It would have been a huge shame if with everything else, they’d left in the old save system.

 

 

 

 

The Good:

It’s been long enough that replaying the game doesn’t feel completely familiar. While the story and the missions are all the same and nothing has been added or altered, a good deal of time has passed. Nothing is going to come as an outright surprise, even the situations you might have forgotten will likely bubble up in your memory as you get to a particular area of the map, but if you played this game before, you picked it up because you loved it the first time around, not because you were looking for a whole new game.

For new players, you’ll get to see where it all started. You get to have that start that you didn’t have before. Some things might make more sense to you as you play the game and learn the story of the Hero. Fable 2 onward were all made to be games that could stand alone while paying a bit of lipservice to the fans who have been there from the start. You don’t have to know the events of one game to enjoy the others, but there are still connections for those of us who do.

The addition of achievements to the game was fun enough on its own. The fact that Lionhead made them so entertaining is completely amazing. They could have easily just named them after the actions that trigger them, or focused all the names on the game itself. Instead, they reach outward into the world and pluck amusing tidbits to attach to the achievements, giving them such names as Fight Cluck and I Am Legendary. They even get a little tongue-in-cheek with achievements like I Did This For A Cheevo and the wildly amusing Definitely Not On Rails. Many of the achievements have more than one way to unlock them, essentially assuring that getting them all is possible (in one play through, in fact) even for those who aren’t rabid achievement hunters.

 

 

The Bad:

At the very start of the game, when you’re just learning about the controls and how to do stuff, it’s a little bit buggy. I had issues with instructions popping up and disappearing before any human eyes could even register any fact beyond there being lettering in a box, which was not so bad for me because I already knew the game. It could be a problem for people who haven’t previously played, as some of those boxes have pretty important information in them. Past a certain point, however, this stops happening. Of course, it could be more because you’ve already learned everything you were supposed to learn, and not because the coding is better.

I believed there to be a major glitch in which the entire game froze so hard that I couldn’t even turn my 360 off and had to open the game tray to get anything to function again, but it turned out to be an update for the machine that was trying to force itself through and nothing to do with the game at all. I only mention it now because it was in my notes and I feel a little bad for accusing the game of something it wasn’t even involved with. Could have happened to anyone, Fable Anniversary, I’m sorry.

The map system is, sadly, still really horrible. When I played the game originally it didn’t occur to me just how bad it was. I didn’t really use the map for all that much. Unfortunately, now I realize that it’s because the map is largely useless, not because I wasn’t adept at game-map-reading. It gives you an overview of the area, shows you where you’ve been, allows a vague idea of where you need to be, and not much else. Thankfully, this is not an issue that breaks down general game play. We got along without maps before, we can do it again.

Conclusion [10 out of 10]:

Fable Anniversary needed to happen. Now that it has, those players that never got to experience it can, and those of us who loved it before can renew our memory banks and reminisce over the first time that we played it. As a whole, gamers everywhere are getting to experience the clever jokes and amusing tidbits that the game brings. Lionhead will be heaped with the praise that they deserve, and everybody will live happily ever after.