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Fable, graphically, holds up very well. The third person behind the character view and optional zoomed first person view for ranged combat makes the game very easy to navigate. The special effects and lighting are also very well done, though they do sometimes obscure the visibility of the game. One of the nicest aspects of the graphical representation is that the character actually changes as you add and remove armor, weapons, hair styles, and tattoos, all of which affect your characters attractiveness and/or scariness factor.

The story in fable does, in some ways, mimic a real fable. The only problem is that it doesn’t actually talk about any truths of life, but it does weave a somewhat interesting plot. You start out as a boy in a village with a seemingly normal family. Your village is raided and your parents and sister are slain, you are rescued by a hero and returned to the Hero’s Guild where you begin in your own training as a hero. This is the premise of the story and the rest of the plot involves you going out into the world to make a name for yourself as a hero, good or evil. The plot eventually brings you face to face with a force that you can use to save or destroy the world… and what you pick will change the course of history forever.

This brings us to the real defining part of the game, the choices you make impact the world and your character in a very dynamic way. There are four main attributes your character possesses: how good or evil you are, how reputable (famous/infamous) you are, how scary you look, and how attractive you are. As you go through the game many quests and side quests will be presented and many enemies will be slain. However, every single action you take impacts your character in some way. There is no one, except for the guild master, that isn’t able to be killed. This means you can literally walk into a village and murder every peasant and guard the same as you would walk into a bandit camp and kill all the bandits. Obviously one of these earns you good points, one of them earns you evil, and both would earn you reputation. There are also a number of different skills and spells you can get. Each character skill/spell is very unique and well designed. You can’t really max out every skill, spell, and ability in the game so you have to pick and chose what would be best for your character. There are no pre-set classes, so you can be a good mage with strong melee ability or an archer with thief abilities or any combination you’d like. This extraordinary level of flexibility is one of the things that make Fable worth playing.

The blessing and the curse of Fable, as I mentioned above, is that the game is short. Not kind of short, REALLY short. My first time playing I beat the game in 6 hours and 30 minutes. My second time was just over 5 hours. The problem is that the game ends just when I start thinking, “Wow, my character is really good and combat is fun now.” I beat the game once as an evil character and once as a good one and I can say that the evil side of things is a little less developed than the good side, but my opinion was that being evil is just more fun (That village of innocent people had it coming!). The blessing side of things is that you can beat Fable on your first rental, so purchasing the game certainly isn’t necessary. The replay value is somewhat good since you can try to beat the game as evil or good, but after that I didn’t have much ambition to pick it up again.

Overall, if they had found a way to make Fable about twice as long it would have been a masterpiece. As it is now, Fable is just a good short story for the weeks when you have too much going on to play an epic RPG.