I have a very strange love for the Fable series. I didn’t own an Xbox when Fable 1 was released, I had never read any of the hype, and I had never seen anything on the game besides a single tiny thumbnail in an Electronics gaming monthly. So, when I came home from school, and received a phone call from a friend, who told me that Fable was here, my only response was, so what?

I should probably explain that my friend is like one of those dogs that when you say it’s name too many times, it shits itself. So, when I showed a complete lack of interest in a game I had never heard of, I was then treated, in a shrieking pre-pubescent voice, why I was wrong.

Fable was the best RPG ever made. You could interact with everyone in the game, who were all unique. There was hundreds upon hundreds of hours of exploring in the game, seemingly endless dungeons, castles, towns and the like to explore.  The choices you made, from stepping on a flower when you were a kid to slaying a king when you were an adult changed the game forever. You aged in real time, you could get married, have kids, raise the kids to be good, to be evil, take over towns, cut down trees and build a house, good god, he went on for literally a half hour. Determined to see a game that had finally dethroned TES III: Morrowind, I cleared the 20 minute walk to his house in 8 minutes, and ran in. What I saw was a definite improvement on graphics on Morrowind’s brown and grey tones. I sat down next to him and watched him play.

He brought me up on the basics. The main character’s sister needed a birthday present and you were the guy who needed to find the money to do so. I told my friend to leave the town and go exploring. He looked a bit embarrassed and told me he couldn’t. He reasoned that it was the tutorial, and that a child probably wouldn’t find the world of Albion very forgiving.

I shrugged in agreement, and watched him gather that money. He punched bullies, gave teddy bears to crying little girls, watched barrels(???) and reported indecent behavior to angry wives. My first thought that if this was going to be the usual amount of activites in towns, then it was exciting you could be spending dozens of hours in towns, completing quests and doing favours. Then, bandits attacked, and suddenly we were at the “heroes guild”. Then, the game began the tutorial. Through the hour my friend spent looking over everything and making sure he’d seen anything there was to offer in the guild, I wondered out loud why we were still doing tutorials an hour after we’d booted the game up. In any case, my friends character stepped out into the world, learned how to fart on people and killed a wasp queen. In this time, we learned that there was no free-roaming whatsoever, and in fact, you would be spending alot of time constrained on paths. My friend was furious. He took the game out of the system, and put it in its case, and jammed it onto his shelf angrily.

I went home, and spent a few hours doing Solstheim quests and snickering to myself about the “amazing” game that was supposed to render every other game null and void.

Christmas rolled around the next month, and I got an Xbox. I also didn’t get any games. I called up my friend and asked him if he could lend some from his extensive collection. I was handed Oddworld, Halo, and Fable.

Well, February came along and I was bored. A strange illness had me bedridden, and the inability to even get up to go to the bathroom was killing my brain. So, I reached over, and put Fable in the system.

I grinded through the tutorials as fast as possible, bored, and slowly become more and more enthralled. I mean sure, the game was painfully limited, but good god, the game was fun. I went around, getting haircuts and tattooing myself in every way possible, making my character the ugliest man in Albion. I farted near villagers. I gathered traders around me and laughed and loved the nervous titters they gave so appease my quickly becoming more corrupted form. I kicked a bandits head around a forest map for almost 45 minutes, laughing at the sheer brilliance of putting something like this in.

Over the course of a week, I fell in love in Fable. My character was a ten foot tall musclebound monster, with black smog pouring off him, massive horns, and a santa beard. I had a weird sense of humor when I was 16. Every shortcoming was well noted, and there were alot, but I couldn’t stop playing. As soon as I killed the final boss, I immediately started a new file, just for the sake of making a good character. When that finished, I went and did every single possible thing that could be done in Fable. The fight club. The sword in the stone. The demon doors. Ordered 5 bandits to follow me, and unleashed them in Oakvale, chuckling at the irony. I was an assassin, killing with his bow. I was a warlord, smashing open doors with a warhammer, and telling people the houses they lived in were mine. If they resisted(they always did) I killed them.  I snuck into stores and robbed people without shame. I stood in one spot for 45 minutes, charging up a bow because I heard that would kill a troll in one hit. Jesus, on one file, I grinded killing Hobbes in the cave for 60 hours, just for the spectacle of watching an 18 year old walk into the level up chamber, and walk out a 60 year old.

I pulled, at final count,(with the exception of that one file) around 70 hours out of Fable. When I finally was bored of the game, almost 6 months later, I was very certain my friend was very wrong. Sure, it was no Morrowind, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’d rarely played a game where I’d had as much fun as I did in Fable. Hell, even Morrowind made me so angry once I threw my keyboard across the screen.  I managed to just barely play through one more time for all of the Lost Chapters content, but even without it, I considered Fable to be the best game put on the Xbox that year. It was an imperfect, but just awesome game.  Maybe I’m a rarity or maybe I was bored enough to let things go, but if you look past the hype, the game can still be fun.

Give it another chance.

-Harvey Vdarski