Thursday, July 9, 2009

Fabling Around


The darker part of me wants to dislike Fable very much. Having invested about five hours in it, I have now witnessed for myself the fundamental shallowness of its social component, its strange brew of cliché (posing as "tradition") and irony, its underwhelming quest delivery, and so on. This relatively brief playtime was all I needed to sympathize with the arguments of the connoisseurs taxing the game of pompousness and self-indulgence, and I have yet to establish an especially deep bond with my avatar and the game world he is supposed to influence every step of the way. And yet, I feel tempted to brush-off these issues... at least for now.

I believe it had been a couple of years since I even approached an RPG, and for some reason I felt that Fable would be the perfect game to reintroduce me to this genre, should I ever feel the urge to. Luckily, it didn't take very long for the game to convince me that it was a most appropriate choice: while slightly off-putting at first, the game's sense of humor quickly sparked happy memories of Black & White, a game that I failed to grasp on a mechanical level but still enjoyed for its aesthetic qualities ; the interface and map layout felt inviting, and the rather drawn-out training segment somehow struck me as nonchalant and easy-going rather than straightforward and boring (although that may have been the result of a night without sleep). Even though I wasn't terribly impressed by its "back to basics" approach to storytelling, I believe that the casual manner in which the game introduces novel concepts into a familiar template compensates for this in a refreshing way. I even suspect, somewhat hazardously, that someone could come to this as his or her first experience of electronic role-playing and easily integrate its twists and quirks as though they were second nature, lacking the knowledge to weigh them against a long history of cultural productions. In short, even though it takes many hints from past successes, the lush-looking, smooth-handling Fable plays very much like its own beast ; even its title sounds like the origin of something.

For some reason I probably couldn't fully understand, my player character ended up with black hair and strange scars lining his face, looking somewhat bent on the evil side. I didn't mind this ; the game may not allow full control over the hero's basic appearance, but I accepted this as part of a playset that seemed partly randomized, and partly generated according to my first actions as a player. Besides, I didn't have a clear idea of the direction I wanted this character to go, intending instead to play along with what the game gave me. And play along I certainly did, which has led to a very pleasing experience so far.

In a nutshell, as I suppose is the case with many of the game's fans, what has me enjoying Fable considerably at this point is the room it allows for toying around with its various, essentially meaningless elements, and the quirky sense of life it imbues them with. Although it never exactly coheres into something that seems fully-formed and consistent, and the air of complacency surrounding the game would prevent anyone from taking it very seriously, the designers have still managed to instill their fantasy universe with a certain vision of the world we live in. Whichever way you choose to look at it, a hero character emitting a noisy fart in the middle of a town square (and a crowd reacting accordingly) says much more about life in society than any number of looping dialogues with perfect strangers ever could. It may not be especially gracious or relevant, but it has the merit to feel true to a certain internal logic, which consists of pitting broad gestures against broad archetypes, and watching the results. Fable, as far as I can tell, appears chock-full of little details that are fun to experiment with, and often have an impact on the growth of the player character, albeit in easily-reversible, ultimately futile ways. They might, of course, get old very quickly, but that moment has yet to come as far as I am concerned.

I have quickly mentioned the disappointing questing, and this is something I hope will get better in my upcoming hours with the game. Although the adventuring itself has a good flow and feel to it, with fun weapons and level designs that encourage forward movement (to a debilitating degree, some would probably say), picking up quests from the same centralized pool and teleporting all around Albion has made my journey seem weirdly schematic, and failed to capture my imagination very much. Apart from the specifics of the levelling system, which is pretty engaging, I have been much more interested in "toying around", as I have said, messing with the unsuspecting population's perception of my character while still trying to figure out some consistent principles to apply in this fantasy world. I am certain that this will only carry my interest with the game so far, but the will to discover more lands and more people, and perhaps more opportunities for happy experiments, shall keep me going at least for a while. And besides, I am told that the game is not very long, so the worst that can happen is that it loses momentum without overstaying its welcome.

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