Let's do this thoroughly, starting with technical aspects:
1. Graphics and animation. Bad, bad, bad. I can fish up an old PSX game and have better graphics. Sure, the old PSX game is pixellated and boxy, but at least characters don't have utterly strange proportions, as is the case here.
Animations fare even worse. If you want to credit it, you could say the characters run and act in more realistic way than in some contemporary games (looking at you, Neverwinter Nights 2), but that's as empty a claim as making a movie with better actors than Paris Hilton. The main character, for instance, seems to think he's a racing motorbike: he visibly leans whenever he's making a turn. Once again, we've taken 10 steps back since the PSX era, here!
2. Sound. The music is downright intrusive and annoying, but once you shut it off, the sound effects are tolerable and the voice-work actually pretty good. The game's strongest point, by far.
3. Story. Generic as it gets, with the bonus of starting in the most unengaging way possible. It all unfolds in an even more linear way than any Final Fantasy, but hopes to hide that fact behind a veneer of childish manichaneism: every action you do is either "good" or "evil" and earns you points towards those characteristics. Does a worldview get any more naïve than that?
4. Gameplay. The real meat of any game... and this is where one realises this game has been mislabelled. It's no RPG. It's a mash-up of all kinds of games: imagine the worst possible Devil May Cry clone and you've got something approaching the combat in Fable... but your imagination probably summoned up a better system than the Fable devs could achieve. Some poorly-made MGSing sequences are thrown in, there are a few customization choices to be made (of course, you want to pick "the right ones", not those you like), to try to adhere to the RPG label they've randomly applied to the resulting monstrosity, but when all is said and done, it's poor in all respects.
Frankly, it seems more attention has been payed to the emotes (ATTN 8 year olds: you can fart at people! Greatest game EVAR!) than the actual gameplay.
1. Graphics and animation. Bad, bad, bad. I can fish up an old PSX game and have better graphics. Sure, the old PSX game is pixellated and boxy, but at least characters don't have utterly strange proportions, as is the case here.
Animations fare even worse. If you want to credit it, you could say the characters run and act in more realistic way than in some contemporary games (looking at you, Neverwinter Nights 2), but that's as empty a claim as making a movie with better actors than Paris Hilton. The main character, for instance, seems to think he's a racing motorbike: he visibly leans whenever he's making a turn. Once again, we've taken 10 steps back since the PSX era, here!
2. Sound. The music is downright intrusive and annoying, but once you shut it off, the sound effects are tolerable and the voice-work actually pretty good. The game's strongest point, by far.
3. Story. Generic as it gets, with the bonus of starting in the most unengaging way possible. It all unfolds in an even more linear way than any Final Fantasy, but hopes to hide that fact behind a veneer of childish manichaneism: every action you do is either "good" or "evil" and earns you points towards those characteristics. Does a worldview get any more naïve than that?
4. Gameplay. The real meat of any game... and this is where one realises this game has been mislabelled. It's no RPG. It's a mash-up of all kinds of games: imagine the worst possible Devil May Cry clone and you've got something approaching the combat in Fable... but your imagination probably summoned up a better system than the Fable devs could achieve. Some poorly-made MGSing sequences are thrown in, there are a few customization choices to be made (of course, you want to pick "the right ones", not those you like), to try to adhere to the RPG label they've randomly applied to the resulting monstrosity, but when all is said and done, it's poor in all respects.
Frankly, it seems more attention has been payed to the emotes (ATTN 8 year olds: you can fart at people! Greatest game EVAR!) than the actual gameplay.