Fable: The Lost Chapters
9/10. Loved it. My only complaints were that it's relatively short (I beat it in ~20 hours, doing practically everything there is to do eg silver keys and demon doors) and that the game world is fairly small and als othat it consists of a billion tiny maps.
That said, I still absolutely the play-experience. The story wasn't revolutionary by any means, but it was intriguiging and engrossing nonetheless. Despite the shortness of the game it still felt pretty epic, due in part to the awesome fact that the character's aging (I was 65 by the time I beat it and I was looking pretty haggard). It felt like I was playing Beowulf, in a way....even the transition from Fable to the TLC felt like Beowulf's reign of peace or whatever after slewing Grendel's mother till the dragon comes and all that when he's an old man and he takes up arms once again. While aging was cool, I think it lacked the depth it could have had, such as your age affecting your stats or ability or NPC reactions, and also that other characters did not age at all in the game (well, I suppose you must forgive Jack of Blades). But the other cool stuff added, like the NPC-reactions and romance/marrying, were all implemented perfectly, in my opinion, and were a lot of fun.
The art direction was beautiful and befitting the off-kilter, quirky atmosphere of the game (really refreshing given it's otherwise cliched fantasy-setting). When I play a fantasy RPG I like seeing hugeness--weapons, armor, villains, breasts--and Fable delivered on all fronts. The locales were nice and varied (Chapel of Skorm, Grey House, Headman's Hill and Necropolis were all sweet), but a lot of the silver quests were kind of repetitive, what with half being escort quests.
By the end of the game I had more experience than I knew what to do with, but that was certainly alright as I like to be able mow down mountains by the end of any RPG. Speaking of which, the combat was a whole lot of fun and a great implementation of non-strict RPGing. I especially loved how archery was implemented. I don't think you could ever hope to have a character based solely on archery or Will, not as effectively as you could a brute force fighter, but for my particular character the balance between the three basic combat mechanics was nearly perfect if not a little bit in melee's favor.
Anyways, I'm gushing now. So I beat the game and I loved it. Not a perfect implementation of some of the brilliant and cool ideas behind it, but I think wholeheartedly that they'll greatly improve all of this in Fable 2 and I'm now greatly anticipating the sequel. I've heard the sequel supposedly has guns,as it takes place 500 years or so after the first game....wild.
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