I know this one is more divisive (perhaps even mostly disliked?) among fans, but this is another case of biased childhood nostalgia, so apologies in advance.
Fable II remains my favourite video game of all time, and I certainly prefer it to III, but Fable III is the one most of my friends got into. I remember having my best friend come home with me after school every day to sit in front of my Xbox and play Fable III with a bowl of Doritos in front of us for hours, and after that we talked it up so much that more of our friend group bought it and played it with me over online multiplayer. We were all around 13-15 then, so maybe we were just easily pleased, but we all enjoyed it - I have a lot of fond memories of running through the quests with them, watching one of them complete the campaign in only a chicken head and boxer shorts, and sleeping with every friend I had so that my character ended up with, like, 40 STDs and everyone proceeding to call me out for it every time that ended up on someone else's 'friend stat comparisons' loading screens.
I must have completed this 20-something times in my lifetime, but I hadn't touched it since I was a teenager, so it was a really sentimental experience to go back to it recently with my fiancee and play it with her after we completed Fable 2. I could still remember so many of the secrets and hidden routes, even if I couldn't remember why - I'd often find myself pausing as we passed an area because I just knew there had been something there and hunting around until I found the inevitable chest or key my subconscious had remembered.
Fable in general has so much heart, and III is no exception. The humour, the characters, the setting, the creatures - it's all genuinely special, both in general and to me.
I can understand some of the criticisms, but I just... don't feel them.
The Sanctuary is totally unnecessary, sure, and a pause menu would've been so much more convenient - but I didn't really care about convenient, I cared about Cool Stuff, and that was The Sanctuary to me. I loved how it was woven into the story, I loved being able to see all my items on little cushions on pedestals, I loved being able to see my bigass pile of gold grow bigger and bigger the more I played, I loved my wall of trophies and my mannequins where I could see all of my outfits and how they'd look before I put them on.
The morality choices were black-and-white? Absolutely, but it was 2010, and I loved how those choices were weighed down with their own consequences. It's not like it was "do this good thing or do this bad thing" and nothing else - it was "you can uphold your promise to do this good thing and it will help your citizens in the short run, but it will cost the kingdom hundreds of thousands of gold and it is increasingly likely you will not have the resources and funds to protect them when the Big Bad comes to invade", versus "you can break your promise and do this bad thing and be seen as a tyrant in the short-term, but the money you get from it could be funnelled directly into protecting your people and keeping them alive". Yeah, with enough effort and time you can get around it by grinding money through endless minigames or meta-ing your way through the real estate system, but most people aren't going to do that - and the harsh reality of having to choose between protecting your people and making them happy was a really cool idea. There's nothing more brutal than going through your entire game doing good things, everyone loving you, being heralded as a great and kind ruler, getting through the final battle... and then running around the post-game to find your kingdom littered with corpses and empty, broken shops, because everyone was killed thanks to your lack of defenses.
I loved the fact that weapons' appearance changed as you levelled them up and grew your character - e.g. a sword growing longer or developing serrated edges, a hammer glowing with runes, a pistol's design increasingly patterned and fancy-looking as it became more powerful.
As in the prequel, I loved that your morality and your purity/corruption stats affected your character's appearance - a good and pure character having soft features and light, magical swirls sweeping across their skin, while an evil and corrupt character has sunken eyes, dark veins, and a harsher expression. I love that you can mix and match - have a good and corrupt character, or an evil character with full purity - as well as how other things can interact with those appearance changes, such as a good/pure Will-focused characters' magic lighting up their skin tattoos when they're casting. I even loved the angel/demon wing motifs depending on your goodness vs. evil in the latter half of the game, and the fact that they appear when you're charging more powerful attacks.
Golden breadcrumb trail is appreciated as always - I'm guessing a lot of players probably don't like that (I don't recall if you can turn it off, you probably can), but I'm someone who likes knowing exactly where I have to go for the plot, not least because that means I can exhaust every other route and area before going to The Plot-Important One to ensure I'm not missing any items or chests without having to worry about advancing the story or walking into a cutscene when I didn't mean to.
Shops were great, and I loved being able to browse the physical items rather than them just being words/images on a list, though I wish they sold more than a few items at a time and that there was more variety in what a shop could sell (not in the sense that a weapons shop should sell more than weapons, but that I'd like the weapons shop to sell a wider variety of them through the game rather than pretty much always selling the same swords, the same guns, etc).
The 0.5 off is mostly a catch-all for the petty little complaints I have, the most significant of which is the fact that for some reason this game, in a series known for being progressive and LGBT-friendly, forces a romantic interest on you at the beginning of the game/during the prologue depending on which protagonist gender you chose - a Prince will get Elise, and a Princess will get Elliot. To be fair, you can dodge the romantic overtones by choosing to hug them rather than kiss them, but it's very clear it's supposed to be romantic, especially with the content of the quest that can involve them later on in the game, so I wish they'd just let you select which you wanted. It's not as bad as it could have been because they're really only around for the prologue and only reappear (now involved with someone else) under a specific condition, and it's 2010, so whatever.
Loved the steampunk/industrial vibes, too. I'm a sucker for that, especially with magic woven into it.
Fable II and Sparrow still clear, but this one's still close to my heart. Also, I had a childhood crush on Ben Finn and Reaver, so there's that.
Favourite Male Character: Reaver or Ben
Favourite Female Character: Kalin
First Character I Liked: Reaver
Favourite Character Design: Reaver or Page
Favourite OST: Music Box, Kalin, Desert
Favourite Moment: The coronation is a pretty obvious big one, but I'll go with waking up in Aurora and exploring it for the first time
Least Favourite Character: The Crawler scared the shit out of me as a kid. Used to have to play through that sequence with the Darkness and Walter in the caves with all of my lights on.
Fable II remains my favourite video game of all time, and I certainly prefer it to III, but Fable III is the one most of my friends got into. I remember having my best friend come home with me after school every day to sit in front of my Xbox and play Fable III with a bowl of Doritos in front of us for hours, and after that we talked it up so much that more of our friend group bought it and played it with me over online multiplayer. We were all around 13-15 then, so maybe we were just easily pleased, but we all enjoyed it - I have a lot of fond memories of running through the quests with them, watching one of them complete the campaign in only a chicken head and boxer shorts, and sleeping with every friend I had so that my character ended up with, like, 40 STDs and everyone proceeding to call me out for it every time that ended up on someone else's 'friend stat comparisons' loading screens.
I must have completed this 20-something times in my lifetime, but I hadn't touched it since I was a teenager, so it was a really sentimental experience to go back to it recently with my fiancee and play it with her after we completed Fable 2. I could still remember so many of the secrets and hidden routes, even if I couldn't remember why - I'd often find myself pausing as we passed an area because I just knew there had been something there and hunting around until I found the inevitable chest or key my subconscious had remembered.
Fable in general has so much heart, and III is no exception. The humour, the characters, the setting, the creatures - it's all genuinely special, both in general and to me.
I can understand some of the criticisms, but I just... don't feel them.
The Sanctuary is totally unnecessary, sure, and a pause menu would've been so much more convenient - but I didn't really care about convenient, I cared about Cool Stuff, and that was The Sanctuary to me. I loved how it was woven into the story, I loved being able to see all my items on little cushions on pedestals, I loved being able to see my bigass pile of gold grow bigger and bigger the more I played, I loved my wall of trophies and my mannequins where I could see all of my outfits and how they'd look before I put them on.
The morality choices were black-and-white? Absolutely, but it was 2010, and I loved how those choices were weighed down with their own consequences. It's not like it was "do this good thing or do this bad thing" and nothing else - it was "you can uphold your promise to do this good thing and it will help your citizens in the short run, but it will cost the kingdom hundreds of thousands of gold and it is increasingly likely you will not have the resources and funds to protect them when the Big Bad comes to invade", versus "you can break your promise and do this bad thing and be seen as a tyrant in the short-term, but the money you get from it could be funnelled directly into protecting your people and keeping them alive". Yeah, with enough effort and time you can get around it by grinding money through endless minigames or meta-ing your way through the real estate system, but most people aren't going to do that - and the harsh reality of having to choose between protecting your people and making them happy was a really cool idea. There's nothing more brutal than going through your entire game doing good things, everyone loving you, being heralded as a great and kind ruler, getting through the final battle... and then running around the post-game to find your kingdom littered with corpses and empty, broken shops, because everyone was killed thanks to your lack of defenses.
I loved the fact that weapons' appearance changed as you levelled them up and grew your character - e.g. a sword growing longer or developing serrated edges, a hammer glowing with runes, a pistol's design increasingly patterned and fancy-looking as it became more powerful.
As in the prequel, I loved that your morality and your purity/corruption stats affected your character's appearance - a good and pure character having soft features and light, magical swirls sweeping across their skin, while an evil and corrupt character has sunken eyes, dark veins, and a harsher expression. I love that you can mix and match - have a good and corrupt character, or an evil character with full purity - as well as how other things can interact with those appearance changes, such as a good/pure Will-focused characters' magic lighting up their skin tattoos when they're casting. I even loved the angel/demon wing motifs depending on your goodness vs. evil in the latter half of the game, and the fact that they appear when you're charging more powerful attacks.
Golden breadcrumb trail is appreciated as always - I'm guessing a lot of players probably don't like that (I don't recall if you can turn it off, you probably can), but I'm someone who likes knowing exactly where I have to go for the plot, not least because that means I can exhaust every other route and area before going to The Plot-Important One to ensure I'm not missing any items or chests without having to worry about advancing the story or walking into a cutscene when I didn't mean to.
Shops were great, and I loved being able to browse the physical items rather than them just being words/images on a list, though I wish they sold more than a few items at a time and that there was more variety in what a shop could sell (not in the sense that a weapons shop should sell more than weapons, but that I'd like the weapons shop to sell a wider variety of them through the game rather than pretty much always selling the same swords, the same guns, etc).
The 0.5 off is mostly a catch-all for the petty little complaints I have, the most significant of which is the fact that for some reason this game, in a series known for being progressive and LGBT-friendly, forces a romantic interest on you at the beginning of the game/during the prologue depending on which protagonist gender you chose - a Prince will get Elise, and a Princess will get Elliot. To be fair, you can dodge the romantic overtones by choosing to hug them rather than kiss them, but it's very clear it's supposed to be romantic, especially with the content of the quest that can involve them later on in the game, so I wish they'd just let you select which you wanted. It's not as bad as it could have been because they're really only around for the prologue and only reappear (now involved with someone else) under a specific condition, and it's 2010, so whatever.
Loved the steampunk/industrial vibes, too. I'm a sucker for that, especially with magic woven into it.
Fable II and Sparrow still clear, but this one's still close to my heart. Also, I had a childhood crush on Ben Finn and Reaver, so there's that.
Favourite Male Character: Reaver or Ben
Favourite Female Character: Kalin
First Character I Liked: Reaver
Favourite Character Design: Reaver or Page
Favourite OST: Music Box, Kalin, Desert
Favourite Moment: The coronation is a pretty obvious big one, but I'll go with waking up in Aurora and exploring it for the first time
Least Favourite Character: The Crawler scared the shit out of me as a kid. Used to have to play through that sequence with the Darkness and Walter in the caves with all of my lights on.