Fable Anniversary (2014)

I've been thoroughly enjoying my time with this so far, and have about 10 hours invested. I thought it was going to be a lot more difficult to go back and play this one after only having played 2/3, but with the option to use the control scheme from 2/3, the gameplay in general isn't too terribly different from what I'm used to. My main "complaint," if you can even call it that, is just the awkwardness of the D-pad and using expressions from there. (Fable 2 really did it best with the wheel, man.)

The magic "cycling" isn't as bad as I was expecting when I saw how it worked, so that's a plus. I always favor bows and magic in Fable (partially because I never wanted to look bulky, haha), so I was a little worried that magic would be frustrating or awkward to change. I haven't tried cycling through the spells while in battle, though, so that could still be an issue.

Super impressed by how good this game looks. Fable environments have always been done quite well in my opinion, but this remaster is 8 years old at this point and I was expecting some ugliness/roughness to the textures or something. Fable 3 was always kind of laggy; I have to admit that no matter how much I love it. This has been running incredibly smoothly, so that's been nice.

I don't think I ever felt like I was missing much lore-wise by starting with Fable 2. Like, I knew there were connections and there was more history to the Guild than you're really aware of in 2 (and I generally would never just pick up the second game in a series if they had deeper story connections), but it wasn't like picking up the second book in a series. I've liked the experience of being a part of the Guild, rather than hearing about what it "used to be."

I also really, really wanted to play The Journey back when it came out, and we did have a Kinect, but my brother moved out with it before The Journey released, so I never got to play it. (There's still a giant display poster for the game from Walmart in my parents' front room that used to be my brother's room and then my hobby room.) I found a Kinect from GameStop and ordered The Journey and an adapter, all of which was pretty inexpensive and will be arriving between today and tomorrow, so I'm super excited for that!

So, I picked this up as well when I got Ori on sale on Steam last week.

I played (the shit out of) and loved Fable II and III, but I never did play the first one. I'm probably actually gonna get the game code for III off Amazon and play it on PC because I haven't touched my 360 in years and it's likely a goner.

So far, it's mostly the good ol' Fable that I'm used to, as far as the combat style, interacting with people, the humor, etc. But there are some things that bother me, specifically with the controls. I'm not a fan of the cycle-through-all-spells-on-one-button thing, especially when I'm in the middle of a fight. I don't remember exactly how the controls for magic were in II and III because it's been a few years, but I know I didn't find it tedious like this.

I always go ranged weapons/magic. A lot of that is aesthetic, in the magic "tattoos" and height, and not really liking the bulk of a MELEE BRO.