Fable: The Lost Chapters (2005)

This is a very interesting game with a high concept of Morality and Reputation being the driving force of the player character.

Basically all your actions are evaluated and increase your Renown and increase/decrease your morale based on what you did, positive or negative.

There's no character customization and the options for changing your appearance are very limited.

You have to take the game's age into consideration, so it's pretty impressive that all characters in the world are reacting to you depending on your renown and morality, they will cheer for you if you have enough renown and at its maximum level people applaud you and fall in love with you at first sight.

Speaking of romance, there's an option to marry a character, however it feels very unimportant and lacks the impact of the most important choice a person can do in their life. Just flirt with and gift your object of passion enough jewelry and they'll allow you to propose. A smart commentary on modern relationships? No, just the limitations of the concept. It's very hard to create impactful relationships in a video game, let alone on the original Xbox, where there's a limit on how much depth characters can have. But at that point why even include it? Yes you can marry ANYONE but also EVERY character is the same and has no traits or personality. So why bother?

Then you have general character interaction. The game was targeted at a more casual audience so unlike in, say, TES, you can't properly speak with others, just emote. Flirt, joke, shout angrily, etc. Again, it fits the concept, your character can interact with others, and most of all, it's emotional and expressive, not just choosing what to say in a dialog box. But to what end? None. You can just do these things but you gain absolutely nothing from it.

Are you seeing a pattern here? The game, desperately trying to fit itself into the, granted, very complex and impressive concept of an RPG with morality, renown, relationships, reputation fails to really flesh these features out, only offering surface-level mechanics with no impact.

Yes, games are about wish fulfillment, not everything has to tie into the game's core mechanics. For example Counter-Strike GO has customization despite the fact that it's useless. But here we have a game that is quite literally based around superfluous and meaningless mechanics. What the lead designer Mr. Molyneux and the Lionsgate team needed to do back at the drawing board was to ask themselves if they could actually fulfill the concept.

Anyway this is an action game where you can use archery, magic and swordfighting. The game is pretty easy and i never felt like there's a depth to the combat or anything like that. Also you don't need to specialize in anything, just be a jack of all trades and kill everyone.

Throughout the story you get to make a few decisions that impact the plot one way or another so at least they checked that box. Still, roleplaying as a proper evil character isn't possible, though not many have actually got that right, so I won't hold that against the game.

And also someone during the development probably mentioned how it would be cool if the character could age. So as the story progresses, you age. And that's it. Nothing outside of your character's appearance changes! Not even your partner's look. Why even include this? Oh yeah, because it's "cool" and high concept.

So to sum it all up, this is certainly an interesting title and I respect that the devs were trying to create a polished casual-frienldy immersive RPG without the number-crunching hardcoreness of Morrowind but with being able to express yourself, have relationships, friendships, etc. Let me know if the sequels actually got it right if you played them.