I have such a love-hate relationship with this game.
You play the prince or princess of Albion, a fictional country in a fictional world that strongly resembles Earth circa the industrial revolution. After witnessing your brother the King commit terrifying acts against his subjects, you pledge to lead a revolt against him. But first you will need allies. Going around the world and forging alliances forms the basis of your adventure, but along the way you can also interact with villagers, buy real estate, fight monsters and do other exciting stuff. The game positions you as the most important person in its world and its your actions that will shape it and the lives of its people.
Exploring the world is easily the best part of the game. Albion is a gorgeous place, with beautiful scenery and cities that seem more alive than those in other games. NPC's are speaking all the time and wandering around as though the actually have things to do. They don't, of course, but the illusion that this is a real place is extremely well handled.
Additionally, the scripting is second-to-none and is aided and abetted by some first-rate voice work. The dialogue is frequently witty and charming and gives the fictional inhabitants of this world so much personality. There are so many amusing characters, including a chicken farmer who believes his chickens are plotting to overthrow society, a pair of ghosts who only want to get away from their strict ghost mother and party, a man who loves his garden gnomes so much that he even celebrates their birthdays and many more memorable charcaters. This is so charming and funny and is worth playing for this fact alone.
Combat, on the other hand, is disappointing. It uses essentially the same system as that of Fable II: each of your three types of attacks - melee, ranged and magic, are assigned to a button. You change the effects of the attack depending on various factors: how long you hold the button, whether you're also pushing the left analog stick, that sort of thing. Fable II managed to get a surprising amount of depth out of this. Fable III, on the other hand, uses a simpler, dumbed-down version of this system. There are fewer things it lets you do. No more shooting off enemy body parts or countering an foe's melee attack with one of your own. Magic, too, is diminished. There are only five types of spells and they are all direct-damage. All you do with your spells is shoot enemies. Apparently all this was done to make the game more accessible, but in a world where God of War, Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry are best-sellers, simplistic combat is more likely to turn players off than attract them. Despite this, fighting is still fun, thanks to to some flashy-looking attacks and interesting enemies. It's just too bad that it couldn't have been deeper.
Speaking of dumbing things down, the interaction system is insultingly shallow. I thought the interaction system was Fable II's weakest point. It was great when dealing with crowds; seeing people gather round and be entertained while you danced or played with your dog was very fun. But it fell apart when you were asked to treat the NPC's as individuals. Courting people was a joke: you simply pressed a button and the game would tell you what expressions or gifts the NPC would respond to. So, you just pull up your expressions wheel, pick the expressions they like, do them until the person loves you and you're set. Believe it or not, this could even lead to marriage. It felt meaningless.
Fable III somehow makes this even worse. Even though there are still dozens of expressions, you can no longer choose from them all at any time. No, you have two, three, maybe four options. The expressions have been moved to the face buttons and whenever you choose to interact with an NPC, your options come up. The A button is a polite or friendly option, Y is something rude and X is more threatening. If you want to make friends, press A. Every time. That's it. No need to figure out what the person will react to. Just press A. They will like you after two or three rounds of this. Even weirder, the game will randomly decide from the expressions you've unlocked which ones to give you for each encounter, which can create some bizarre situations. For instance, my character, a heterosexual male, can approach a heterosexual male NPC and begin an interaction where the "friendly" option is dance. So I, wanting to make friends with the guy, select this. The two characters then begin to cha-cha in the middle of the street. There's nothing wrong with two men dancing together, but when this is their first encounter, it's beyond weird. And when you do manage to make someone like enough that they want to befriend you, they tell you that they will be your friend if you do something for them. That's right, it's like back in kindergarten when your classmates would tell you that if you give them some of your M&M's they'll be your best friend. Romance is equally stupid. The NPC will tell you straight out that if you were to ask them out they would say yes. And if you agree to a date, they will tell you exactly where they want to go. Take your date there and they will tell you to kiss them. Do that (by simply pressing the A button) and they will immediately fall in love with you. If only real life were like this! Unparalleled interaction with the game world's inhabitants has always been one of the Fable's most-touted selling points, yet in practice it's so shallow and unsatisfying.
If that weren't enough, this game is buggy. Often during combat, my character would begin charging a magic attack or a flourish after I pressed the button for a ranged attack. There are frequent bouts of slow-down. Numerous times while interacting with an NPC, I would tap, rather than hold down, the button in question, not wanting to extend the expression, yet the game seemed to think I was still pressing the button. The glowing trail that is meant to lead you to your destination had mislead me on a few occasions. There was a patch on launch day which I installed before setting foot in Albion. If the game is this screwy after that, I'd hate to see what it was like before.
I sound like I hate this game, but I don't. It may not be a great game but it is a game that has great elements. It's brilliant script, top-notch voice acting and excellent world-building do so much to buoy an otherwise deeply flawed game. Unlike most sequels, its gameplay fails to build on what its predecessors did and instead it makes Fable III feel like a weak copy of those great games.