Review

Sound and Fury, signifying nothing.  Or nearly nothing, anyway.  It boggles the mind that this game consumed over 3360 man-months worth of development resources (70 developers, 4 years).  And that's likely a hugely conservative number, if the end-game credits are any indication.  Having spent the 20+ hours necessary to witness the overwhelming majority of what Fable has to offer, I can't help but think of that development investment and wonder, "um... where's the rest of the game?"  Like going to a 5-star restaurant and paying $80 for edible decorations masquerading as a meal. Surely, that many intelligent, dedicated, passionate developers spending that much time ought to have produced something more... fulfilling.

The issue isn't length, or amount of raw content, so don't mistake these complaints as the rantings of a fool who confuses quantity with quality.  The issue is the general scam being performed by the game, where shallow parlor tricks are being peddled as though they were a treatise on moral choice and the fundamental law of cause and effect.

Read the reviews on Fable and you'll be swimming in terms like "explore", "sandbox", "experiment".  Lies.  All of them.  Fable is more adventure game than RPG, and more action game than adventure game.  And all told, it's not really a particularly compelling action game.  So that pretty much tells you how it fares as an RPG.

Good

• Graphics.  Yes, of course.  That hardly even matters anymore, though, does it?  That's like lauding a new car for having power windows and a CD player.  Of course it has those things. 

Bad

• The tutorial portion doesn't really identify the terms of its completion (which is ironic in a game that otherwise can't shut up when it comes to telling you what you're supposed to be doing).  The problem is that while you're in the tutorial portion, you can't save the game.  I spent my first few hours in Fable thinking I had actually started playing Fable.  I was making progress, doing the things NPCs told me to do, and then decided to hang it up for the night, and selected the only 'save' option that was presented to me: "Hero Save", thinking that I was saving the game in the normal "I'm saving my game" sense.  Not so.  Apparently, the tutorial portion is implemented as an official quest of sorts, and, as I would eventually learn, you can't save your progress *during* a quest.  So it came as quite a shock to me when I fired up the game on the subsequent evening only to discover that nothing I had done had actually been recorded - I had to retread all of the menial early guild activities I had done the night before.  It didn't take terribly long, but that's not the point.  I would neither have loitered around in this 'tutorial' quest phase as long as I did, nor would I have quit without triggering its completion, if I'd had any idea that I couldn't in fact save my progress.
• Speaking of the tutorial...  I made the mistake of bringing an expectation into the game that went categorically unmet.  Namely that some non-trivial portion of it would consist of my avatar's trials and tribulations during the transition from boy to man - i.e. that a goodly portion of this whole process of orienting one's 'moral compass' would occur *while* my character was growing up and learning how to become a hero.  But no, apparently not.  As it happens, *poof* you're a full blown adult as soon as you're done with the tutorial.
  
• The 'class' system in the game is pretty lop-sided and poorly balanced.  In a recreation of the textbook RPG flaw, the game is severely tilted in favor of melee.  Yes, there are cool magic effects, and you'll get some decent mileage out of them, but clearly it's melee or the highway if you've any interest in efficiently dispatching your foes -- and you will as soon as you discover just how shallow the gameplay is.  And really the magic ends up just feeling like various ways to augment your melee effectiveness.  In other words, at best you end up a magic-using fighter, rather than a magician.  But the real disappointment is that the third leg in the class tree - the archer - is downright dysfunctional as a career choice.  The implementation is sound, in the sense that equipping and using your bow isn't mechanically frustrating.  The problem is that it's effectiveness simply doesn't scale sufficiently with the strength and quantity of the enemies.  Attempting to role-play an archer is simply not an option.  If you've an affinity for shooting the bow, you can certainly gin up excuses to use it, which is precisely what I did.  But I had a mind to commit fully to the archer discipline early in the game, only to quickly discover that the variables involved in the game's design just weren't compatible with that goal.
• The game world is really nothing but a collection of 'rooms' connected in a sparse graph.  And that's another big knock against its aspirations as sandbox RPG -- it exhibits virtually no sense of free-flowing environment.  You walk out of a dark doorway, spend a minute or two in a small, tightly-bordered area, and walk into another dark doorway.  The loading transitions aren't long, but the frequency alone makes them an irksome burr in the saddle of immersion.
  

Ugly

• As I hinted at in the introduction, the charade of 'choice' in the game is both frustrating and sad.  To be accurate, the charade involves both 'choice' and 'consequence'.  Fable gives you lots of opportunities for choice.  But not for any that really have any weight.  Here's an example of the puzzling juxtaposition of choice and inanity: You can court and marry anyone in a town in which you've purchased a house.  There are multitudes of women in each town (if women are in fact the target of your courtship efforts).  That's the choice.  However, essentially none of the women even have names, and there are scant few graphical templates for them.  That's the inanity.  So the 'choice' is revealed as nothing more than choosing which nameless clone you want to have walking around town with a wedding ring icon over their head.  How is this compelling?  And the game's signature feature -- having your avatar morph visually according to your 'good' or 'evil' rating -- turns out to just be a frivolous parlor trick.  There's no investment required, the choice is disposable.  Say you trend 'good' for awhile.  A change of clothes, a few minutes whacking inappropriate things, and a generous donation to the wrong associates and, voilà, you're as evil as evil gets.  The game is just a big switch that can be toggled again and again and again, according to any passing whim, and nothing truly consequential happens when you flip the switch -- apparently the mere act of flipping a switch is supposed to be satisfyingly consequential.  Of course, it is not.

Beautiful

• The combat.  It's not the panacea of real-time medieval fantasy combat, but it's well above and beyond what we've become accustomed to when it comes to anything that has 'RPG' on its resume.  But then, I'm a sucker for real-time melee (and archery) action, so I'm easily wooed.  I'm just pretty fed up with the industry's habit of assuming 'RPG combat' has to be defined by turns and stats and timers and virtual dice rolls.  You've given me this giant, skull-splitting, glowing ax - let *ME* swing the damn thing, rather than just watching it be swung.  The melee is clearly Fable's sweet spot, and it's pretty sweet.
  

Summary

Is Fable fun?  Sure.  I guess.  Sort of.  Ultimately, as always, it depends on you.  I've certainly had the displeasure of spending time with games that chaffed more quickly and more severely, even if they didn't necessarily end up feeling as shallow as Fable.  But of all the games I've played that touted themselves as RPGs, I don't think any of them felt so immediately and thoroughly fake.  Usually it takes a bit of malicious prodding to get behind the curtain of an RPG and expose the puppeteer, whereas in Fable, the fundamental failing is obvious and systemic.  One doesn't so much feel like they've caught the game cheating, or trying to fool you, but rather that it actually believes it's offering legitimate role-playing.  Fable seems convinced that the choices offered to players are in fact enough fuel to stoke the fire.  And that's the real tragedy of it.  It doesn't even know it's a fraud, and so even to the bitter end it's quite convinced it's done something unique, when in fact all it's done is waste your time with lies and sleight of hand.