Mr. Potato Head

So far Fable is interesting enough, and plays like a clunky version of Fable 2 (which makes sense), but I'm a few hours in and there is no story really. Raiders attack your village take your mother and sister and "mortally wound" your father (betting he comes back) and then Corn shows up out of nowhere and takes you to hero camp. There are hints that the reason for the raid will tie into the main plot, but so far it's mostly just "go on random quests and get popular". In the second game the main lot is introduce in the first half hour, some jerk kills your sister and tries to off you and you seek revenge., it gets more complex as you go but the basis is there.

Also the design of the models are really ugly, this was made 3 years into the xbox release and the characters look worse than KotOR which was a year older, compared to Jade Empire this looks like a generation behind. They look like lumpy potato people with ventriloquist dummy mouths and huge deformed feet. The voice acting is not bad but it seems to have 1/4 of the variety of the second game. Aside from the named characters the only other voice actors seem to be generic man, generic woman, guard, and bandits.

Also the fighting system is really unintuitive. To toggle the sword and crossbow is the left and right bumpers, but to use magic it's holding down the right trigger and targeting is left trigger. So when combat starts I try to use magic first but hit the bumper instead and get out my crossbow, and then to aim the crossbow I have to press the left analogue stick, but then targeting takes me out of aiming and leaves me defenseless since I have to hit left bumper to get my sword out. Also the default lighting spell randomly chooses if it wants to auto advance to the next target or just fly in a random direction.

But it's still fun and at about 12 hours long I'm already about 1/4 through I think so I can put up with the ugly and awkward...