Your story begins as a young boy living in an idyllic town. Just after you’ve had a chance to run around and meet a few people, a band of marauders slaughter everyone in their path. You are saved by a mysterious stranger, who brings your orphaned character to the Hero’s Guild of Albion. This is where you’ll spend your childhood training in combat and magic, and it also serves as a home base throughout your adventures.

The childhood years in Fable, as in life, leave little for you to control. You’ll make a few decisions, but for the most part the beginning of the game is training for your character’s future as an adventurer and yours as a player – the basic controls and game concepts. Once you graduate, you’ll be able choose the quests that tickle your fancy. There are some that are optional, and some that are necessary for the story to progress.

Your quests range from simple fetch or protect missions to more complicated and interesting. Generally speaking, your quests involve typical medieval fantasy stuff – dungeons, monsters and assorted bad guys. Most of them are pretty easy but a few challenge you to figure out your opponents, who use a fair amount of strategy.

Even though you don’t have to be on a quest to be doing something constructive and there are some options when it comes to quests, Fable is not a free-roaming world. The story is fairly linear, with missions leading into one another. But there are enough side quests and miscellaneous interactions available that it doesn’t have to feel like you’re just along for the ride if you don’t want it to.

Leveling up doesn’t happen automatically, you’ll accumulate points in strength, will, skill and a “general” pool. When you want to improve, you’ll have to go back to the guild and spend those points in areas to improve your fighting, magic and other skills, respectively, and each category breaks down into many sub-categories. Strength covers your close combat abilities, will represents magical power and skill includes ranged attacks, sneakiness and speed, among others. The system in Fable never forces you into a certain class of character, so you’re able to turn him into any combination of abilities that you like. The points in your general pool will fill up the most quickly and can be spent on anything. For the other categories, you’ll earn points based on how often you use those skills. So if you use your sword most of the time, you’ll accumulate most of your points in Strength.

Fable probably stands most out in the options it provides the player for communicating with the game world. Instead of just selecting dialogue options, you have a certain number of expressions mapped to your controller, for example. You can flirt, belch and laugh at anyone you come across. You can also alter your appearance as you go, including your hair and getting tattoos. If you eat too much of certain foods, you’ll get fat. As time goes on, you’ll age. Many of the choices you make affect your appearance – for good or ill. Your appearance and your other choices affect how people perceive you, so if you run around town farting at everyone (yes, that’s an option), you won’t impress the ladies. There are many expressions to choose from and it won’t take long to map your favorites (insults, vulgar gestures, etc.) to convenient buttons. Fable mixes a fun sense of humor with a fairly serious story: You could create an evil, hunchbacked marauder who spends his spare time belching at peasants if that’s what you want to do.

You can also work proactively at increasing your fame. Certain quests give you trophies for completing them and you can show those trophies to townspeople who will be quite impressed. Boasting is another way to impress the people of Albion. When you accept a quest, you can go to a special part of the town, called the “Boasting Platform,” appropriately enough, and declare that you’ll make the quest even harder by agreeing to complete it with certain added conditions. You can tell everyone you’ll do it naked, for example, and earn extra money. Fulfilling any boast also increases your renown (Fable’s term for fame). Fortunately, there are many boasts that don’t include nudity, like “Without A Scratch,” which challenges you to complete the mission without being hurt, or another in which you agree to use no weapons – only your fists. Boasting is a great, optional way of making missions harder.

At every step, you’ll have the freedom to be as bad or as good as you wanna be. You can run around town lopping the heads off of farmers if you choose, but there are also many more interesting, subtle ways to be your own man. For some quests, you can choose which side to be on – those defending a farm or those attacking it, for example.

Whichever you choose, people will hear about it. News travels fast in Albion and townspeople will either grow enamored or fearful of you pretty quickly. Slaughtering innocents will bring the attention of guards and some very hefty fines if you’re caught. If you’ve gone far down the dark path and want a second chance, you can spend a nice big sack of gold on a new shot at morality. And after a few days, murder victims will come back to repopulate the town and the guards will forget your transgressions. The end result is that your actions don’t really affect your character or the game world over the long haul if you decide to change your mind about what kind of character you’ve become.

To make traveling less of a chore, you’ll be using a teleporting system with portals scattered across Albion. These become an absolute necessity the farther you go, because the load times in Fable are one of it’s biggest shortcomings. Some areas are just too short, causing frequent load screens, and others just take forever to load. There’s no reason for such long waits between action on an Xbox game – one can only imagine how slow this game would be on a system without a hard disk.

One other gripe that’s minor in comparison involves loot: Enemies should drop more of it. It’s rare you’ll find anything of value on a fallen foe, but there are many, many specialized traders wandering about Albion. This seems to be a design choice intended to encourage deeper interaction among characters. Instead of just visiting traders to unload old equipment and buy potions, they are your primary method of getting anything. If you pay close attention to the varying values of goods among traders, you can also make your inventory more profitable than usual. Trading is a legitimate way to make money in Fable if you’re interested, as is owning homes and offering them for rent.

Along the way, you’ll be treated to some of the best graphical presentations in an adventure game. The world of Fable is colorful, detailed and home to an artistic style perfectly suited to the genre. Your character looks and feels like he’s part of an old-fashioned fairy tale, without making the game feel or look as though it’s made for children. There’s not much exploration of the wilderness, with well-worn paths being the norm, but every area has obviously been crafted with care and no two buildings or towns repeat their structure or background, as so many other games do Likewise, no two characters look or sound a like, and the voice acting and script rings true, with hardly any exceptions. Helping to create the atmosphere in Fable is a score composed by Danny Elfman, whose name you may have seen in the credits for movies like Batman and Men In Black.

An excellent presentation, interesting setting, unique identity and solid game play make Fable an easy game to recommend. Fable does not redefine the role-playing game experience, but it does add several new ideas that make the game more engaging, interesting and rewarding. There’s no doubt that many of the concepts in this game will be mimicked by others in the future, and that bodes well for everyone. The innovative parts of Fable surround what is a very solid, if traditional, role-playing game, and the whole package comes together exceptionally well.