Fable of Heroes I: Legendary Edition

Version played: v1.9

There are two disclaimers I feel like I need to make before starting this review.

First, this is not the kind of game I usually play, I’m not a big fan of the genre, and unlike most other games I’ve played in this site, I didn’t play this just for the fun factor (though I was open to it). I decided to play this game because there’s been a lot of discussion about it on the site, especially due to the fact that it was featured, and I think this discussion is pretty relevant to RMN in general because of numerous aspects I’ll try to deal with through the review.

Second, I may sound excessively harsh on this game because I’m judging it not as just another My RTP Adventure/Beginner’s Project (which is what this project actually is), but as a game that’s staying frontpaged on RMN for an entire month, and that’s been receiving praise from numerous respected(?) members of this site, including staff members. So, Dustsoft, please forgive me for the excessive harshness... I’m just trying to make a point.

Also... I didn’t finish the game. I played as far as the town of Sandeem.

So, let’s take a look at Fable of Heroes: Legendary Edition.

This is a very standard game in many ways. Graphics are almost entirely RTP. Music is part RTP, part rips from old RPGs. System is all default RM2K. Story is... well... I wouldn’t even call it traditional or cliché, because there’s barely any. There are just a few very minor excuses for you to explore and battle, usually “let’s save the world” or “let’s explore the world”.

The game starts with something of a cutscene showing a girl named Descia trying to escape a castle attack and eventually being captured by demons. Then you jump 700 years in the future, and now you control some generic guy named Alec (it’s Alex), who’s just turned 16 and needs to pick some flower to prove he’s become a man. You can roam around town, but there’s nothing to do except having some empty short dialogs and buying basic equipment. For some reason I don’t remember, I left town immediately after I took control of Alec, before exploring the town. Then a girl named Ariel appeared and said “I won’t let you go to the forest alone! I’ll come with you!”. No idea who she was, or why she was coming with me, but still she pledged her loyalty to me.

Just after that, they started: the BATTLES. Oh, the battles. You start by fighting monsters who deal a very harsh amount of damage to your party, but give you something from 1 to 3 XP each (yes, 1 XP), and you need like... 35 XP to level 2, 100 to level 3. So far, I was trying to be positive about this game, and nothing had really bothered me. But knowing I’d have to fight that many difficult battles for minimum leveling was my first huge turn-off. Luckily there was free healing in the first town (your bed), because I’d have to get back and heal after 4 or 5 battles tops. So, before I would even know anything about this game, I found myself grinding, going back and forth to town for healing, finding myself scared to roam too far from the city because I might get killed (which actually happened once at this point).

So let’s talk about them battles in Fable of Heroes.

First thing about them is that they are HARD. The creator of the game acknowledges that, and everybody who commented on this game said the same thing. I’m the type of gamer (not an uncommon type) that doesn’t like hard battles. In Fable of Heroes, you’ll find yourself grinding a loooooot of time until you feel like you make a decent matchup for random encounters. If you don’t level up enough (which usually consists of a few DOZEN random battles), you’ll surely die trying to explore dungeons or wild areas. Also, enemy difficulty greatly increases when you reach a harder area, so just when you start getting the feeling that your characters are somewhat strong, you find them to be proportionally even weaker than before, meaning you have to grind a whole lot more.

Second thing about battles in this game is that they are MANY. The encounter rate of this game is absurd and insane, to the point of having 3 encounters in under 10 steps. Not rarely, I had a random encounter after ONE STEP from the previous encounter. You can barely breathe without battling in this game. If you’re training, a high encounter rate is not a problem. But if you’re walking through a strangely designed dungeon with corridors that lead nowhere, it can be very frustrating... especially considering the slow walking speed (which wasn’t an issue for me because I edited that out).

Third thing about the battles in this game is that they are BORING. Before the wizard of your party joins, there’s nothing to do in battles except for mashing the attack button. After the wizard joins, sometimes it’s a good idea to cast spells that hit all enemies, but there really wasn’t a big variety of that, or any skills. There weren’t many status or buff skills (none worth using anyway, except sometimes on bosses), enemies seldom caused status conditions either, there was no clear element weakness/resistance strategies... So you’re basically just running through random encounters every 3 seconds, and desperately pressing space bar hoping it’ll be quick and painless, and you’ll often be let down on those hopes, because despite boring, battles are slow and merciless.

Now, I have to admit, there’s something fun and somewhat addicting about RPG battles, not matter how standard they are. I’ve played lots and lots of traditional RPGs back in the time, and I did enjoy walking in circles in the world map just to fight boring battles and level up. I liked leveling up, learning new skills, becoming more powerful, getting more money. That’s something that’s inherently rewarding to any RPG fan. So I did have my share of fun with this, although small. But that fun was quickly defeated by how fast new enemies would overpower my party, how frequent and repetitive battles were, and how slooooooooow leveling was.

Ok, so battles weren’t good... what’s left?

Graphics in this game are standard RTP with really bad mapping, lots of open spaces, weird object placing, etc. Click the Images tab of this gameprofile and see it for yourself.

Music is ok. Pretty RTPish, nothing outstanding, but nothing really annoying either.

The story... oh, the story. Silviera called it “minimalist writing”, but to me, it’s just childish. It’s like a story written by a 7 year old. Plot hooks are absurdly strange and pointless. After you finish the flower-catching quest at the beginning, some guy will give you your father’s sword (even though nothing else is said about your father), and give you no direction whatsoever... So you’ll just roam aimless on the world map until you find some tower that’s supposed to contain great treasure. At the bottom of the tower you’ll find a guy who wants to climb that tower too, and he joins your party, and so forth. It’s sound simple, but it’s worse than that. It’s just bizarre. It’s the kind of dialog I would expect from a joke/parody game:



Characters were all pretty much silent, and the minimal attempts for character development was disastrous. At some point you’re told to look for a girl who would tell you where to find the Dark Elf, because you need to take an item from him. You find the girl, she tells you where he is, and then she says “I’m coming with you, because I have a score to settle with the Dark Elf”. That’s a very poor take on character development, but still, it was consistent with the rest of the story. But later in the game, in one of the very few cutscenes of Fable of Heroes, that same girl tells you a secret: she didn’t really have a score to settle with the Dark Elf... she lied about that just so she could JOIN YOUR PARTY AND EXPLORE THE WORLD. That part of the game brutally murdered the very little character development the game had so far. It’s sad like that.

The pacing of this game is fight fight fight fight fight fight go to town, heal, save, buy items fight fight fight fight fight fight fight go to town and do it again.

Bottom line, the reason why think this game is so bad is that it seems like every game design aspect (story, dialogs, graphics, systems) were intentionally underdeveloped and left behind in the name of the focus on combat, but the combat in this game sucked big time.

I really don’t like writing reviews without finishing games. Except for the first 2 or 3 times I leveled up (like I said above), I didn’t enjoy one second of this game, so it was really hard to keep playing it for... 4 or 5 hours. After my annoyance bar reached its max, I decided I would just see what happened next and I cheated to raise all my characters to maximum level. I played like that for a little while... battles were easier now, but still way too frequent and annoying, so I got fed up and decided to quit this game, leaving this review with no rating.



Honestly, I don’t think the terms “cliché” or “old school” apply to this game. This is not a recreation of classic Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy or Shining Force genres, neither it is a homage. This game is what I would expect from a very young person who’s just got acquainted to RPGMaker and says “hey, I can make RPGs too!” “Hey, I can make a game like Dragon Quest”, and then he puts together a bunch of unimaginative common RPG segments together and seal it with a name like... “Fable of Heroes”. Ok, this is definitely not bad for a beginners project, and the game is indeed polished (it should be, it’s version 9), but this is not a game I would recommend to... anyone. Let alone recommending to an entire community, on the front page. If you want old school, go play old games, they’re by far better than any RM imitations. But this is an indie community, and this is 2010, pretty much everybody here has played tons of “old school games”. We have these amazing tools at our hands, and vast sources of inspirations from thousands of other games and movies and life. There’s so much we can do. I’m guessing Dustsoft hasn’t played that many (or any) indie games, because if he did, he would know what a waste of time it is to spend years on the production of a lesser version of outdated games. I’m sure he’ll grow out of that eventually (we’ve all been there), so I don’t think he should even be offended by my heavy words. But still, Fable of Heroes is the type of game you would expect from someone who isn’t trying to create anything new. There doesn’t seem to be a point in it, other than showing that he’s got the minimum knowledge to create something that has been done millions of times before... just like this and this.

I do believe some people can have fun playing this game (though I haven’t heard from many), but this game definitely should set NO standards in an indie game making community.