From Metroid Prime to Gears and Dark Souls, the video game industry loves its trilogies. Three has always been the golden number, but it’s rare to see a trilogy where each game doesn’t just feel completely different, but looks completely different too. Fable is one such example, a trilogy of RPGs so absurdly ambitious that it was arguably a serious fault. At the time, this led to some divisive fan reactions, especially to Fable 3, which diverged the hardest from the original game’s “formula.” But looking back on the whole thing 15 years later, the Fable games feel almost quaint, a throwback to a time when games shot for the moon and landed in some wild places.
By far the most interesting thing about the Fable games is their setting in the fantasy world of Albion. While you control heroic characters, the entire trilogy is arguably more about Albion itself, how it grows and changes with your decisions, and how the power of authoritarians molds it. In each Fable game, you get to see a different era of Albion: the first game is set in its medieval age, the second in its Renaissance, and the third in the Industrial Revolution.
