Fable 2 Was the Closest Xbox Ever Got to Having Its Own Zelda-Like Action-Adventure

This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.

Fable had to fight an uphill battle in the minds of gamers before the original game even shipped for the first Xbox. If you don't know the story, decorated game designer Peter Molyneux — from whose mind Fable first emerged — had promised an RPG that was so alive that players could plant an acorn seed, and by the end of the game it would have grown into a full acorn tree. That never happened, of course, and while I never held Molyneux's big dreams against him, I completely understood anyone who felt shortchanged by the Fable they ultimately got.

It was a great game, in the end, but it could never live up to Molyneux's design document. I remember reviewing it for Official Xbox Magazine at the time and delighting in the absolute evil I could wreak upon the world, watching my hero's skin turn pale and horns grow out of my head in the process. Of course, I could've gone the other way and been a saintly do-gooder who'd manifest a literal halo above my hero's head. It certainly made for a more replayable experience.

The first Fable got a lot right, in the end, but it was Fable 2 on the Xbox 360 that, for me, came closest to living up to the franchise's great potential. I reviewed it, too, and gave it a 9.5 out of 10 on OXM's then-20-point scale (back when I gave Splinter Cell Chaos Theory a 9.9 out of 10, we were on a 100-point scale). Fable 2 is the one I think about and miss — Fable 3 fast-forwarded the timeline by 500 years into a more steampunk era, and to me it never quite had the same charm the first two games did.

Fable 2 leveraged the Xbox 360's higher horsepower to broaden the scale and, certainly, bring snazzier graphics into the HD Era to boot. It leveled up all of the British charm and humor the original established, and expanded our Albion adventures too. More Demon Doors, more towns, more monsters, more everything.

And the key to all of it was your canine companion. Every hero had a furry, four-legged sidekick, and he or she accompanied you through thick and thin. Your dog could alert you to nearby treasure, attack enemies, and more. He couldn't be killed (thank goodness), but if he got hurt, you really felt it, you know? Or at least, I did. I got BIG MAD if my dog got injured, and it only added to my connection to my hero. I'd remained evil, just as I had in the first game, but I made one exception to my badness. I treated my dog like the good boy he very much was, everyone else be damned.

All of it — the charm, the humor, the action, the adventure, the puzzles, the dog, and the multiple-ending story — combined to create an absolutely brilliant RPG-lite that was not only the peak of the series so far (though as I've written already , I have extremely high hopes for Playground's upcoming reboot, based on both the studio's impeccable track record as well as, more concretely, everything we've seen of the new Fable for ourselves to date), but arguably the closest that Xbox ever got to having its own exclusive Zelda-like franchise. Perhaps the new Fable can get there (though it's trickier to do when it ships on PS5 as well, admittedly), and we'll find out come February.

But Fable 2 did nearly everything right, and it remains one of my favorite Xbox games of all-time.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked , and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch . He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan .