Discussion VideoGame / FableIII

Removing and/or editing some bad examples.

• Awesome, but Impractical: Most of the spell combos are this. However, combining the two most basic spells, Fireball and Shock, results in a spell that is in effect an "Instant Death" Radius for about 90% of the game's enemies.

What exactly is so impractical here? Spells are amazing and super easy. There's a charge-up time but you don't NEED to charge spells all the way to wreck everything. Also, there's no MP or cost for spells.

Also, "Instant Death" Radius is specifically about enemy attacks that stop you from getting close. This example does not relate to that trope.

• Big Bad: The hero's brother Logan, a hated king who has them chased out of the castle. Logan turns out to be a Disc-One Final Boss and he was preparing to counter the true big bad invading, a dark being called the Crawler.

So you list a trope, then halfway through your example you go into "oh, but actually, it's not this trope." What? I moved it to Disc-One Final Boss, with a rewrite.

• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Done by the Hero during the "Darkness Incarnate" quest.
  Sir Walter: Do you sometimes get the feeling someone's playing a game with you?
  Hero: All the time.

This is actually Leaning on the Fourth Wall. Breaking is when the characters straight up say "this is a video game." This line is certainly implying a fourth wall joke, but it's only implying, and it could be interpreted in other ways. I moved it to the proper trope.

• Five-Man Band: The Hero and their main allies:
  • The Hero: The Hero.
  • The Lancer: Walter and Ben.
  • The Smart Guy: Page.
  • The Big Guy: Sabine.
  • The Chick: Kalin.

The Five-Man Band is about teams. These characters are not a team. They don't hang out. In fact, there is never any point in the game where all of these characters fight together side by side as a team. Not even in the battle for Bowerstone, or the final confrontation against the Crawler. Everyone is off fighting on their own for both of those.

Also, aside from The Hero and Sabine, these are all seriously shoehorned in. Ben isn't nearly close enough of a relationship to be The Lancer. Page puts together a few plans, but so do all the other characters, and it's not as if she's some sort of Gadgeteer Genius or even a Guile Hero. And Kalin is definitely NOT the moral center, useless in combat, or any of the other things associated with The Chick.

• Broken Aesop: The game is presumably trying to make a point about the tradeoffs inherent in spending limited government money and resources on defense over social programs or vice versa. Since the economy is utterly broken and it's possible to very easily make a functionally unlimited amount of money by investing in real estate, however, the moral comes out looking more like "You can have your cake and eat it too as long as you put all your trust in philanthropic real estate barons." Uh, okay.
  • Although it is doubtful that someone would indeed take to heart a rather-nontrivial sociological/economic/geopolitical aesop from a game like Fable, of all things. PS:T or Deus Ex this is not.

JustifyingEdit.

• But Thou Must!: No matter how you feel about him, you can't do anything to Reaver and he'll always become your adviser.

But Thou Must! is when the player is given a choice, but only one of the options actually allows the game to proceed. This is just an example of Karma Houdini.

• Cruelty Is the Only Option: Have fun trying to scrounge up the funds needed to fight the Crawler on a good-guy playthrough.
  • Or just invest in real estate. Actually, this is extremely easy to do, almost frighteningly so. Sure, you'll need to work a bit more at the beginning (the minigames help), but once you've got a few houses and the money is rolling in, you buy more estate, and revenue increases exponentially. Rinse and repeat. It is perfectly possible to literally own every single building in the world in the endgame. This route is somewhat more tedious than the "evil" choices, but not overly so - the total increase in play time in order to raise enough money to begin the cycle of investment and, once you own enough property, to fill the kingdom's treasury, is something like 2-3 hours of real time. And while perhaps slightly more time-consuming, there is no actual challenge in terms of gameplay whatsoever.

First off, the "...is the Only Option" tropes are for when __ is actually the only option, not just the easiest one. Second, Natter.

• The Dark Side Will Make You Forget: Subverted with Logan. He never forgot why he was behaving like a tyrant. When you capture him, he has no Villainous Breakdown. He calmly surrenders quickly and tells you exactly why he did what he did.

That's not a subversion, it's just Not An Example.

• Downer Ending: If you choose to make life better, and drain the vault, better be ready after you win to see a lot of corpses littering the land. The land is beautiful, friendly... and dead. On the other hand, be a tyrant and have everyone alive - and hating your living guts because they now live in a Crapsack World that you created.
  • Of course, you can Take a Third Option and Earn Your Happy Ending with virtually all your citizens (minus soldiers who died in battle) surviving by keeping the land beautiful as well as working your butt off and investing smartly, coming up with the 8.5 million gold you need to keep the citizens alive and keep all your promises.

Okay, I worked the natter about the real estate into some of the other examples, but here it literally has nothing to do with the trope and just comes across as a Justifying Edit.

• Elaborate Equals Effective: Subverted as the hero weapons do gain different styles and decorations per level depending on your decorations^note albeit very limited. The hero weapons are very weak in comparison to the legendary weapons you gain along the journey^note not to mention, if you have xbox live, there is a DLC pack of just two weapons(a rifle and hammer) that rank within the top 5 in power. Due to this, the hero weapons become more for style points and self imposed challenges.

Again, this isn't a subversion, it's just Not An Example.

• Full-Circle Revolution: It's possible for you to be just as bad or even worse than Logan.

Why is this a spoiler? Everyone knows you become king/queen. Everyone knows the game has a Karma Meter. This is like spoiler tagging the fact that you can use a sword in the game.

• I Am a Humanitarian: Hobbes. And Lesley.

Hobbes aren't human, so eating humans isn't cannibalism for them. As for Lesley... just saying a name is a Zero-Context Example, and I don't know the details of his dialogue, so I'm commenting the example out as a ZCE.

• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: Lesley will only trust you if you kill a man for him.
  • Some of the heroic weapons power up from doing very cruel things, like killing spouses. Yes, you have to get married multiple times just to kill the person.

That second part is not this trope.

• Knight Templar:
  • Several, but perhaps most extremely Logan.
  • Turner and Milton of Traitor's Keep.

Commenting out as ZCE.

• Love at First Sight: If you're a good King/Queen and fulfill all of your promises and always take the good course of action, subjects in certain areas will automatically consider you a friend at the very least, with a few citizens actually being in love with you. However, the Love at First Sight bit kick in to an extreme degree in Aurora if you rebuild the city without turning the citizens into indentured workers and build the Outpost; the citizens will universally be either fully in love with you (if you are of the correct gender) to the point of agreeing to marriage after a single positive expression, or consider you their best friend (if you are not the gender they're attracted to), all without you doing a single thing for them personally. Meaning that you can marry every single person of compatible orientation in Aurora within ten seconds of meeting them. It's either heartwarming or creepy depending on how you look at it.
  • Truth in Television: Celebrities can achieve that in Real Life. Just look at The Beatles in the 1960's.

Natter. Whether or not it can happen in real life is irrelevant.

• Lovecraft Country:
  • Aurora tends to be this, what with ancient temples, a sense of absolute lifelessness, the small sparsely populated town that knows whats out there, and crawling with Eldritch Abominations.
  • Something to note is the scale and mystery of the location. The tone is set perfectly with the music and artwork telling one that they are no longer in the same world you were before, and while the locations are rather small and cramped it is eerily and justifiably empty. In one of the regions dungeons there is also a window which shows the true scale of the land, a massive plain that extends out forever with nothing but huge towers of stone extending from the terrain, begging the question of just what else besides the previous stated Eldritch Abominations were hiding beneath the sands. The place is also awash with strange and mind boggling set pieces despite being so barren; one such piece being a massive door in a canyon which leads nowhere and is never explained.
  • The devs expressed interest in developing DLC content for Aurora, though this ultimately didn't happen. The large door was possibly meant for a DLC that never materialized.

I took this to the Is This An Example? thread on the forums. I'll either leave it off or put it back depending on how that goes.

• Mission-Pack Sequel: For the first half of the game, Fable III is very much this in relation to Fable II, but once you become King/Queen it changes up a little.

Again, not a spoiler. Becoming king/queen is the entire point of the game.

• Take That Me: There's a quest where you enter a Dungeons & Dragons style game. You kill the villain in this game by hitting him once with a bane-sword. One of the Dungeon Masters says "What kind of rubbish game lets you kill the villain in one blow?" As a totally random example, Fable II did.

I have been informed that it is against site policy to spoiler tag tropes from a previous game in that game's sequel's page.

• What Measure Is A Civilian: Apparently each life can be saved for 1gp.

Not An Example. Also don't change the trope names.

• Writer on Board: It's hard not to read the writers' political biases into some of the less cartoony choices offered to the PC as ruler of Albion, especially when the game assigns "Good" and "Evil" values to those decisions. (Examples: Saving the environment is "good," despoiling it to fuel economic development is "evil." Legalizing alcohol is "good," instituting prohibition is "evil." Bailing out Albion's banks with government money is "good," letting them go bankrupt is "evil.")
  • It's more a function of the fact one option gets you money, such as taxation, and the other option drains money, such as lowering taxes.

Soooo, this is an objective trope, but I don't think there's necessarily any proof that this is the author making a political statement. I'll move it to the YMMV page as What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?, because that's an audience reaction, which is what this is.

Also Justifying Edit.