The Guild Master. "Try to get your combat multiplier even higher!" "Your health is low. Do you have any potions? Or food?" "Check the guild for more quests."
Parodied in one scene in The Lost Chapters where Jack of Blades starts mocking these things. "Hero, there is an important quest card waiting for you at the bottom of a slime pit!"
Your Combat multiplier is atrocious!
It's to the point where a loading screen hint in the sequel stated that it was rumoured the Guild Master died with the words "Your Health Is Low" carved into his forehead.
Whisper and summoned monsters do very low damage and tend to Kill Steal, keeping you from earning any experience from that monster. Though at least the summon might upgrade to a more powerful monster.
If using Physical Shield, there is absolutely no reason to wear anything but plate armor, except for aesthetic reasonsnote Without Physical Shield, plate armor becomes a liability in the end game due to being relatively weak against magic and taking more damage from lightning attacks. In which case, Will User's Robe is far better.
Even if playing a purely mage build, you'll only need three spells in the game: Physical Shield, Enflame, and Fireball. Though Magic Knight builds benefit from others like Assassin's Rush and Slow Time.
Complete Monster: Jack of Blades arrived in Albion millennia ago to lay waste to humanity for refusing to bow to him and his cohorts. Surviving the destruction of his physical body by placing his soul in a mask and possessing whomever wears it, Jack goes on to spread turmoil over the years. Attacking the village of Oakvale, Jack personally murders the young Hero of Oakvale's father, gouges out the eyes of his sister and imprisons his mother to torture her for decades. Continuing to cause destruction throughout the Hero's life, Jack eventually attacks all of Albion with his forces so he can activate the powerful Sword of Aeons by sacrificing a member of the Hero's bloodline, Jack kills the Hero's mother to claim the blade before facing him. Planning to bathe the entire world in blood, Jack returns in The Lost Chapters, attempting to corrupt the Hero into murdering his own allies before trying to possess him with his mask.
Balverines are only weak to silver, can stunlock you with quick claw swipes and leap at you from a distance. Worst of all, they always travel in packs. They tend to become Goddamned Bats as you level up and get better weapons.
Minions are Master Swordsmen who can stunlock you with their combos while blocking most of your physical attacks. Like Balverines, they’re never alone.
A quest available after the Bandit Seeress quest tasks you with killing an assassin to avenge a guard's dead brother, except it turns out the assassin is the guard's brother and the guard wants him dead so he'll inherit their mother's fortune. The assassin offers to pay double to kill his brother instead, though he does note he's rather upset his brother wants him dead. Accepting the assassin's offer earns evil points while completing the quest to kill him earns good points.
Killing your wife earns you 60 evil points. Divorcing her earns 600!
Difficulty Spike: The Trader Escort quest is the first real challenge of the game. Being a far lengthier quest, with more powerful enemies, and an Escort Mission on top of that.
Evil Is Cool: Jack of Blades is probably one of the most popular characters in the series.
Franchise Original Sin: The first Fable had plenty of advertised and promised features that never materialized in the finished product. Audiences didn't mind, because Fable was still an impressive technical achievement and an interesting new game of its kind. It was only as the years rolled on, with ever more elaborate promises leading into ever more disappointing games, that audiences turned on the franchise and the creator.
Using the Hero Save in certain situations will make the game way too easy. The makers seem to have realized this, and your game will crash if Hero Save is used too many times in the PC version, and is removed entirely in Anniversary.
It is very easy to acquire a lot of experience quickly by getting a high combat multiplier then drinking the Ages of Skill/Will/Strength potions. To a lesser extent you can also do something similar by getting a high combat multiplier then eating a lot of meat/carrots/fish, or casting certain spells over and over very quickly (Summon is good for this).
The shopkeepers in Fable and TLC have a dynamic pricing mechanism: for each item, there is a number that they prefer to have in stock, and they will set the buy and sell prices up when they are short and down with they have excess. Unfortunately for them, they only update the price after each full transaction ... so if you buy out the entire stock of an item at fire-sale prices, you can then immediately sell your entire inventory of the same item to the same shopkeeper at deep-shortage prices. With sufficient seed money, especially with high-ticket items like perfume, you can earn tens of thousands of gold pieces in minutes by this method without even changing shops.
By getting merchants to follow them out of their stores and getting them stuck where they can't move players can safely rob their stores without getting caught. Getting expensive items like Resurrection Phial, and pieces of plate armor that are on display very early.
Certain spells drift into Game Breaker territory:
As mentioned on the main page under Boring, but Practical, Physical Shield makes you take no damage so long as you have Will to power it. That alone makes it moderately useful, but it also knocks back enemies who hit you, prevents you from getting knocked back when hit, and protects your combat multiplier (resulting in more experience gained).
Berserk + Multi-Strike. Individually these are both useful spells, but together they let you do a lot of un-blockable damage very quickly.
Enflame, especially at higher ranks, does a lot of damage in a wide area and also knocks the enemies down.
Battle Charge makes the player character invincible for it's entire animation and Charges can be strung together with repeated casting to keep the player invincible, while also doing some damage.
Slow Time, especially at higher ranks, lasts for a long time and slows the enemies to a crawl.
Genius Bonus: Hobbes are probably named for Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher famous for describing human life as "nasty, brutish, and short," which is an apt description of the creatures.
Goddamned Bats: Undead. While they are slow and easy to kill, they come in large groups and tend to infinitely respawn, and if you try to run away, they'll constantly pop out the ground in front of you, damaging you as they come up.
Nymphs spend most of their time rapidly flying around while invincible which makes them hard to keep track of when not locked-onto. If the player does lock on to a Nymph the speed and odd angles at which they fly can make it hard to keep track of other enemies and can even be Nausea Fuel due to how fast the player's perspective is moving around. The only times they become vulnerable is when shooting Area of Effect projectiles at the player or when using their Mook Maker summon ability. Scoring a melee kill on nymphs is especially annoying as normally they can only be hit by melee attacks while they're summoning minions.
Goddamned Boss: The Knothole Glade Chieftain in the Fist Fighters Tournament needs to be hit between 20-50 times depending on your Strength stats while he can take you down in as little as 2 hits. If you’re particularly unlucky, he’ll start swinging at you immediately after the cutscene ends. Save before attempting.
Good Bad Bugs: The original game had a few. Most of them were patched in The Lost Chapters or the Anniversary Edition.
Abusing the Hero Save function, as described under Game Breaker.
If you use the Berserk spell then save and reload your game while the spell is still active, your character would stay in the huge, buffed-out form (but wouldn't do extra damage) until you used the spell again.
If you mash fast enough, you can get a second upgrade to a skill. This works even if you shouldn't be able to get the skill at the point you're at, or if you don't have enough experience. This works in Anniversary, too!
If you have access to Summon and Assassin Rush, you can clip under the arena you fight Jack of Blades in and get the Sword of Aeons almost immediately after graduating at the beginning of the game. Like the above, this too works in Anniversary. Though tragically, you lose it if you take the good choice at the end of the base game.
It's Easy, So It Sucks!!: Fable originally had only one difficulty setting and it was practically impossible to get a 'game over' due to easy availability of instant healing items, the Resurrection Phials, as well as Physical Shield which is essentially invincibility so long as the player has some cheap and abundant Mana potions. Eventually a 'Heroic' difficulty mode was added as a response to this criticism. Selecting the Heroic option for a new game would make enemies more damaging, more abundant, and remove Resurrection Phials.
Moral Event Horizon: If you put on Jack of Blades's Mask after beating him in the final battle of The Lost Chapters, your karma meter will be permanently locked to pure evil.
Scrappy Mechanic: Small one, but you age physically as you level up. As a consequence, if you power up too fast too early, you're going to be a geezer and aging yourself down isn't a trivial matter. It can potentially cause a rift in the story in which you end up being older than your sister you meet up with again or even your own mother!
Stock Footage Failure: The Guild Master will let you know when your health or will energy is low even when Jack Of Blades is burning down the Guild, and The Guild Master himself is lying wounded and barely able to speak. In the expansion, he can keep informing you of the blazingly obvious even when he is dead.
The Guildmaster for giving no useful information but constantly reminding you that your health is low or telling you to get your combat multiplier higher.
Thunder, for being a Commander Contrarian and more or less the only character in the game to play Dude, Where's My Respect? completely straight. Basically, he just hates your guts and will let you know no matter what. It's justified with an evil hero, who has the option to completely ruin the man's life, but he will be a dick even to a good hero who's only ever done right by him.
Take That, Scrappy!: You can completely humiliate Thunder, if you so choose. Namely: you can kill his sister (who has the same condescending attitude), steal his wife, humiliate him in a fight, and then in the Lost Chapters, you have the choice between killing him for good measure or letting him live with his failures.
Twinblade is particularly difficult for mage builds as he only takes damage if attacked from behind when his swords are planted in the ground. While archers can get off at least one full powered shot and melee builds can get a few swings in, most mages will only get a single spell off before he's no longer vulnerable. That he's also resistant to most spells just makes things worse.
For half his fight, Maze is a nightmare for archers. He automatically deflects arrows while within a given range and both the start and end of the fight has you fight him well within said range, forcing you to run away far enough to actually be able to shoot him or rely on subpar melee attacks or spells. That Maze has a tendency to run into melee range to cast Enflame only makes it more difficult.
Even worse for archers is the swarm of Screamers they have to fight when obtaining their mother's soul to fight Jack of Blades' new form. Screamers can bypass both armor and Physical Shield to drain your life directly and unlike against Maze, where you only fought one at a time, this time you face a dozen or more at once with more spawning as you kill them. While Screamers are weak to every kind of attack, archery specializes in taking down one or two strong enemies rather than facing a Zerg Rush. It's almost required to start breaking out a backup melee weapon to take them down.
For melee builds, especially those not using Physical Shield, Arachanox is one of the hardest bosses in the game as it's a Lightning Bruiser who takes little damage from any attacks except ones aimed at its face while charging its strongest attack. So melee fighters have to spend most of the fight running away from its charges and sweeping attacks only to charge in to hit its face then run away again before its ultimate attack hits them.
While the second battle against Jack of Blades is difficult for everyone, mages, especially those without Infernal Wrath/Divine Fury will struggle. Almost all of his attacks are powerful enough to wipe out mana shield in one hit; some are strong enough to wipe out mana shield and most of your health. And he's heavily resistant to both Fireball and Enflame, which are usually the go-to offensive spells.
That One Level: Bargate Prison, in the attempt to rescue your mother, thanks to an egregious case of Failure Is the Only Option. Nothing you do can prevent Jack of Blades from capturing you and your mother on your way out. You then endure a long unskippable scene in a prison cell and an irrelevant Racing Minigame — and then have to repeat them both because your first attempt to steal your cell key from the Warden's office invariably fails and you can't just kill the guy while he's reading poetry off a wall with his back to you. To add insult to injury, once you do finally escape, your mother gets re-captured in the very next quest.
Rescue the Archaeologist. Specifically, the final section of it where you only have 5 minutes to get to the Archaeologist and defeat the Minion spellcasters guarding him. There is a veritable army of Minions between you and the two spellcasters guarding him, the Minions have a lot of health and block a lot, wasting your precious time, and you'll get an Assassin joining in if you didn't visit the area beforehand. Hope you kept the Guards alive.
Lady Sophia, the noblewoman High-Class Call GirlHooker with a Heart of Gold from the Darkwood Bordello, shows a bit more personality than the others, seeming to fall for the hero and expressing a desire to escape the place with him and get married. Several players were disappointed at the realization that you can't actually marry her after setting her free. Twice stupid because this would have allowed Good players an alternative to marrying the evil Lady Grey and still get past the one Demon Door that demands them to have a wife with a noble title.
When first entering Oakvale, the protagonist encounters the little girl whom you can help find her stuffed bear in the prologue, now grown up into a young woman. Being the only explicitly confirmed survivor of the Oakvale Massacre other than the protagonist and his Mysterious Waif sister, you'd think there would be some opportunity to bond with her over their shared past, maybe do a quest for her or have a Romance Sidequest. But no, she appears for exactly one cutscene and then leaves.
Theresa has an incredibly cool backstory and character design: An Action GirlDisabled Badass who's also a Blind Seer, having had her eyes gouged out as a child by the Big Bad, then Made a Slave by a group of bandits, only for her to rise to the position of second-in-command of the gang by her own merits and killing anyone who stood in her way. Unfortunately, in actual gameplay, all she gets to do is being a Damsel in Distress and Mr. Exposition. There is never an opportunity to see her famed skills for yourself (for instance by teaming up on a quest), nor interact with her and maybe catch up in a way that isn't strictly about the Hero's destiny and the game's main plot.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: One sidequest involves you delivering a love letter/poem to a young woman. You're given the option to pass the letter off as your own. If you do, you cannot actually start a romance with the girl, meaning the only reason to do it is For the Evulz.
Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The Anniversary edition has this sometimes. It comes from the fact that the character models are cartoonish and stylized, with realistic-looking skin and eyes. The worst offenders are the children in the game; Thankfully, outside the intro and Bowerstone, children are pretty rare in this game.
There’s no point in showing off your trophies since it’s ridiculously easy to earn fame.
Marriage, since there's exactly one character in the game you can marry who isn't a generic faceless NPC. While the later games in the series add more interactions with spouses such as the ability to go on dates with them and raise children, here your interactions with your spouse are quite limited to waving hello to them, doing expressions, and having (blacked out) cutscenes of going to bed with them.
The player character has 'Attractiveness' and 'Scariness' stats that have a mild influence on N.P.C reactions, mostly in the form of the offhand comments they make. Attractiveness makes N.P.Cs become attracted to the player character more quickly, which can be useful if you're trying to get a spouse but it is mostly influenced by the player's choice of hairstyle so gaining attractiveness is very easy.
