Introduction

The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike…that title I didn’t know how to initially react to honestly. To me, this title was completely foreign and seemed like words thrown together in a name blender. However, when I dabbled on some trailer videos and screenshots, my interest peaked quite a bit. I was even more curious when I discovered The Fable was a 22-volume manga series by mangaka Katsuhisa Minami and published by Kodansha.

Now it all makes sense—The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike isn’t just a random title developed by MONO ENTERTAINMENT—and published by Kodansha not surprisingly—but a video game adaptation of the series! As a reader of manga and a fan of assassin-themed stories, The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike chanted my name! Is this manga game adaptation worthy of the legacy from The Fable, or should manga just stay on the pages within a book? I find out in my review of The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike for the PC!

Gameplay

Like any good manga, there needs to be order in how a character attacks and executes their moves. The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike makes that the center star of this quite different roguelike. Players choose from one of three assassins (only one is available at the start) and must enter into a series of manga panels to take down various foes and bosses. You accomplish this by literally entering into a 2D setup where several “panels” are presented to you like a hand of cards. Each panel gives your assassin different moves they can execute, such as reloading a gun, shooting, moving a step, and so on. You have to use these panels to kill all enemies on screen within five turns, or else the game ends and that particular run is over (thus the roguelike element). This might seem a bit strange at first, but I’ll break it down even further and show you why The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike is actually such a cool idea.

Each assassin you choose has a different base set of panels, but what matters is how you use them to kill your enemies. Various baddies will be presented to you from the front and back, which in turn means you need to set up your manga panels to take down these foes. Take Akira, your first playable assassin. Akira uses guns and melee attacks to take down enemies, so his panels are dedicated in that style. You can only use a gun panel if you have ammo (which means you need reload panels), and to attack an enemy, you need to be either in front of them or utilize a panel that gives you distance. Another assassin you unlock, Yoko—Akira’s sister in The Fable—isn’t a gun enthusiast but can beat down enemies with kicks and punches and manipulate them into coming closer to her panel. Each panel has a purpose, but they are based on RNG to a big extent. Luckily, your panels can be redrawn once per battle, and while at first it might seem easy, when you reach later stages, the enemies have more health, and your panel usage can make or break your turn.

All of the assassins in The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike don’t take damage—they are protagonists after all—but their panel layout does take a hit. When you are shot or hit by a melee strike, your panel will suffer a hole or two, decreasing which panels you can use. You can fix these panels with tape—which is limited—or try to survive with the damage and have the panels fix next turn. There’s a lot of strategy to The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike, and panels need to be smartly used by the player to best survive. There’s also a nice tutorial that does an adequate job of explaining the basics, but just that—don’t rely on it to make you a pro manga assassin.

As you progress, you will gain new panels and the ability to upgrade panels too. Upgrading them works how it sounds—maybe instead of doing only six damage, they can be boosted to nine. Likewise, you can sometimes get the chance to remove panels, which might help your draws be a bit more focused rather than so RNG-based. I at first questioned removing panels, but even if you have ten OP panels, they might cause a turn to end up being wasted with unusable ones, so reducing the amount is actually beneficial at times.

Outside of panel-based combat, you’ll occasionally be presented with mini-games that earn you new panels based on how you do. One game, for example, is a timing picture game that sees how fast you can capture an object on screen, while another is a memory game. These mini-games are really silly, but they break the gameplay up a bit and add some extra flavor to The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike.

There are also various other game modes in The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike such as a drinking mini-game (which is just timing-based) and a puzzle mode, which gives you certain criteria you must meet to beat the level, such as specific panels and limited turns. The drinking game probably has some tie to the manga—I haven’t read the series, but after playing this game, I plan to—so it seems ridiculous and absurd. The puzzle mode is tough; these require a mixture of knowing how manga works—which way it is read—and how to use panels in the best possible manner. I can see most people, if they beat the main game, really dabbling with this mode after the credits roll.

Graphics

The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike is one part amazing looking and another part kind of meh. Taking art from the series, most of the panels and designs—especially the menus—look gorgeous. I found myself just staring at these menus and really wanting to dive into the manga even more. Sadly, the game’s visuals are very overly simplified. Utilizing simple pixel sprites, the characters and backdrops rarely ever look that great and remind me of older NES or SNES games. Yeah, it works given the context of the story and themes, but I really would have liked a bit more detail on the character models and sprites.

Sound

The music is…also not as good as I would have liked it. The menu music and game themes I hope you’ll like—you’re going to hear them a lot and repeated often. There’s almost zero voice acting in The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike aside from the drinking mini-game (which is weird), as you’ll hear your dude say “pistachio,” “water,” “lemon,” and a few other lines. I didn’t need voice acting here (it would have been nice though), but the music feels overly simple.

Story

Again, as someone who only just now learned The Fable is a manga series, I won’t say I know much about the lore of Akira and his cast of assassins. The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike doesn’t do a good job either of telling you their stories, as this game I feel assumes you already know—which is a bit of a mistake in my opinion. I don’t believe a story mode is 100% necessary for The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike to be great, but I would have liked more depth to understand these cool-looking characters and why they are trained killers. The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike does have some bits of lore scattered about, but it’s not enough to really formulate a story, and that is a bit of a letdown.

Overall Impression

Here’s my last impression on The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike. I think this game was made for several reasons and not all of them were just to make a good puzzle game. I partially wonder if The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike was meant for fans who wanted more from the manga or to see if the public still knew about it at all. Maybe it was made to gauge if more people wanted to keep this series alive and it could lead to future games or manga releases. The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike is a fun roguelike—more like a roguelite, to be honest—that keeps your mind thinking about how to best beat a run. Is it perfect? Nope, but I feel puzzle and manga fans will love The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike for how it takes the roguelike genre and changes it up a bit from the usual RPG themes we see so often.

Conclusion

The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike is a good game but one that I feel should have been a lot better. That’s the issue with a lot of gaming adaptations of anime, manga, or movies. They seem to always be aimed more at fans and often rely heavily on those fans being the focus, which dissuades others from really enjoying them. In the case of The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike, there’s a lot of potential here thanks to solid gameplay and manga art, but it loses a lot of points for not pushing forward with a lot of the game’s themes. Had this included a decent story mode and maybe some better sprite art, I would have given this a 9/10 with no questions asked. As it is though, The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike is a good puzzle game that is fun but lacking in many departments. Still, I recommend it to fans of roguelikes who are tired of the same themes over and over and want something different. The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike is good, but it could have been excellent.

—Aaron