As regular readers know by now, I like to get into games like Fable Age (Free) and basically go as far as I can without spending anything. It’s an enjoyable challenge sometimes, like doing a solo or white mage run in Final Fantasy ($7.99). Most of these games are actually very playable even if you don’t want to kick in money or a lot of time, and Fable Age is no exception. Whether you want to pull off a little clever trick to get yourself a super-powerful character upfront or you just want to play it straight and slowly build up through persistance and a bit of luck, it’s easy and fun to make progress in this game at a reasonable pace. As usual, after sinking some time into this, I’ve put together some tips and advice for anyone who’s getting started with Fable Age.
Like most games that derive from Puzzle & Dragons (Free), Fable Age is made up of two main components: team-building and battles. Building a good team enables you to win battles that will give you the resources to build an even better team. This guide will be broken up into two sections, each one covering one of the two major elements of the game.
Team Building Tips
Keep elements in mind. More than anything else in this game, having the right type of element will give you a leg up on the enemy, while having the wrong type will seriously hobble you. If you use the element that the enemy is weak against, you’ll do double damage, while if you use the one they’re strong against, you’ll do half damage. Elements also factor into the damage you receive when enemies attack, as well as certain active skills. Most of the storybooks rely on one element more than the others. If you can’t guess what it might be, then bringing a balanced party to the first quest is the way to go, but once you know, bring in the right types for the job for the remaining ones.
Keep at least two of each element type leveled up and ready to go. The more team members you have that are strong against the enemy, the better, and with small party sizes and a generous inventory, it’s certainly possible to keep a full party of each element. Once you get to later storybooks, you’ll probably need to do this, but in the early going, just having an extra of each element type that you can bring into your team can help tip the scales in your favor. If you have an available friend of the right type, that gives you three members hitting weak points.
Skills can be useful, but don’t build your team around them at the start. There are a lot of useful skills, especially ones that let you swap out one type of tile for another, but for a long while, you’ll barely have them charged up before you hit the boss of each quest. That said, keep an eye on them. Having a skill that boosts all the chaotic members of your team does you little good if you have none.
There are a couple of sneaky tricks for getting some very good characters. First, there’s King Thrushbeard. He’s very strong, especially in the early game, and he’s all yours if you can manage eight referrals. That’s admittedly a tough task unless you go around spamming your referral code (please do not spam your referral code), but if you have or know someone who has another device, it’s easy-peasy to just install, add the referral code, delete, and do it all again eight times. If that’s a pain, another way to get a good character is to save your gems up so that you have 20 when you finish Geppetto’s storybook. The game will give you a one-time offer to buy him, and he’s an excellent character to have all throughout the game.
Inventory isn’t a big issue, so feel free to spend your gems on rare character pulls. With no party cost to take into account, the sooner you can pack your team with big guns, the better. Unless you’re saving for Geppetto, you should take a spin with a rare book every time you have five gems. Even if you have a strong team built, there’s always a chance you’ll pull an extra of one of your characters and be able to skill merge them to improve them.
Don’t waste resources on one- or two-star characters. They’re mostly dead-ends, and should be sold off as soon as you can fill your team with three-star or better characters. At the very least, by selling them, you get some coins you can use in the daily shop to buy something for your good characters. Their potential just doesn’t match up to the better characters, and even if your luck is rotten, you’ll have plenty of three-star characters to work with.
Remember to power your team members up. Verging on a tooltip here, but the ways you can power-up your characters aren’t quite as front and center as in other games. You’ll probably remember to use the books you find to level your characters up, but don’t forget to check out the enhance menu, where you can use potions to increase health and attack stats, elixirs to give your characters enchantments, and access the evolve and merge features.
Battle Tips
Save your skills for the bosses. Building up your skill meter is a very slow process in Fable Age, so until you get to higher levels, you’re probably looking at one skill use per character per quest. Unless you are in a dire situation, you’ll want to save that use for the boss fight, where skills can help you end things quickly before the fight gets out of hand.
Be careful managing your links throughout the quest. Links are another resource you’ll want to have in abundance when you face off against the boss. It’s okay to use them here and there in earlier battles, especially to close loops, which applies your attack to every enemy instead of just one. Make sure, however, that you’re not using more than you can mostly replace.
Think about how the pieces are going to fall. If removing the pieces you’ve already highlighted will cause matches to fall into place, there’s no need to waste links connecting them. Of course, you can’t see what’s going to fall from the top of the screen, but if you’re careful about which pieces you remove, you can do a lot of damage with very small moves.
Consider the colors you’re matching. Remember, the colors of the pieces match up with one of the elements, causing all characters of that element to attack. If you don’t have anyone with the matching element, removing those tiles doesn’t do much for you. If you’re using a mixed team, it’s tempting to just go for the strong attacks every time. Generally, it’s a good strategy, but if the enemy only has a little life remaining, it’s better to take advantage of the opportunity to use up some of the tiles they’re strong against, just to remove them from the board. The more tiles you have on the board that can target the boss’s weak point by the time you reach them, the better.
When you reach the boss, go all out. The longer the fight goes on, the worse it will be for you, so give it everything you’ve got right away. Use any buff skills you might have, then use up all of those links you’ve saved to throw almost the entire board at them. Don’t forget to close your loop to take out any henchmen the boss might have with them. After that attack, use any skills that restore links so that you can throw as much of the board as possible at them again. Try to keep a healing ace in the hole, but if your team doesn’t have anyone with that kind of skill, just try to save heart tiles so that you can bounce back after the boss’s attack.
Following this guide should help you get yourself to the point where you can take on some of the special quests, where you can earn evolve materials, pets, and new characters. Beyond that point, you should have a pretty good idea of what you’re doing in Fable Age, but if you need any help or just want to chat about the game, feel free to swing by the thread in our forums, which is full of useful strategies and other good advice.
