Story
Jade Empire takes place in a world clearly inspired by ancient Chinese mythology but isn’t actually China. The world is filled with wandering spirits and demons that take the form of giant toads, horses, elephants, foxes, and other animals. It is not entirely devoid of technology, however, and amongst the beautiful Chinese architecture and picturesque natural settings you will also find mechanized warriors and flying machines. It is a big well imagined world that provides an interesting backdrop for the overall storyline.You play as a young martial artist that is just about to complete their training. Before you really have a chance to celebrate, however, you are thrust into a quest to save your Master. This quest reveals your true identity and that you are the only one who can right the wrongs in the world and end the corruption at the heart of the Empire. Along the way you meet up with several companions that each have their own interesting stories to share as well. The overall story features a lot of twists and turns and is very well written and presented.
You Control Your Own Destiny
The key to the storytelling in Jade Empire is that you have a lot of control over what happens. Just like in KOTOR, you have a large number of responses for any and every conversation and your choices will determine your path through the game. Also, you once again can choose to be good or evil based on your conversation choices and actions which has dramatic effects on what you see and do later on. Additionally, a lot of the quests have multiple outcomes and what you choose to do now has an impact on what happens later. Everything is not presented in clearly good and evil choices, either, and there are a lot of shades of gray in everything you do. Doing something you think is good now might have negative consequences later one, for example, and you can even skip large portions of the game based on your choices. What all of this means is that it is impossible to see everything on your first trip through the game. So between playing as good and evil and then going back through and doing quests you missed before, you can play through Jade Empire a half-dozen times before you see all it has to offer.Gameplay
The gameplay in Jade Empire is very different from what we have seen from BioWare in the past. Rather than pseudo turn-based combat governed by dice rolls, the fighting in Jade Empire all happens in real time and feels more like an action game than an RPG. There are a couple of problems here, however. Even though you have a huge number of styles you can use and you can switch between them at will, the combat is very simple. No matter what style you are using (which include various weapons, support styles that cast spells such as slow or poison, magic spells such as fire and ice, and straight up hand to hand combat) you only have two attacks in each style. A standard attack by pressing “A” and a more powerful attack when you press “X”. In addition to your health, you also have to watch your chi and focus meters. You use chi for magic attacks as well as to heal yourself and you use focus for your weapon attacks. Monitoring these meters while you are fighting helps beef up the fighting a bit so it isn’t as simple as button mashing, but that isn’t the only problem with JE’s combat.Easy as Pie
Also, the biggest and most powerful moves and styles aren’t even that useful because the game is easy to begin with. You can switch styles mid-combo to create “harmonic combos” that kill enemies instantly, but it is easy enough to use your standard attacks to take everyone out. Using harmonic combos and switching styles a lot certainly makes the game more interesting to look at, but it is just hiding the fact that the combat system is weak and simiplistic.
You can switch to a harder difficulty level, but it doesn’t make that big of a difference. You still follow the same patterns and since enemies are constantly dropping powerups it is hard not to be successful as long as you pay attention to what you are doing.
