Jade Empire finally came to PC earlier this year (2007) after being released for two years on X-Box (2005). Unlike other console to PC ports, Jade empire plays smoothly and the controls feel natural. The story is based in a fantastic and mythical China (called the Jade Empire in the game) and the fighting and many elements of the game borrow heavily from the wuxia (pronounced wu-sha) genre of movies, books, and theater. As an action-role playing game based around martial arts and magic, the environment is unique and compelling - I know I couldn't stop playing until I finished the game.
You can start with a built-in character (3 female and 4 male models are available to chose from). You can use their base abilities or adjust them to fit your style. There are three main attributes to adjust: Body, Spirit, and Mind. Body affects your health (hit points), Spirit affects your Chi (magic or mana), and Mind affects your Focus (weapon wield time and Bullet Time).
Each pair of these physical attributes are averaged to produce your conversation skills. Body and Mind results in your Charm, Mind and Spirit is your Intuition, and Spirit and Body is your Intimidation ability. These skills come in handy to produce favorable outcomes (sometimes with more XP) than if you tried to brute force your way through the game by fighting all the time.
Leveling up occurs when you collect enough XP to advance to the next level - and XP is pretty plentiful in this game. I leveled up about once every one or two hours of game play (and that includes watching all the cinematic cut scenes and listening to all the dialog). Whenever you level up, you get three more points to add onto your attributes (Body, Mind, Spirit). (I ended up putting almost all my points into Mind to increase my Bullet Time/Focus Time which slows down the action around your character.)
The game is very action oriented for a role playing game and at times reminded me of the game play in either Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or Fable. That makes sense since it's an action-RPG (unlike Neverwinter Nights which is straightforward RPG). In Jade Empire, you use your character to fight (Tekken-style but with far fewer controls) in a fighting style of your choice. There are so many fighting styles in the game that it's hard to determine what's the best style. I ended up using the styles that I started the game with maxed out (you can level up various aspects of your style as you level up your character - for example, the long sword style can do more damage and take less focus to use if you level it up).
There can be an awful lot of blood and gore that reminded me more of anime than wuxia. For example, if you've made a particularly devastating attack with your long sword while killing enemies, then their heads go flying off with large spurts of blood. In the image on the left, two heads are flying (click on the image to see a larger version).
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Two Hams improvised weapon style
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A much touted feature of Jade Empire was the ability to use improvised weapons. Supposedly, you can pick up environmental objects and use them as weapons. I only found one area in the game that allowed me to do this - the Tea House in Tien's Landing where I could pick up either Table Legs or Twin Hams. By the time I figured out how to do this, I would have been able to demolish all my opponents using my normal marital and weapon styles.
It seems that opponents can also pick up improvised weapons (but I've only seen this in the Tea House area). It's too bad because they could have done so much with this capability, especially if the improvised weapons were significantly more powerful than your own abilities. Then, we'd be looking for improvised weapons all the time.
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Low resolution video cut scene
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In any case, I found the game play to be ridiculously fun and the plot familiar but new enough that I enjoyed the progression and game engine rendered cut scenes. What I could have done without is the pre-rendered cut scenes that are liberally peppered throughout the game. These cut scenes are low resolution and look awfully bad when you've been staring at a high resolution, anti-aliased rendered version of your characters and then all of a sudden it's blurry and low resolution.
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High resolution in-game rendered scene
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Through most of the game you'll have followers, and in the tradition of many of Bioware's games, you can even manage a romantic relationship with a few of them (not at the same time - one per game please). These followers can fight alongside with you or provide support functions such as providing you with more Chi or Focus. Unfortunately, you can only have one of your followers with you at any given time. Having more would probably make the game too easy, but would have been really cool.
The voice acting throughout the game is pretty good. Some of the voices don't fit the characters as they've been modeled, but the voices are still quite nice to listen to as they act out the drama. Some of the characters speak another language, the old tongue, so it's unintelligible. In these cases, the voice tracks are just a random or repeating series of odd sounds that fit the Star Wars universe much better than ancient China (the gibberish language definitely has a western sound to it versus a Chinese tonal pattern). I assume this was done to reduce the amount of voice recording necessary in the game and to allow text changes to the dialogue without having to rerecord with an actor. Unfortunately, I found the voice to be distracting as I was trying to read the subtitles and wished they would have done what they did in Neverwinter Nights and simply remove the voice track when the dialogue had not been prerecorded.
Other than these minor gripes, Jade Empire is a great action-RPG with a fun storyline and lives up to Bioware's reputation for making stunning and compelling role playing games.
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