By Cherie Thomason
Jade Empire is an action RPG developed by BioWare. Published by Microsoft, it was originally released for Xbox in 2005 and released for the PC as a special edition in 2007. I had not previously heard of Jade Empire when my husband brought it home. But I knew I would play it when he made the connection to Knights of the Old Republic (also by BioWare), a game I thoroughly enjoyed. I played the PC version of Jade Empire and I’m not sure I would have known that it was originally an Xbox game. The environments looked beautiful and the controls supported both my customized keyboard layout and a gamepad. While my husband played with the gamepad, I took to using the mouse/keyboard setup after I figured out which keys I needed to map to my numpad for most efficient flailing (it’s how I play action games, honed from my Mortal Kombat days).
Combat
The combat system was relatively straightforward to understand once I’d seen it in action, and the game made sure to initiate me on it right away. The manual described it as a rock, paper, scissors system. In the game, it translated to attack, block, and power attack where blocks stop attacks, attacks interrupt power attacks and power attacks break blocks. I understand that it’s possible to watch my opponents, determine what move they’re about to perform and react accordingly. As it turned out, I rarely employed blocks and favored meaningful flailing which amounted to a lot of jumping and rolling away, then jumping back into range to deliver attacks and power attacks. And yes, the rolling did help – it delivered blows to any opponents unfortunate enough to get in my way, preventing them from hitting me in return. Complexity is added to the system by way of many fighting styles. There are Martial Styles (hand-to-hand), Magic Styles, Weapon Styles, Transformation Styles (transforming into a mythical beast), and Support Styles (beneficial, no damage attacks). There were too many styles for me to explore fully or even understand through the course of the game, but it did add some variety in how I could fight. Fortunately, I didn’t need to understand or even use every style I came across to finish the game. I primarily used Martial and Weapon Styles with the rare Transformation and Support Style thrown in.
The game keeps track of three conditions: health, chi (a.k.a. magic) and focus. Health and chi work as one would expect. Focus dictates how much you can use weapons and can also be expended to slow down time. Running out of focus forces you to switch to hand-to-hand combat, which cuts down on both range and damage output.
The Story
In my view, the combat is only secondary to the story and characters. I could (and did) play a male or female protagonist. Common internet wisdom maintained that customization of stats came so easily through leveling as to make the initial build choice irrelevant. So I initially chose the female that wore the most clothes; my assumption was that while cotton wasn’t much armor, it was better than bare skin. In fairness, the male characters didn’t wear much in the way of upper body armor either.
The story was set in mythical China. As the main character, I was the top student in a borderland school under a revered master. But as I neared the end of my study, the master alluded to a secret past tied to disturbing happenings around the empire. But the story would have been short indeed, had not some mysterious, sinister group swept in, kidnapped my master and laid waste to the idyllic town and school. Having survived the carnage and thus been suitably motivated, I set off into the adventure. Throughout the story, I was given the choice to follow the Way of the Open Palm (light side) or the Way of the Closed Fist (dark side). The choices primarily mattered when determining the outcome of the various quests. While the general storyline continued forward regardless of my choices, there were quests, items, and even endings that were available or locked depending on which Way I had been following.
As the story progressed, I met a number of characters that joined my adventure. They were evenly split between having Open Palm and Closed Fist tendencies. While most could join and help me in combat (one at a time), there were two that were purely non-combat characters. Of all my companions, my favorites were Sky, a roguish thief with a ready wit, Silk Fox, an imperious, no-nonsense beauty with a secret, and Kang the Mad, a brilliant inventor and pilot with a quirky point of view and a less-than-perfect memory.
There were a number of moments in the game that I found refreshingly anti-stereotypical. Wild Flower, a young girl in my entourage, had a conversation with me (as a female character) concerning her admiration for the strength of the adult women in the party. One quest in the capital city had me as a stand-in in a play as a female character that needed saving. I had an interesting conversation with the playwright/quest-giver discussing the fact that traditional theater only officially employed men and how ridiculous the conditions were that women had to endure in order to participate anyway. Finally, the game provided an option to flirt with a member of the same sex, albeit mildly. My understanding is that if I flirted with both a member of the opposite sex and a member of the same sex, the relationship with the opposite sex would have taken precedence. Since I wasn’t able to resist flirting with everyone I was given the opportunity to, I wasn’t able to see how far the game designers would have let me take the same sex relationship.
There were seven unequal chapters in the game. The first chapter was necessarily linear, as the introduction to the game play as well as the story. The second and third chapters were the most open-ended, allowing me to explore the town and city respectively and rack up the side quest list. Once I reached the final section of Chapter 3, the game sadly fell into a single track, with no more side quests, in a sprint to the end. I consider this a mild complaint since I had enjoyed the previous chapters and was merely disappointed in my wish for more game content. The difficulty of the fights was also somewhat uneven. While the final boss fights were generally a step up from most of the game, I found that the most difficult battles involved relatively minor side quests earlier in the game. On the plus side, the game allowed me to toggle the difficulty mode between easy and hard at any point in the game, including mid-battle. My patience for repeating a fight wore thin at points and that toggle allowed me to continue enjoying the game rather than get frustrated with it.
One more touch that I found thoroughly enjoyable was the voice acting in the game. My companions each had very different personalities, which were enhanced by their voice actors. I could always click through the dialogue segments in order to speed up the process, but in the first play-through, I found myself listening through the conversations in their entirety. A pair of voice acting highlights for me included Nathan Fillion of Firefly/Serenity fame and John Cleese, especially since I was expecting neither of them.
Conclusion
Overall, I highly recommend this game and give it a rating of 5 lolcats. BioWare has once again provided a compelling storyline with engaging quests coupled with a combat system that was simple to learn while still providing challenges along the way. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a third character awaiting her turn at the game.
Article © August 2007 by Cherie Thomason.
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