Jade Empire

Jade Empire has some similarities to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) since it's a Bioware RPG with melee combat, and some magic. It's an Action RPG rather than the "turn based" nature of KOTOR. It's a new IP (based on Chinese mythology), rather than having to conform to an existing universe like Star Wars. There's lots of lore, probably overwhelmingly so, but is there if you do want to take time to discover and read it.

You are the best martial arts student in the school, aside from a bitter rival who is held back by his attitude. Your town is attacked by bandits on an order by a group of assassins; Lotus Assassins who are the main enemy in the game. Your master is kidnapped, and you then venture on your journey, accompanied by your friend Dawn Star.

There's several pre-made characters to choose from with limited customisations. There's an option to randomly generate a name which will give you a name that fits in the world since they have an adjective as the first part. I was Silent Wuyin, for example.

There's three main attributes: Health, Chi, and Focus. Chi is like magic used for transformations and healing. Focus drains when using weapons or can be used to slow down time. Some dialogue options give you an option to attempt to persuade. There are 3 styles: charm, intuition, intimidation; which are based on pairs of the attributes (health, chi, and focus).

There are many fighting styles to discover as you progress through the game. There's unarmed martial styles, weapons, support, transformation.

When you level up, you assign three points to the attributes and then gain several points to upgrade your fighting styles. These upgrades are increased damage, increase power when using focus, and increase speed.

You also have a Dragon Amulet which allows you to assign gems to boost your attributes, persuasion skills, and some other miscellaneous effects. As you progress through the game, you gain more parts to your Dragon Amulet.

There are two methodologies: Open Palm and Closed Fist which is basically good/evil so adjusts based on which dialogue options you choose and what side-quests you are doing. There's a few gems which are restricted to the styles, but not sure what else it affects.

In combat, you can attack, block, dodge, activate focus, heal with chi, and switch martial styles. The styles can be mapped to hotkeys, or the d-pad if you play with a controller. Enemies are often assassins, or various demons. Demons are weaker to weapons. Ghostly enemies are immune to weapons but yet you can still punch them though.

For most of the game, you can just repeatedly attack, then when you see them block, you charge up your unblockable attack. Rinse and repeat. When the game throws more enemies at you, you can often use the same strategy but it's often best to try and quickly reduce the numbers so maybe use your Focus power to slow down time then wail on the enemy. It will also involve more dodging to avoid being ganged up on.

There are many characters that join your party along the journey, but only 1 party member can actually battle with you at any time. You can change their style to Support or Attack. I found Attack was the better option for the most part.

I knew Jade Empire was probably the kind of game where it suddenly ramps up the difficulty by 1000% on a boss fight. This did happen with the Inquisitor Jia fight, and then even the subsequent battles. It took me a while to realise I was dying due to a damage reflect spell which I had never noticed any other enemy using. I was trying to look out for cues when she activated it, but there wasn't one, so sometimes I hit her with a strong attack and found myself dead - as she perfectly activated it as soon as the attack landed. It didn't help that I was locked in that room with my magic drained, my health at 75% and no way to heal. It also doesn't help that you fight in a thin corridor, she has area of effect attacks, and the camera can easily give you a poor view of the fight - which is bad if she has activated reflect and you can't see her. After looking at my available techniques I found one that paralyzed her, then just spammed it whilst my ally chipped away at her health. Totally cheesed it, but I was probably retrying that fight for an hour with different team mates, different configurations of gems, and hoping for some kind of luck.

The FMV cutscenes can be skipped; dialog where you have responses can be rapidly selected; but enemy monologues are unskippable. This means boss fights often end up forcing you to sit through 30 seconds of unskippable dialogue and you have the added farce of hammering the button to skip the rest.

There's no potions, so you rely on your Chi for restoring your Health. There are Shrines to find which restore health and focus or magic, but sometimes they aren't always in convenient places. You can probably get into impossible situations since weapons require focus, and transformations require magic. When you are up against Golems that resist martial arts, you then need to use weapons or magic but these can quickly drain and you might go into the fight with low chi/focus.

The areas are often fairly small, so when you get an objective like "travel here and explore the cave", it doesn't take long to find the cave, or even fully explore it. Most chapters in the game are fairly short but there's some really long chapters mid-game. The overall pacing didn't seem quite right, so maybe was rushed in development, and content was cut. The in-game timer stated it took 16 hours for me to complete but there's a few areas I had to repeatedly play, so technically it took me a few hours longer. It's long enough, but RPG fans may consider this too short.

Once you gain a flying machine, you can play an optional minigame when travelling to a new area. This is like a classic bullet-hell game which is quite jarring in style, but was decent enough. It's not a game where you need to travel back and forth and explore. It's very linear where you just move from one objective to the next, then the next original area is a new chapter in the story.

Just like KOTOR, Jade Empire does feel a little dated. I never played these games at the time of release so it's my first time playing them. In my opinion, both KOTOR and Jade Empire seem like they have the ideas, but don't quite get the execution right. For this game to be fun, the combat needed to be great, but I felt it was too limited and you can get away with the same cheap tactics for the majority of the game.

Just like everyone else, I'm a big fan of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and it's sequel. In-depth dungeons and dragons combat, an amazing cast, an intriguing story, and a universe which is a delight to explore led both of those games to be some of the best RPGs of all time. While Jade Empire is not on the same tier of those games, it's still reminiscent of them while being a breath of fresh air.

Just like KOTOR, Jade Empire has a great cast (excluding Sky who has almost no story time and no character to bout). I found myself switching through followers because I enjoyed which ones I had. Similarly, it was a blast to explore, and the lore created here by Bioware is a uniquely Asian influenced culture with some odd elements which work to its favor. Both Tien's Landing and the Imperial City had a ton of fun quests and cool environments.

Speaking of quests, this game's quests are consistently great. While there are some less interesting go here and fight these guys quests, there is a vast amount of unique quests which lead to some fun decision making. A few great ones off the top of my head include The Marriage Quest in Tien's Landing, the Outsider quest (probably the best one), and the stage play quest. That being said, this game weirdly copies some of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic's storylines and events such as the arena. However there are very few instances of this and it's a fairly minor thing.

What is not a minor thing is the game's falling off point after you leave the imperial city. The story starts to become a bit of a mess (a plot twist out of left field trying to recreate the same reaction as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic's twist) and game becomes a linear slog focusing almost exclusively on combat.

This wouldn't be as big of an issue if combat wasn't this game's biggest flaw. The game's combat is 90% of the time piss easy, and the other 10% an annoying slog. While the developers created a variety of different styles, it is clear which are the best one's as you pick them up. One of the strongest things you can do in the game is to simply alternate between using storm dragon and what ever weapon or martial style (I used a longsword) you have. This stun locks everything but ghosts and demons. Even then, demons are still torn apart by weapons, making ghosts the only somewhat tricky thing to deal with. The combat system provides a lot of features, but most of it is useless except in rare occasions. Chi strikes didn't do significantly more damage, and when I needed that damage I'd rather heal myself. The slow down move drains too much chi to be useful. Even blocking is rarely used since you can just hack at enemies and kill them in a few swings. What should be a rich combat system ends up being shallow and exploitable to such a degree it trivializes fights such as the final boss. At the very least, there are times rolling around and getting hits in can be fun, but I wouldn't tolerate this if the rest of the game wasn't so good.

As mentioned before, the last bit of the game feels like a slog but it's over before it gets too draining. I 100% (minus like 1 quest I missed at the start of the game) in 20 hours, which felt perfect for what was going on here. Unlike KOTOR which could easily keep me in for 50+ hours, this game's shakey story near the end felt solid at 20. This shakey story is not helped by the fact that certain conversations feel super drawn out by the end of the game.

I also am extremely confused by the inclusion of the schump minigame, they are short, easy, and lacking much depth. I can't really complain since you can avoid them if you want (and I'd recommend you do), but it still feels super shoehorned in, like it was an abandoned idea from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Ultimately this is a really solid experience and if it wasn't for the poor timing of this release, I guarantee this game would garnish a lot of love.