Summary Jade Empire is a beautiful looking game with a proper plot with twists supported by good sounds and visuals. The mood is great, the supporting cast is diverse and interesting. The combat is basic, maybe to simple for experienced gamers. Replayability is low, despite the option to choose from several starting characters and the option to play a new level of difficulty. No new content is opened up and you are forced to the same combat options regardless of the character chosen.
I bought this game in the first half of 2007. After I installed the game and started it I was struck by the atmosphere. It breathed the ambiance of an ancient Asiatic empire. I was especially impressed by the way the music changes with the setting while keeping the music in Asiatic style. (Spooky in graveyards, impressive in the imperial city, dreamy when walking through the grasslands.)The visuals are also beautiful with for instance grass and flowers moving with the wind and water running down the side of a mountain into a small lake.
The way the story evolves is interesting, it's has some nasty twists. While the main story follows a single path with no options to choose from, you are allowed to choose between two or even three options in side quests. These side quests are varied in content.
The supporting cast of characters is varied and interesting. Many of them have interesting tales to tell and you can even have a romantic affair.
The good thing is that Jade Empire sets down a very good stage for the player to act upon. But balanced by this are some lesser aspects to the game.
For one thing: it has a feeling of being unbalanced. Most of the talking happens in the first chapters of the game. In fact I guess that two thirds is concentrated in the Imperial City and Tien's Landing, with the imperial city easily taking half of all non-violent interaction. After leaving the imperial city the story is just a single path of combat to the end, before Tien's Landing it has the feel of an introduction.
That the game is actually longer than it has content is partly because there is much repeated. Especially this is true for Tien's Landing. Everybody tells you about disaster the town experiences: the same line's are used over and over. Another annoying feature is that while movies are made to skip, cut-scene's are not. This is aggravating when the cut-scene directly results in a difficult combat scene. When you die you have to view the cut-scene again. This is especially true for battles against the powerful monsters like Death's Hand or the final battle in the arena in the imperial city. Indeed it looks like the more difficult a battle is the longer the cut scene is.
A second thing is the combat. On the face of it the combat offers enough different options, amongst it something called styles. But many styles are superfluous.
The first reason being that most styles are only obtainable when you progress through the game and some come late in the game. Since you need to spent skill points to develop styles to more effectiveness you find out you only have enough to develop the styles you got early in the game. Besides it is a guess each and every time how effective a new style is and you can't reuse skill points already spent.
The options are even reduced because monsters are immune to some styles. In fact the basic style you start out with affect the most monsters. In addition the effectiveness of styles are reduced because the more advanced ones cost magic points(called chi) while the basic one's are free to use. Especially powerful styles are an enormous drain on your chi and can only be used for short while. The options are strange: advanced styles cost chi to work and affect less targets and sometimes don't do much more damage.
The most disappointment I felt with the weapons styles. I created a character which mainly used weapon styles. But I found out I got stuck after a while. The reason was that you need to buff both chi and focus when using such a character. This is because chi is used for healing next to powering style's, so you need to have chi regardless of the style chosen. So when using weapons you need to buff two stats while if you use basic and magic styles you can concentrate on one stat. In addition you can actually choose a style that regenerates chi, but there is no style that does the same for focus. And finally weapons styles don't affect ghosts and, because of the plot, there are a lot of ghosts in this game.
In other words, while there is potentially a lot to choose from in reality your options are limited to a small set of well developed styles and some you choose for fun or spent points by accident.
There is one other weak feature, that is the unlock-able Jade Master difficulty. When you have gone through the game you can replay it in Jade Master difficulty with the stats and styles you ended the first game with. There is however no new content or new things to find or develop. What changes is that the monsters have way more hit points and hit harder. What not happens: you don't hit harder and all the magic and support style's you and your enemies do the same damage as in the basic game. Since there isn't a way to improve the skills beyond the basic set you find that the battle's just take longer to complete. These battle don't get interesting alas, they tend to bore.
Nevertheless besides these weak point it is an entertaining game that, when due time has passed can be replayed.
I bought this game in the first half of 2007. After I installed the game and started it I was struck by the atmosphere. It breathed the ambiance of an ancient Asiatic empire. I was especially impressed by the way the music changes with the setting while keeping the music in Asiatic style. (Spooky in graveyards, impressive in the imperial city, dreamy when walking through the grasslands.)The visuals are also beautiful with for instance grass and flowers moving with the wind and water running down the side of a mountain into a small lake.
The way the story evolves is interesting, it's has some nasty twists. While the main story follows a single path with no options to choose from, you are allowed to choose between two or even three options in side quests. These side quests are varied in content.
The supporting cast of characters is varied and interesting. Many of them have interesting tales to tell and you can even have a romantic affair.
The good thing is that Jade Empire sets down a very good stage for the player to act upon. But balanced by this are some lesser aspects to the game.
For one thing: it has a feeling of being unbalanced. Most of the talking happens in the first chapters of the game. In fact I guess that two thirds is concentrated in the Imperial City and Tien's Landing, with the imperial city easily taking half of all non-violent interaction. After leaving the imperial city the story is just a single path of combat to the end, before Tien's Landing it has the feel of an introduction.
That the game is actually longer than it has content is partly because there is much repeated. Especially this is true for Tien's Landing. Everybody tells you about disaster the town experiences: the same line's are used over and over. Another annoying feature is that while movies are made to skip, cut-scene's are not. This is aggravating when the cut-scene directly results in a difficult combat scene. When you die you have to view the cut-scene again. This is especially true for battles against the powerful monsters like Death's Hand or the final battle in the arena in the imperial city. Indeed it looks like the more difficult a battle is the longer the cut scene is.
A second thing is the combat. On the face of it the combat offers enough different options, amongst it something called styles. But many styles are superfluous.
The first reason being that most styles are only obtainable when you progress through the game and some come late in the game. Since you need to spent skill points to develop styles to more effectiveness you find out you only have enough to develop the styles you got early in the game. Besides it is a guess each and every time how effective a new style is and you can't reuse skill points already spent.
The options are even reduced because monsters are immune to some styles. In fact the basic style you start out with affect the most monsters. In addition the effectiveness of styles are reduced because the more advanced ones cost magic points(called chi) while the basic one's are free to use. Especially powerful styles are an enormous drain on your chi and can only be used for short while. The options are strange: advanced styles cost chi to work and affect less targets and sometimes don't do much more damage.
The most disappointment I felt with the weapons styles. I created a character which mainly used weapon styles. But I found out I got stuck after a while. The reason was that you need to buff both chi and focus when using such a character. This is because chi is used for healing next to powering style's, so you need to have chi regardless of the style chosen. So when using weapons you need to buff two stats while if you use basic and magic styles you can concentrate on one stat. In addition you can actually choose a style that regenerates chi, but there is no style that does the same for focus. And finally weapons styles don't affect ghosts and, because of the plot, there are a lot of ghosts in this game.
In other words, while there is potentially a lot to choose from in reality your options are limited to a small set of well developed styles and some you choose for fun or spent points by accident.
There is one other weak feature, that is the unlock-able Jade Master difficulty. When you have gone through the game you can replay it in Jade Master difficulty with the stats and styles you ended the first game with. There is however no new content or new things to find or develop. What changes is that the monsters have way more hit points and hit harder. What not happens: you don't hit harder and all the magic and support style's you and your enemies do the same damage as in the basic game. Since there isn't a way to improve the skills beyond the basic set you find that the battle's just take longer to complete. These battle don't get interesting alas, they tend to bore.
Nevertheless besides these weak point it is an entertaining game that, when due time has passed can be replayed.