Jade Empire

Jade Empire is a fun, solid RPG by BioWare that's hampered slightly by a few small issues. The PC exclusive "Special Edition" comes with some new content, however in general it's not a very good port. Mouse support isn't great, there are some weird control screw ups, and a few dumb glitches here and there. Along with some weird presentation issues, the game feels outdated technically even for a game originally released four years ago. The story segments are a weird mishmash of nice-looking CGI, sloppy real-time stuff, and grainy video of scenes made in-engine that could easily just be real-time. The characters look decent, but it's compromised by them having to move around awkwardly to their designated positions before speaking and the very small number of exaggerated animations used when saying their lines. Some people use a made up language instead of English, but instead of saying actual translatable dialogue, each one has a few random samples that can be picked from, which leads to silly situations like someone going on for several seconds when the subtitle consists of a single word. The whole game feels like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic with all the alien architecture replaced by Asian-influenced stuff, and they didn't bother to bring the engine up to date.

This feeling that the game was just a filler project while they got working in full on Mass Effect is further supported by the game's brevity. It starts out seeming like another epic adventure, with the first three chapters taking their time exploring a grand story and providing the player with tons of side quests to tackle, but after that, the optional parts fall away and the last four chapters breeze by very quickly, as things quickly come to a head and the player is rocketed through the rest of the tale. You get the feeling that they had to finish it quicker than they wanted to, with things like the pointlessness of the world map when there's a grand total of two locations you can actually travel back and forth between. I took the time to do most of the unnecessary stuff I found, and the game only took me about fifteen hours to finish. That's not exactly short for an average game, but it is for this kind of one. The story is competent, at least in the main plot, though thanks to the abrupt shift in pace I felt like I didn't get to know the other characters as much as I'd like. A few of them were genuinely interesting or entertaining, but it seemed like I missed something.

The combat system is kind of fun, if not as deep as I hoped. You learn a ton of different fighting styles, some of which are normal hand to hand or weapon-based martial arts, others use elemental magic or transformations. However I found myself only using a select few to finish the game, because they were the most effective without draining my resources for healing too much. I did feel like kind of a badass flipping around and beating the crap out of a bunch of guys, but fights against tougher foes were more annoying as I had to deal with the different status effects they assaulted me with instead of just fighting me like men. The allies are kind of useless, because you can only take one at a time and they were pretty ineffectual at doing anything more than distracting enemies for a while. The open palm/closed fist karma system didn't seem as important as in other games, limiting the selection of magic equipment and access to some quests but not providing me with exclusive powers or anything like that. I had some fun with the side quests, although at times I felt more like I was doing chores than having fun. In the end, Jade Empire was not a great RPG like Knights of the Old Republic, but it was a pretty good one.