Jade Empire

"Jaded Empire"

Before I even start this review, I am going to begin by praising Bioware's previous work, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Easily, it is one of gaming's best RPGs. The combat was well done, characters very interesting and entertaining, the story compelling, with a nicely done twist at the end, and lots of reason to play through it again. I'm not a huge fan of Neverwinter Nights, which grew kind of boring, but I also enjoyed Baldur's Gate 2, an endlessly complex game with plenty of interesting characters and scenarios, perhaps lacking a truly cohesive story, and can literally be played for over a hundred hours and still not be completed. Now comes Jade Empire, and I will not express disappointment, although it is nowhere near the quality of KOTOR and Baldur's Gate, but I believe this is a moment of Bioware experimenting, dinking around with the ways they can make a game. The story lacks any interesting, original premise, most of the characters have no charm, and the combat is way too easy, but somehow Bioware still manages to make the game fairly enjoyable.

The Good
+ Responsive, easy to use combat
+ Black Whirlwind, Henpecked Hou, Kang the Mad
+ An experimental Bioware

The Bad
- Easy combat
- All of the other characters
- Could have benefited from a halfway interesting story

The Ugly
? The long load times – I timed one of them at 50 seconds, and the average load time was about 30 seconds

Story – 5/10

This is easily Jade Empire's low point. The game consists solely of story and action, much like Shadow Hearts, which moves in such a linear and fast-paced fashion, that you blow through the game. Jade Empire sorta does the same thing, although it doesn't begin to drag you on a leash until after the first several chapters of the game. Story progression works in much the same way it did in KOTOR, listening to somebody speak and choosing from several dialogue choices when it comes time for your character to speak. It was revolutionary then, and still a good idea, as it gave choices which determine whether your character is good and evil, giving you some freedom with character development. Only problem is, the story does not suck you in.

Taking place in the fantasy land of the Jade Empire, where flying machines and horse demons abound, your character, whatever you wish to name him or her, let's say, Screaming Walnut, finds himself in his master's training school, being the best student Master Li and Smiling Mountain have ever had. Ever. Ever as in will pretty soon save all of Jade Empire (or maybe rule it with an iron fist, but Screaming Walnut is a goody two-shoes) from the clutches of Death's Hand. But we don't know that until the peaceful little settlement of Two Rivers is attacked by the mean bad guys, the Lotus Assassins. If the name Lotus Assassins does not make you wet your pants, then you are very brave. No, really, it's a neat name, I really do think so. Anyway, Screaming Walnut must travel with such companions as Sagacious Zu and Dawn Star to rescue Master Li, who Death's Hand wanted to capture for whatever reason, but I cannot say that, or I would ruin the sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, revealed plot of Jade Empire.

The story is very similar to stories you have read in books, watched in movies, and even played in several video games. It takes a relative unknown and turns him into the world's savior. This unknown happens to kick butt like nobody's business and constantly ends up in fights in which the opponents' last words are, “You will wish you never crossed us,” or maybe even, “Quickly! Dispatch of this one and go after the others.” Nobody ever learns, and the villains never keep up on popular culture – the hero always kicks butt. Problem with the story is, as you may have noticed, nothing worth noting, or nothing original, ever happens, even the twist is very unoriginal, though I won't reveal it. The story moves too slowly and only promises it will reveal more later on, and by the time it moves quickly, you find plot details being stuffed in your noggin, but not only that, you have become too bored to care, and nothing the game throws at you will surprise you. The great revelation in KOTOR produces a reaction, your mouth opened wide, of “OOOOOOOOH!!!” The great revelation in Jade Empire produces a less enthusiastic reaction of “Oh come on!” Something in the story must be redeeming, right?

Ok, ok, yea, something is redeeming, and I will get to that soon enough. It has to do with the characters. Bioware makes lovable, memorable characters: Jolee, HK-47, Carth, Canderous, just to name a few. Jade Empire lacks the character development KOTOR had. Most of the dialogue is used to advance the plot, but those characters whose purposes are not for plot development are the game's shining moments. But first, I must go over the characters that left less of an impression on me.

Three characters are potential love interests of the main character: Dawn Star, a goody two-shoes with naive ideals; Silk Fox, a spoiled brat who is pushy and controlling; and Sky, the male romance interest whose voice puts you to sleep, much less what he has to say. Of course, Screaming Walnut and Dawn Star went together perfectly, as two goody two-shoes can both agree on their naive ideals about love and the environment and the sweet laughter of children (I will talk about the children later). It's too bad that the only characters who can share a kiss with the hero (and yes, there can be homosexual relations, but the kiss scene is not shown unless a guy and a girl kiss) are such dull characters. They have nothing interesting to say about themselves and their experiences, but instead seem to whine and cry at every little problem. I rarely laughed at what they had to say, as every joke they told was buried between boring chit-chat, and whenever I heard their voices pipe up I felt like I needed to take an aspirin. To summarize, they sounded like naively hopeful high school students who have a positive outlook for the future of the world and believe they can make a difference. To make matters worse, these weren't the only dull characters.

These other two characters are Sagacious Zu, who plays a large part in this play, and Wild Flower, who plays absolutely no vital part in this play. Sagacious Zu isn't quite the naive hopeful of the above three, but his dialogues are no less tiresome. He never talks about anything that the plot doesn't want him to reveal yet, and whatever he says either reveals key points in the plot or hints that there is still some revealing yet to be done, as though saying, “Wait! Don't quit yet, I have some very interesting and important things to tell you.” And you play on, believing him...you foolish mortal. Yea, me too, I'm a foolish mortal too, I played through the darned game. Then there's the character of Wild Flower, a little girl with two demons inside of her, each fighting to take control. One of the demons is good, the other evil, surprise surprise, puppy surprise! I don't mean to sound nasty, but the little girl and her demons have nothing of any interest to say, and worst of all, they play no role in the plot whatsoever. Why did Bioware include this character? Even toward the end when the characters get together in their groups to play their own parts in a defense, the little girl, who can transform into a demon, does nothing. Aye aye aye, I dunno. At least there are three characters that are worthwhile to talk with.

Henpecked Hou is an ex-fighter, pushed into the role of a bun master when he marries his wife, his “beautiful jewel,” who ruins his life. Black Whirlwind is a chaotic, well-intentioned barbarian who thinks the meaning of diplomacy has something to do with blood and guts. Kang the Mad is an inventor whose voice backs up his madness and from his vocabulary he pulls out some very interesting ways to describe things. These characters recreate the glory of the characters from KOTOR (who did not need humor to make them interesting, mind you). Hou is so dryly sarcastic, that sometimes you forget he isn't being serious when he says he loves his wife. He seems to be Bioware's critique on marriages, showing how the married man's dreams are banished by his controlling wife. Of course, it doesn't condemn all marriage, but marriage of a spoiled woman who wishes to control every nature of her man's life. Hou escapes his house while delivering buns, dreading that his return will only make his wife angry, and he will want out again. His story is very interesting, and funny, and may even make you stop and think before marrying a woman who could possibly divert you from your dream job. Black Whirlwind is quite a creation indeed. He lives on wine and blood, and when he doesn't have his fill of one, he has his fill of the other. His anger can get out of hand, but he recalls past events with descriptions that reveal how he came to the decision of slaughtering a group of politicians in a debate, but you still don't agree with it. He serves as the mentality of solving problems with violence, as violence solves all disputes much quicker than words, and it gets straight to the point. Whirlwind is easily my favorite character in the game, and one of Bioware's best creations, along with Minsc and Jolee, among others. Kang the Mad is self explanatory. He's a mad man, but he's only mad because he's a genius inventor and his dialogues are so frenzied, but also so inventive, that he is entertaining to listen to. Whoever did his voice did a very good job, and I don't think any other voice would have made Kang quite as interesting as he turns out to be.

The story is well-written, don't get me wrong, except for one little thing. I can't help but wonder about Bioware's use of ellipsis, or should I say...overuse. The majority of characters in the game use the ellipsis for...emphasis, just like this. Sure, in real life people talk like that at times, but it's not everyone who pauses to...emphasize a word. But pretty soon every...person I talked to...emphasized certain...words to grant them more importance. Soon I stopped paying attention to the words meaning and grew annoyed at the use of the ellipsis, like a puppy using a new toy so much they tear it up in the first five minutes they received it. If you play the game, I'm sure you'll know what I...mean.

Gameplay – 7/10

As I said earlier, Jade Empire is an interesting experiment from Bioware. I do believe it is Bioware's first venture into real-time combat, and Bioware does a fairly decent job. The combat flows smoothly and the controls are responsive. Having multiple fighting styles is neat, but, unfortunately, unnecessary. There are several different types of styles to choose from – weapon, martial, transformation, magic, and support. These are quite explanatory, but the problem is that, while the different weapon and martial styles are somewhat different, several versions of one of the styles can be very similar to another. Several of the support styles paralyze enemies, making combat much too easy, and it's already quite easy. Each transformation has no real difference until the last several transformations. Also, the magic styles are all very similar, except one freezes, one immolates, one petrifies, etc. So, the idea of switching between several fighting styles is neat, and a good idea, except there's not a whole lot of variety within styles to create a deep combo system, and usually you only need to use one or two, actually just one style to win a fight. If you mix up the styles you use, it's probably only for a little variety, as you'll feel silly for having four styles mapped to your D-pad, but only one that you really need to use, depending on what you're fighting.

The difficulty is a slight problem in this game. I've played real-time combat games like Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry where difficulty is the name of the game, and so is fluid combat. With Jade Empire, the game is much too easy. If a group of enemies attack you, usually they let you deal with one of them one-on-one before you go one-on-one with the next in line, like a kung fu movie where the hero is surrounded by enemies, but only one attacks at a time. And their tactics are all too similar. They just stand there and take hits until they block, in which you use a power attack to get through, and then occasionally they attack, but that's easily avoided. You can block like them, but why block when you can jump over their heads and attack them from behind? I dunno, blocking's too inconvenient for useful purposes. You can adjust the difficulty from somewhere in the options screen. The default is easy, but there's also normal and hard. I tried out hard after realizing the easy difficulty granted me the ability to kill enemies in three hits. Hard is just like easy, but enemies have much more health and dish out much more damage per hit. It's kind of the same, except you can't be quite so lazy and allow enemies to hit you as much, and it's much more tedious, as killing a regular enemy becomes a chore. Even normal is a little easy, there's just no middle ground, no good balance that provides for a challenging fight.

Also unchallenging is the good/evil system, or I should say, Open Palm/Closed Fist system. It's too easy choosing the moral choice that fits your character. The game makes you choose between two obvious extremes of good or evil. You never have to stop and think about morality when making a choice of what you want your character to do. For example, as I said I would talk more about the children (and the children are put to annoying use in this game as ploys to plead to your sentimentality), there's a part in the game dealing with ghost children (and boy are there ever a lot of ghosts in this game, and I don't really see any deep meaning associated with the ghosts, except perhaps how history is treated shows how an empire is ruled). These children drowned in a great flood when their caretaker failed to release them from their rooms. One child is oh so sad and pleads to you with tears in his eyes and a poignant voice about how he would like you to bring their caretaker to them so he could ask for forgiveness. Another child, angry, fire in his eyes, rumbling coming from his throat, yells and agrees that you should bring him, but he would like to torture and kill the man. You bring the man to the kids, and now your choice is to tell him to ask for forgiveness or to let the mean child torture and kill him. Of course, the choice is obvious, and by choosing the goody-good choice, the kids go off to heaven, happy, and the man has been forgiven and not tortured to death. These kinds of choices dominate the game, and it's easy to see that there is no difficulty in picking between good and evil.

As I said, it is an interesting experiment from Bioware, the combat at least, and because of that, I think everything else is only second thought. It seems that magazine and online video game journalists have eaten this game up, possibly because Bioware is a god in the video game community, but I don't imagine that Bioware intended this to be a great game. It's good to see powerhouse developers behind the microscope, holding cultured media in hand, and dripping different formulas on top to observe what happens. It is unfortunate the game didn't turn out to be great, but experimentations do often result in failure, and failure is what the gaming giants fear most, but is sometimes what they need.

Visuals/Sound – 8/10

The game looks good, better than the rather flat-looking KOTOR, but looks don't make a game great, as KOTOR has proven. Also, I think the work the visuals do cause some long load times, which is something I would rather do without. The music is decent background music, nothing too memorable, but it works. The voice acting is good, but sometimes I despise voice-acting in an RPG, as it has lots of words and it's much quicker to get through dialogue by reading it and not having it acted out. Plus you get less of the...dramatic pauses.

Longevity – 8/10

For an RPG, it's short; for an action game, it's long. At about 25 hours, probably less, you will have completed this game. But I doubt you will want to play much longer than that, as the majority of the game takes place in the numerous dialogue scenes. There's so many side quests that you can spend hours in an area just doing those, especially with all of the dialogue to get through. Without the side quests, the game would be much shorter, but no more or less enjoyable, I think. I don't see any reason to play the game over and over again, because I don't think the evil-side ending being would be more interesting than the good-side ending, and I don't see the thrill in trying to make a romance with any of the three characters to choose from. Nothing interesting happens after, or up to the kiss, so, so what? It's not a bad game to purchase for your library, but don't expect Bioware's best when you play it.

Score – 7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/19/06