The Jade Empire is no Old Republic
User Rating: 7.3 | Jade Empire: Hisui no Teikoku XBOX
Jade Empire ,the long awaited Bio-ware RPG just doesn't match up over the long run. The Game Starts you out with a choice of Characters, Each character has their own look & Fighting Style. You can customize your starting values but you can't customize you characters look. Also If you purchase the Limited edition version you get an additional player character & 2 special weapons. Your chatcter levels up in 3 areas Body, Spirit & Focus. Body Determines the amount of damage you can take, Spirit detrmined the amount of chi, used for magic , restore health, chi attacks. Focus is for weapons attack & focus mode. The combat is in real time but is essentially of the button masher variety. To win at combat is mainly achieved by Switching between two styles and using the unblockable attack mode. I like a good button masher more than most but in Jade Empire this grew tiring rather quickly & Often tired to change between many styles just to keep my instrest up. Jade Empire is lacking in some of the more traditional RPG elements. Costumes & armor being one. There aren't any rather there are power gems that you equip but the don't change your looks. The story for me started very slowly and only got a bit engrossing in the last 1/4 of the game. Jade Empire also features the Way of the Open Palm or Way of the closed fist. Sort of lightside vs darkside deal but the choices aren't always as clear as in KOTOR. You also aquire followers like in KOTOR but with the exception of Two of them none are close to their KOTOR counterparts. There is no HK-47 type even though one tries to be. Graphically Jade Empire is Good but nothing spectactular, The transormation styles do look cool. Sound is OK as well lots of voice dialog that is generally well acted. The game does have some framerate issues from time to time as well as a bit above average load times that occur quite frequently. Game length for me was about 20 hours but I didn't do every side quest. Overall it seems like a Watred down version of KOTOR on a new graphics engine. It's too similar in construction to KOTOR to not suffer from comparisons to that Legendary Game. I would be hesitant to recommend this for purchase a rental might be a good start to see if you want to ad Jade Empire to your collection 
