Is nice.
This review definitely recommends Jade Empire Special Edition and tries to explain why.
No bs +/- :
+ Memorable characters, well made. Companions are interesting and add replay value.
+ Everyone has a voice, great acting. Fight-sounds are flawless.
+ Beautiful graphics, that don't take much time to load.
+ Alignment system, that adds replay value. Interesting view on good and evil.
+ Combat is simple. Great movements and different martial-arts, but only movement keys and mouse clicks for the player.
+ Great story! Still great when beating the game the second or third time.
- Leveling up might as well not be there.
- Otherwise quite scarce character-customization options.
- Short. More side-quests would not have hurt, the game's 7 chapters come to an end damn quickly.
Special Edition features include: character - Monk Zeng; greater resolutions; new effects and better textures; iron palm and viper martial styles; rhino demons;
improved AI; Jade Master difficulty; new map interface; keyboard- and hot-key support.
At the beginning you have a choice of premade characters or premade characters with a different name and slight customizations:
The male playable characters are Furious Ming (fast, tattooed), Lu the Prodigy (balanced, stocky), Monk Zeng (magic, dressed as a Buddhist monk), and Tiger Shen (strong, heavy-set).
The female characters are Radiant Jen Zi (fast, diminutive), Scholar Ling (magic, contemplative), and Wu the Lotus Blossom (balanced, wide-eyed).
(I chose Wu the for the female character, because she's damn sexy and Ming for male, because I needed someone evil-looking.)
Which reminds me - sexiness is wide-spread in the Jade Empire.
The game starts in the village of Two Rivers, where you, a student, learn martial arts under Master Li. One day the village is attacked by
pirates, Master Li reveals himself to be a lot more than a martial arts master in a small fishing village. The player is introduced to the main problem:
souls cannot enter the underworld, the natural order of things is broken and must be fixed. Soon after that the village is destroyed, Master Li kidnapped and the player must
take off to meet his/her destiny. After about 10 (for first-timers) hours of adventuring, questing and a pleasant amount of arena battles, the player will infiltrate an organisation of assasins and will confront the evil emperor Sun Hai, betrayal soon follows...
The player can choose to be male or female. Gender gives the game a bit of replay value, since the romance options are different: as a woman
you can hook up with either a male rogue, one female or two females, playing as a male character only allows you to hook up with one female or the male rogue.
I guess it's a really gay friendly game, not really something you see often.
The party following you will get more and more colorful towards the endgame, all party members may not have a special quest-like thing for you, but can then either be romanced
or can offer you some humorous tales of themselves. (Especially the "shaved bear")
Jade Empire presents a somewhat new angle to the alignment system, as the player can follow either the way of the closed fist (mostly evil, but not necessarily) or
the way of the open palm (good). A corpulent person in the beginning of the game will be happy to explain these philosophies in depth to the player:
basically the way of the closed fist maintains, that strength is the greatest virtue and the weak should fend for themselves or die, the way of the open palm
says, that compassion should be shown to the weak, that the weak should be helped, to do good and teach them to help themselves next time...
//Personal ramblings:
(This brings to mind Kreia, an old woman from KOTOR2, who explains that the charity and good-doing may always not be the right thing and in the end all
the good deed has done is wrought more pain, nevertheless this way of thinking won't really manifest in Jade Empire and if you do the good thing, it's always
the right thing to do.)
//
The graphics are preprocessed and look beautiful, nothing movie-like, but gorgeous nonetheless. The loading screens, or bars,
are frequent, but easily tolerated if you are in posession of at least a mediocre PC.
The game is pretty open ended, sadly the big decisions feel kind of all piled up in the endgame, with the small acts of good or evil you did before having little effect on anything. With almost every quest, there's an evil way and a good way, lots of freedom.
The story is great. I think most of the players who play it once, play it twice or even a third time, maybe just to check out a Special Edition feature: the Jade Master
difficulty level, which is...difficult, the 300% damage inflicted by enemies and the 25% damage inflicted by you should give you a clue..
I only tried master and jade master difficulty levels, the first being easy enough for anyone and the second one not so recommended for the casual player,
the other modes - discover them yourself.
The game is pretty open ended, sadly the big decisions feel kind of all piled up in the endgame, with the small acts of good or evil you did before having little effect on anything. With almost every quest, there's an evil way and a good way, lots of freedom. I can't say it's really very negative or game-ruining.
Now the (really) negative things about this game.
This game is criminally short. There are two small towns and one big city in the game, one becomes unavailable shorty after the beginning. For the size in gigabytes I would have hoped for at least 60 hours of game-play the first time. Sadly 23 hours was the maximum I could
squeeze out from this pretty little rock and I did 99% of the things possible without using any guides...
The player character ends the game with level 23 or less, unless grinding at some infinite spawn points, but that is besides the point, the point is - the levels you gain are pointless. Each level grants you 3 stat points (mind/body/spirit). One of your stats will be well over 100 and the other two at about 50-70,
if you decide to specialize in one of them. The only visible equipment a player can find are weapons, which are useless to all except one - a blunderbuss you get in mid-game.
Other usable equipment include small gems, that you can put in your special amulet, the gems offer bonuses ranging from minor to fight-winning effects.
So basically what you can choose about you character is: alignment, sex and weapon, the three stats you can change and the persuasion skills affected by them mean little, as a persuasion check never disallows the player to start (or complete) any quest. Or make any changes to the outcome of the game for that matter..
Combat system comments:
A thing much whined about in Jade Empire, yes, it is simplistic, you use normal attacks to shred and an occasional power attack to break blocks. I agree, that it's not as challenging as for example - the Jedi Knight games, but frankly, it really doesn't matter in an RPG. I get my kick from doing stuff and seeing the
consequences, not spending hundreds of hours and quick-saves to beat one single boss. I get my fingers trained in a good online FPS.