Brilliant game, unique style. The only wuxia themed game I've ever played, unless you count an assassin in Guild Wars
The companions are utterly interchangeable apart from one who stands out (fortunately you only need to use one and she has a pretty good support mode), named Wild Flower. The others are Little Miss Ninja, Little Miss Spirutal, Mr Psychotic, Mr Inept and Mr Explosion, not counting novelty characters you'll never use. I suggest using Wild Flower through the whole game as you'll lose nothing by doing so and she's the only interesting one. In fact if the game did force you to use any of the other followers for more than about 3 minutes it wouldn't be scoring a 10.
What makes Wild Flower different is she's a dead little girl, I always liked characters I could feel for so I guess she scores points with me straightaway. She's possessed by a 'Heavenly Gate Guardian', a spirit summoned to guide you and by a less friendly demon who will serve you as it's in its best interests that you win but would happily murder you if it had to. Eventually you have to decide which of these spirits you want to have following you around, something that leads on to my next point...
The karma meter - good people follow the Way of the Open Palm, bad people follow the Way of the Closed Fist. I have never seen a game where the villain path is quite so villainous, this is a choice between reasonably good and well adjusted or absolute evil. Not sure how much I can say without giving away too much so if you're a bit concerned over spoilers skip ahead a bit. The moment when it really sinks in how incredibly evil the Closed Fist is is when you reach the wounded body of the benevolent god your people serve. The Open Palm way of dealing with this situation is to let her be reborn, the Closed Fist way of dealing with this involves deicide to use her power.
And onto the plot. The plot is very Bioware-y, you start off as a student being taught by Master Li. You're his favourite student, he has a special interest in teaching you which is all to do with your destiny as a Spirit Monk which you'll find out about in the first half hour or so. A while in the Lotus Assassins start hunting you down even though descriptions of you are poor at best, you play a very clever person who doesn't let any of the assassins who see you live. And of course these Lotus Assassins have kidnapped your Master Li and you're on a quest to rescue him.
You go from town to town by flying on a very... reliable... machine built by the mad inventor who is a possible companion but you'll never use cause he doesn't have a support style. This involves a little minigame which plays like the godawful arcade game whose name escapes me at the moment, you control a plane shooting at lots of little enemy planes. Anyway I hate it but I'm sure a lot of people who like that game will absolutely love it. For the people like me this minigame is completely skippable.
Special mention for a character that only appears for a few minutes, Roderick Ponce von Fontlebottom the Magnificent Bastard. He is voiced by John Cleese and is guaranteed to at least put a smile on your face with his absolutely ridiculous dialogue.
And finally the combat. It's definitely wuxia, there's only one ranged weapon in the entire game and it's strong but sooo slow and in a game that's all about speed that isn't a great thing. You'll learn to use support styles, at first Heavenly Wave, to disable your enemies before switching to attack styles (my personal favourite being Leaping Tiger or staff). Eventually you'll get some transformation styles which will help you with the two fights I mentioned as being annoying as hell (you'll know them when you see them). Magic styles aren't very good, my personal favourite is Stone Immortal for Open Palm or Tempest for Closed Fist.