BioWare doing a kung-fu RPG? Sounds superb – another departure from all the Dungeons and Dragons RPGs. I can only hope that more companies do this too, especially after Knights of the Old Republic showed that the genre could leave the land of the +3 Frost Mace and benefit from it. Jade Empire feels familiar at the very beginning, should you have played the aforementioned KOTOR, but in reality they share very little.
In Jade Empire you play a kung-fu student that is close to the end of their training – you are told that you have a great destiny, but that destiny is up to you to discover. Obviously then something happens and you are despatched off on your great adventure, and that's where I'm going to stop - one of the main expectations of any BioWare RPG is the deep story and the lore surrounding it, and Jade Empire definitely lives up to expectation. On your way you will learn a myriad of kung-fu styles and spiritual techniques, but you'll have to specialise at mastering a few, as well as choosing whether you will follow the 'way of the open palm' or the 'way of the closed fist'. More about that later.
The first thing to notice after getting into the game is the amount of detail in the environment - it's obvious that each area has had a lot of care to put into it. Close up the graphical quality of items isn't great, but the game has a beauty in the detail and styling of the environment. The musical score is very nice too, very high quality and original, as is the voice acting – the lines are all delivered with feeling and timing, and are mostly very well written. The bad side is that the frame rate can get a little choppy at times, and the loading times between areas are too long for my liking. The latter problem is not helped when you have a fight as soon as you enter an area – if you die you'll reload from your last save in the previous area, then have to move into the next area where you died and have to wait for that area to load - obviously this can get tedious if you decide to play on the hardest difficulty and find yourself dying regularly.
The difficulty is adjustable at any point in the game, so you shouldn't ever get stuck for long (as long as you're willing to admit to defeat when it gets too hard), which is especially useful as the game becomes somewhat easy when you have picked up one of the more powerful fighting techniques, and you may find yourself wanting a bit more of a challenge. Which leads me very nicely to the most controversial part of Jade Empire – the fighting. Jade Empire has a real time fighting system – A is a basic attack, which can be blocked by holding B, which in turn can be broken by the slower attack on the X button, although those attacks can be stopped by the basic attack – really it's the old game of paper, scissors, stone. If you're surrounded you can press X and A together to perform an attack that will knock back all your foes around you to gain some breathing space, and perhaps let you heal yourself with the white button. In the game menu you assign a fighting style to each direction on the D-pad, meaning that you can switch your style of fighting by simply pressing the appropriate direction. The trouble is I can't say that I enjoyed the fighting that much – it possesses neither the poise and skill requirement of your usual real time combat game, nor the tactical ability that a more generic RPG would require. The moves all look great as your character winds up another attack, but they don't seem to have the impact on your enemy that you would like to see (barring the harmonic combos, which cause a weak character to explode in a shower of blood, but are far too slow to use against powerful characters), plus because of the lack of variation in attacks for each style the animations just becomes tedious.
After you've gained enough experience fighting you can upgrade your character and choose to improve one or more of your fighting styles in various ways. You can also buy and acquire 'techniques' throughout the game, which are permanent changes to your character's stats, as well as equip various gems that you acquire to further enhance your character. It's simpler than you'd find in your generic RPG, but at the same time it forces you to make choices about how you want your character to improve – you won't have time to master every style in the game and so have to pick where you want to specialise. It's not the only game affecting choice you have to make either – like in Knights of the Old Republic, you'll have to make plenty of moral choices in the game, your decision on which will either cause you to become a follower of the 'way of the open palm' or the 'way of the closed fist'. The game initially presents these choices as a decision of how you want to lead your life – by being virtuous and helpful to the weak (open palm) or by making people prove their strength (closed fist). It's a minor grumble, but the choices you could make to push you towards the way of the closed fist seemed more plain evil than the philosophy suggested – I don't want to be nasty to the other characters, I just want to make them help themselves rather than relying on me to do it all for them, as the way of the closed fist philosophy is presented.
At the end of the day though, you should buy this game for the story and to enjoy the journey and interaction with the characters. On that point, the game isn't far from flawlessness. The combat is hugely disappointing though – I just can't see how something with this quality of production ended up with such a weak portion of the game. Maybe there is a future in it somewhere and it just needs some more work, but it certainly wouldn't put me off buying another BioWare game.
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