After travelling last week, I felt the need to just sit around and decompress on the weekend. To that end, I picked up Jade Empire Special Edition for the PC on Friday night. After about 25 hours of playing between Friday and Sunday night, I finished it, and I have to say it was a very satisfying experience.
The engine the game is built on is basically the same as the one used for the Star Wars: Knights of the old Republic games (also from BioWare), which many of you know I thoroughly enjoyed. The graphics for Jade Empire are, as you would expect, an improvement on the earlier games, but they’re not in the same class as Oblivion. You still get the feeling that the world is a series of path’s that you can follow, rather than a wide-open sandbox. Somehow though, this doesn’t detract from the experience.
What really makes these games work for me is the combination of epic story telling, deep meaningful characters, and a strong sense that your moral choices (and not just your speed on the gamepad or mouse buttons) actually effect the outcome of the story. I have always said that the first KotoR game was a better Star Wars movie than all of Episodes 1, 2 and 3. To me, Jade Empire is like a cross between a martial arts movie and Chinese opera where you get to play the action hero, the tragic anti-hero, or anything in between. Love, loss, triumph, sacrifice, humour, all there with you at the center.
A strong recommendation to any RPG gamer who wants to know just how good the stories told by games can be.
If you decide to play, let me know whether you follow the way of the open palm or the closed fist. I’m thinking of playing through it again (yes, right away) to see how some of the other choices would turned out.
Caveat: One thing to watch out for with Jade Empire is that it does require a certain non-trivial amount of manual dexterity. You can definitely feel the console roots of the game — it was originally an xbox360 title — both in the player reaction time requirements and in the inclusion of flying “mini games” that are (thankfully) skippable.