Jade Empire was a suprisingly good game, despite a few flaws.
So Jade Empire was a pretty good game, but with a few flaws that bugged me. The battle system just wasn't that good to begin with, there isn't much action, and the game was just extremely easy, that it only took a few hits to kill an enemy. Boss battles were pretty simple as well and easy to figure out. I was expecting a very open-ended game, but only 2 of the 7 chapters had any amount of freedom, everything else was linear. I also had issues with the camera and load times. The ending of the game was really really lame. This is just nitpicking I guess.
Otherwise, this was a fine game with a good story, impressive graphics, and a ton of fun sidequests to complete.
----------Battle System----------
Jade Empire is an action RPG. At the start of the game you have a few abilities, one Open Palm attack, and one Closed Fist attack. You later learn more skills, like weapons and summons. These attacks can be equipped on a fly with the D-Pad and changed depending on the situation. Some monsters are immune to certain attacks or vulnerable to others, so it's good to have a variety of moves equipped on your D-Pad quick list.
You can equip gems that boost your defense, magic and chi, along with your charm and other minor abilities.
You gain experience for killing monsters, but there's not much action in the game to be honest, so you'll mostly be gaining experience by doing sidequests. Sidequests give a TON of experience, so it's smart to do them. Each stage has a map, and sidequests and main quests are shown on the map with a Yellow Flag, so you can run around looking for these flags to start a sidequest. Most sidequests are fairly simple to figure out.
After you gain enough experience, you gain a level. You then have 3 points you can distribute among your HP, Chi or Focus points. Focus is a magic bar that gives you health, and Chi is the magic bar that lets you use magic attacks with your weapons, boost your strength or slows the game down to give you an edge over your enemies. After you're done with that, you can move into your "Attack list" and they'll give you points for you to distribute among aswell. Each Attack skill has three abilities you can boost over time with more skill points. It's a pretty simple concept.
Each attack by enemies are almost storyline related, so you mostly walk around unarmed, but then when monsters show up, you get into fight position. Monsters are VERY easy to dispose of, they only take a few kicks and they're dead, but they can block your attacks with a shield, but you can break the shield with a slower but more powerful single attack. One thing I hate about the battle system is how slow it is, and if you hit the attack button, your character will go into a slow combo attack and it will take him a few moments to get out of it, so he could be kicking at nothing for a few 15 seconds and you can't stop him. It's annoying.
----------Characters / Story----------
At the start of the game you get to pick which character you want. During the game, you get to pick your dialog branches, some are good choices and others are bad. They call this the Way of the Open Palm (the good path) or the Way of the Closed Fist (bad path). I played through the Open Palm path. Depending of what dialog you pick, you mold the story, so there was a ton of effort put into the story and dialog.
You play as a rookie monk training under his master, until a group of pirates show up terrorizing everything in their path. You end you fighting them off, but they end up later kidnapping your master, so your goal is to free your master from the evil gripe of "Death's Hand" and his assassins.
----------Graphics----------
The graphics are VERY good for a WRPG. The character models are very detailed, the dungeons are carefully crafted. The cutscenes look good, although they just look slightly more detailed than regular dialog scenes. The only gripe I have with the graphics is the lack of emotion given to characters during dialog scenes. Everyone looks like droids and that's not good. There's really no action in dialog scenes either, they just stand there, barely moving. Although in cutscenes the characters emote and show some movement, but these scenes are few and far between.
A few other problems is the crappy camera, you control it with the right analog stick, you can move the camera right left and up, but not down. Which is not that big of a deal, but a small annoyance. The biggest problem with the camera is when you're into a battle and the camera doesn't follow you, or takes way to long to follow you, and you're fighting offscreen. It's also very annoying.
The long load times are aggravating. Some loads can take up to 20 seconds to a full minute. It's cool that the worlds are fairly large, but we suffer with the intial long loads. The biggest problem overall with the loads is the Arena, because it loads before AND after a battle.
----------Sound----------
The music is very minimal, but gets slightly more intense before a battle. I enjoyed the music and how they don't pulverize you with it. The voice work is pretty good aswell, and there's ALOT of it.
----------World Map----------
The game is broken down into 7 Chapters, so the map is broken up a little bit. Chapter 1 is open ended to an extent, but once you leave it, you can't enter it again. Chapter 2 and 3 are open ended and you can travel between them through a sub-map. Chapter 4-7 are linear and short, and you can't travel between them. You get a plane in the game, this is what you travel between Chapter 2 and 3 with, and to travel to new chapters in the game. You fly it in a mini-game, kinda like how Kingdom Hearts throws you into a mini-game to travel between worlds. The game is like a classic overhead shoot'em up space fighter game, you can skip it at anytime though, so you're not forced to play it.
----------Time to Complete Game----------
17:37
Yeah, not a very long game. I did most, if not all sidequests I could find. The ending was very short, but the credits were about 10 times longer than the weak ending. Not sure what was up with that.
