Great RPG that starts out slow but finishes very strong.
Took me a while to play Jade Empire but I finally got around to it and I don't regret my choice. Most people I talked to told me that the game was good but not memorable, well I’m here to disagree because I found this game VERY memorable.
Most say that the gameplay sucks, and in a way they would be right. It is very repetitive, all of the styles have only a couple of attacks each (strong attack, normal attack), which can make combat grow old fast when you have to rely on only one or two styles throughout the game. However, there are a LOT of styles in this game. There are four martial styles, four or five weapon styles, a whole bunch of support styles and also a whole bunch of magical styles. So even though each style isn't fully developed, you do have a bunch of them so that really helps. And in a way, the repetitiveness of the gameplay is a good thing because the battles don't last long. And they still have that epic feeling; beating up someone with three moves feels pretty similar to beating up someone with 25 if you ask me. On top of that, I’ve never been one to complain about battle systems being too easy in RPG's. I play for the story mainly, so if I can get rid of the battles quickly that's just okay with me.
The graphics in this game are amazing, what can I say? The only thing is that the character models could have been better, after playing RE4 I know that last-gen could dish out some amazing character models. Aside from that this game looks awesome.
The voice acting in this game is very good, nothing bad to say against it. Also, the music is really suited to the ancient Asia setting and some of the songs are actually pretty nice (the Jade Empire main theme is really cool, and they use it sometimes during some important cutscenes in the game and it really works well.) I hesitated to give this game a 10 in sound because I usually only give 10's if the soundtrack is listenable, that means that if a game has superb atmospheric music but nothing that could be listened to on it's own then it wouldn't get a 10 from me. Jade Empire has mostly atmospheric music (like most games these days), but it does have a couple of nice songs so I decided to slack a bit in that regard and give it a 10.
The game is pretty short, took me something like 20 hours to go through it the first time and that is with completing pretty much every sidequest in the game. There is some good replay value here though with the light side and dark side paths as well as the whole bunch of relationships you can have. If you are a man you can have a relationship with two of the girls and one guy (and I think you can have a relationship with the two girls at the same time), and if you picked a girl you can have a relationship with one girl and one guy (not sure if you can be with both though this time around). Also, the fun thing is, if you're in a relationship with a good character but yours is evil, you can influence the other character to become evil too which is pretty cool. Also, every time you play you can try out different styles which would make every playthrough feel somewhat different than the last one. Overall I feel that there is good replay value but the game still lasts only 20 hours on the first run through so it should go down a lot for every subsequent playthroughs, spoiling the replay value somewhat.
You have to bear in mind that unlike most RPG's, in Jade Empire you're out to only save your country, not the universe nor the world. The scope does feel smaller than in other games of its type (KOTOR for example) and it also probably explains why this game takes 20 hours or so to go through. Honestly I feel that the length of this game is just right, if the developers had decided to add more content to this game it might have felt like filler and we sure don't want that, do we?
All in all I was very impressed with Jade Empire and I am eagerly awaiting its sequel.
