fter inaugurating a successful role-playing game in the Star Wars universe and licensing the technology for its equally popular sequel, developer Bioware have upgraded its graphics and sound engine to usher players east—as in the Far East—to a land known as the Jade Empire: a fantastical version of an ancient China that might have been, had its mythical stories been true.
Guided by the long arm of the Emperor Sun Hai, the Jade Empire has seemingly thrived, but tales are rampant of strange ghosts—spirits unable to rest and consequently troubling the living. Assuming the role of a more or less reluctant hero in the rural village of Two Rivers, players select a character based on abilities in body, mind and spirit. Health, focus and chi secondary abilities are derived from the primaries and directly affect fighting attributes and styles. Unlike Bioware's previous games, Jade Empire focuses heavily on action and introduces a real-time combat system that emphasizes specialization in various fighting styles. These include standard hand-to-hand and weapon techniques, extending to magic manipulation as well as the ability to physically change into assimilated spirit creatures and wield their special powers. Though the end finale is the same, players also have the option of pursuing the philosophy of "open palm" (benevolent, altruistic) or "closed first" (domineering, survivalist) based on conversation choices and behavior, which can subsequently impact quest results.
As players advance through the story, they can upgrade combat styles, choosing from more than two dozen, each with up to seven moves and adjustable attributes ranked in areas such as speed and power; with a winning marriage of styles, players can trigger powerful "harmonic" combos. While party members are accrued over the course of the story and fight alongside the main character, they cannot be "leveled up" and function as independent computer-controlled companions. Though Jade Empire is not Xbox Live-enabled, there is a limited-edition version of the game available (for the same price) that includes a special bonus starting character and various "making of" materials on a second DVD.
More action/adventure than RPG
Looking back at the glory days of the adventure genre with mainstays like King's Quest and Gabriel Knight, one can't help but notice the fascinating transformation of the contemporary "role-playing" game. Jade Empire bills itself as a role-playing game with action elements, which is true if one accepts the contemporary definition of an RPG—looking less than ever like the traditional RPG these days. Rather than create an open-ended world for players to roam through at will, Bioware have essentially stealth-rejuvenated the traditional adventure game, locking players into pure plot with little or no branching. Jade Empire curiously has more in common with The Longest Journey and Onimusha than either Baldur's Gate or Knights of the Old Republic. This, in other words, is "role-playing" on rails, which is bad if you're expecting KOTOR-cum-ancient-China, but actually not too shabby if you're a dyed-in-the-wool adventure aficionado with a thing for resplendent detail and rich background material. In short, adventure gaming never looked (or played) so good.
Certainly players have come to expect high-quality character-tinkering draped in lavish albeit linear storylines from the company that rewrote the book on the RPG when it released the fateful and much-lauded Baldur's Gate in 1999. Jade Empire strips most of the tinkering found in those games and replaces it with significantly more dialogue sequences. A typical hour spent playing Jade Empire consists of running a short distance from point A to point B, talking for dozens of minutes to various people, possibly jogging back to point A, handling a few "delivery-boy" errands and fighting in real time. This is a game for players that prefer two things: prohibitive narrative reins and considerable fists-a-flying.
Jade Empire does fighting acceptably, though not nearly as well as it should have. One might think this is finally a chance to go "wire-fu" a la Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in a video game. Alas, for all the ado made of the fully motion-captured animation technology (and attention paid to much of Hong Kong cinema), most battles consist of striking the enemy, jumping over (and behind) and striking again. Because of a fairly bad camera system, as well as a tendency for the frame rate to jerk—a lot—combat doesn't keep pace with the game's otherwise terrific production values. The various fighting styles add some tactical depth, but the rapid and sometimes camera-blunderous pace of combat fails to capture the balletic essence of a Woo-ping Yuen (Iron Monkey) or Siu-Tung Ching (Hero, House of Flying Daggers). Fans of Prince of Persia's much more sophisticated pirouetting may find themselves yawning.
On the upside, Jade Empire tells a delicious story—for a video game—that's only exceeded by its exotic graphical engine and period-allusive soundtrack. An incredible amount of work went into putting this package together, and there are certainly a lot of reasons to get excited about skipping through a magical, ancient faux-China, leash or no leash. There's not much point fussing over what might have been, and Jade Empire is easy to recommend to fans of high-quality adventure games who don't mind a healthy dosage of kung-fu action.
I'm finally tired of Bioware's plot-in-noose storytelling, but I'm still a sucker for exotic locales and that lovely, lovely music.
—Matt
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