Jade Empire: Special Edition Review

Introduction

At time of writing, if you look on the main page of our website, you’ll find a poll asking you to select what RPG developers should be spending the most time on. With a fairly dominant 57%, “story/dialogue” is winning. If you look over at BioWare’s website, you’ll discover a nearly identical poll. There, with an impressive 47%, “involving storyline and numerous sidequests” is the winner. In both polls, categories for things like graphics, equipment, skills and monsters are getting almost no play at all, which seems strange to me, because those are the areas upon which marketing departments, if not the developers themselves, seem to focus. You’ve seen the ads: 5000 monsters! 2000 skills! Over one million unique pieces of equipment! And, oh yeah, an engrossing story… that spans two dozen beautifully rendered continents! Too often, when I play a role-playing game, if there’s any real story at all, it’s just enough to get you from your starting village to the final boss battle, and little thought or ingenuity is put into it.

Which brings me to Jade Empire: Special Edition. This is a game that should be a good test for the people who participated in the polls. It has the best story I’ve seen in a game since Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003), but it has very little in the way of equipment, distinct enemies, or character development, and while its graphics are nice, they’re not exactly going to wow anybody.

And so, this makes me wonder: which is going to sell better, Jade Empire: Special Edition or the next story-challenged Diablo-style action-adventure that rolls off the press? Given the polls, you’d think that Jade Empire would sell tons more, but I don’t know. This is one of those questions where I wish that game sales information were in any way possible to find, because I really have no idea which way the market might lean. Do people really look for a good story when they purchase a game, or is that just what they say they look for, when it’s really the pretty pictures that grab their attention? Perhaps those marketing departments have it right, but I hope not.

The Special Edition

Anyway, before I meander too far away from the topic at hand, let me get back to actually reviewing Jade Empire: Special Edition. The Special Edition is not really a new version of the game. It’s not an expansion pack, and it’s not trying to be, like The Lost Chapters were for Fable. It’s basically a straight translation of the Xbox version of the game (released in 2005) into a PC version.

Of course, there are a couple of additions. There are two new fighting styles (viper and iron palm) and two new enemies (rhino demon and ghost lord), and there’s a new (jade master) difficulty level (which allows you to play the campaign again with a character who has already finished it), but that’s about it. All of the other changes have to do with modifying the game so that it looks and works better on the PC, and they include things like higher resolutions, more hotkeys, more autosaves, and mouse support. That is, unless you really loved the game, if you’ve already played it on the Xbox, there isn’t much reason to buy it for the PC.

The Story

Jade Empire takes place in the Jade Empire, a fictional land that bears more than a slight resemblance to ancient China (among other things, it has problems with horselords to the north, and a visitor from the far west sounds suspiciously like John Cleese). The empire is run by an ambitious emperor, who recently ended a drought just by commanding it to stop. However, he hasn’t been seen in some time, and in his place, his enforcer, called Death’s Hand, and his private army, called the Lotus Assassins, have taken center stage. Given their names, it’s probably not a surprise that the empire isn’t in a golden age and that the peasants are very careful about what they say in public.

As the game opens up, you take on the role of a student at a small martial arts academy. One day, bandits attack the academy, and, after you’ve helped repulse them, the master takes you aside and informs you that you have a great destiny ahead of you. Soon enough, the Lotus Assassins strike at the academy. They kidnap the master, and you chase after them, first with the goal of rescuing the master, but then with the idea of dealing with Death’s Hand and his assassins, and putting the empire back to rights. Along the way, you meet up with some companions who offer to help you, you find that the dead aren’t staying as dead as they should, and you get into a tremendous number of fights.

Character Development

When BioWare developed Jade Empire, they took sort of a minimalist approach to character development. Each character only has three ability scores — body, spirit, and mind — and each score affects a lot of things. For example, the spirit score affects how much chi you have, and chi can be used to power spells, add damage to melee attacks, and heal your character. Similarly, the mind score affects how much “focus” you have, and focus powers some weapon attacks, and you can use it to slow down time during combat. That is, all three scores are important to all classes of characters, and you have to be careful about how you spend the ability points you receive each time you gain a level.

Another thing that defines characters is the use of “styles.” There are many types of styles in the game, including magic styles that allow you to cast spells, martial styles that allow you to fight using unarmed combat, and weapon styles that allow you to use weapons. You can only use one style at a time, but you’re allowed to hotkey the styles so that you can quickly switch between them. Some enemies are immune to certain styles — spirits can’t be damaged by weapon styles, for example — and so, as with the ability scores, you have to be careful about how you spend the style points you receive each time you gain a level. If you only put the points into one style, then you’ll be really good with that style, but you’ll be in trouble if you face an enemy that you can’t damage with it.

Finally, you’ll also run into a slight amount of equipment. You won’t be picking up a variety of rings, boots, and helmets, and you won’t be wearing body armor at all. Instead, you’ll only be able to use gems and techniques. Near the start of the game, you’ll find a special dragon amulet that you’ll be able to put gems inside. Gems can increase ability scores, change how often enemies drop power-ups, and provide other sorts of bonuses, and the nice thing about them is that you can move them into and out of the amulet at any time. The techniques are permanent bonuses, but once you’ve picked one up, you won’t be able to get rid of it. Most techniques are positive, but every so often you’ll get stuck with a real stinker, too.

The Engine

Jade Empire uses an engine fairly similar to the ones employed by the Knights of the Old Republic games. Just like in those other games, you control a single character, and while you’ll have a companion with you for most of the game, you won’t be able to give the companion any orders, except to set whether it helps you attack enemies or simply acts in a supporting role. As an example, Dawn Star, the first companion who joins you, can fight with a long sword (attack), or she can help regenerate your chi during battles (support).

Strangely, the camera in the game is fixed directly behind your character, and it always points horizontally. You can move the camera up and down a little, but you can’t zoom the view in or out, and you can’t rotate or otherwise change the viewing angle. This is sort of an awkward system (if nothing else, it means that your character is always partially blocking your view), but it’s strange because this wasn’t the system used in the Xbox version of the game. From my understanding, in the Xbox version, you could move the camera around, so I have no idea why they’d make it more restrictive in the PC version.

Otherwise, the controls are about what you’d expect. You move your character with the WASD keys, and you steer with the mouse. When combat starts up, you use the left mouse button to make a normal attack (which depends on the style that you’re using), you use the spacebar or middle mouse button to block (which protects against normal attacks), and you use the right mouse button to initiate a power attack (which bypasses blocking). This is a fairly common scheme, and it works about as well as ever. There are also various modes that you can enter (such as chi and focus mode), and you can evade (that is, dive out of the way) by double tapping one of the direction keys.

When I played through the campaign using the default (master) difficulty, I found the combat to be pretty easy. Using my standard (swing wildly until everything is dead) strategy, I got through most of the battles without any problems, and I rarely had to change modes, styles, or even block. However, when I moved up to the (grand master) difficulty, things got much tougher. I had to use more strategy and pay more attention, but even so, each battle turned into an iffy proposition, and I had to do so much loading that the campaign slowed to a crawl. I’m usually good but not great with action games, so my guess is that regardless of your ability, you’ll find a difficulty setting that will give you an enjoyable experience.

Gameplay

As I mentioned way back in the introduction, Jade Empire is a game that relies on and devotes a lot of time to its story. This can be good news or bad news, depending on what you’re looking for in a role-playing game. For example, there are a few points in the game where you have to listen to a couple of hours’ worth of dialogue, with little or no combat in between to break it up. The dialogue is well acted, so it’s not a chore to listen to it, but there’s just a lot of it, and even I (with my preference for an involving story) got a little antsy.

I think it’s safe to say that the dialogue could have been edited down to a more manageable level. Many characters need their dialogue to set up their background story or to connect you to what’s going on in the campaign, but there are also a lot of secondary characters who get full dialogue trees, and there just isn’t any reason why you should need to ask them about their thoughts on the emperor and the empire (among other things), only to get basically the same response each time.

It took me about 30 hours to play the campaign, and I’d say that at least half of that time went to listening to dialogue, which surprised me given Jade Empire‘s Xbox origins and my assumption that console games tended to be more hack and slash (which is one of the reasons why I don’t play console games). The other half of my playing time went to combat.

Combat in Jade Empire is basically a succession of duels. Whenever your character gets close to an enemy, the game switches to combat mode, and then you stay in combat mode (which is the only time when you can attack anything) until your enemies are dead. The battles are usually small in scale, with you facing between one and four opponents. Jade Empire isn’t a game like, say, Dungeon Lords, where you face an endless stream of enemies. Generally, you fight a small battle, talk to some people or solve a quest, heal yourself up, and then repeat.

The battles themselves work fairly well, but they’re not spectacular. There isn’t a wide variety of enemies, and most of the enemies fight in about the same way, so you’re rarely forced to change your tactics. This changes for certain bosses, but the bosses are few and far between. Fortunately, because the emphasis of the game is not on combat, fights are rare enough that they don’t wear out their welcome and become boring, and I generally enjoyed trying out new styles and beating the crap out of random bandits and spirits.

Finally, there are also numerous quests to complete in Jade Empire, both of the required and optional variety. The game introduces you to the concept of Open Palm versus Closed Fist, which is its way of handling alignment (Open Palm is basically good while Closed Fist is basically evil), and so you’re given some options for how to deal with people and how to solve certain quests. The quests work well enough, but I felt like I had seen a lot of them before. For example, there’s an arena that you can fight in, there are bounties to collect where the criminals being hunted aren’t necessarily as evil as they’re being portrayed, and you’ll find a person being framed for a crime and have to clear his name.

More unique is the mini-game in Jade Empire. The technology level of the empire includes gunpowder, and that allows for lots of odd contraptions, including flying vehicles. At various points in the campaign, you have to fly between places (that’s how you move between cities), and, of course, if you have a flying vehicle, then the bad guys have them, too, and way more of them, and you have to shoot them down. This results in a scrolling shoot-em-up mini-game similar to the old arcade game 1942. I enjoyed this mini-game more than, say, swoop racing, and it has the benefit that most of the flights are optional, so you can take it or leave it.

Conclusion

Overall, I enjoyed Jade Empire: Special Edition. I didn’t love it, but I liked it. I think the game does all of the things you want to see in a role-playing game — it tells an interesting story, it gives you options in quests, it looks nice, and it rewards exploration — and it succeeds despite its origins and the developer’s choice to leave in the clunky menu-driven interface and to overly restrict the camera. I encountered no bugs of any consequence in the game (which is pretty rare these days for any game, let alone a role-playing game), and the 30-hour campaign has enough options to it that you might want to try playing it twice.

I think Jade Empire: Special Edition has a lot of parallels to Fable: The Lost Chapters. Both were developed for the Xbox and then made their way to the PC. Both have sub-par, console-style interfaces. In both you control a single character and use roughly the same control schemes. And in both the emphasis is on story and quests rather than on character development options. My guess is that anybody who enjoyed Fable would also enjoy Jade Empire, and Jade Empire should also appeal to the less twitchy-fingered players of role-playing games.