Played on:
Xbox
Bioware is a unique game developer. Owned by no major publisher even amidst the huge consolidation of the industry, they have been working on titles for other companies' major intellectual properties since inception. First, they worked on the Dungeons & Dragons-licensed Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights games. Then it was onto a Star Wars property with the hugely successful Knights of the Old Republic. But with the success of all of their gmes so far, Bioware's decided that while making games for other people was probably a lot of fun, enough's enough. It was time for them to branch out on their own.
Jade Empire talks philosophically about breaking free of bonds and forging your own destiny, but the game's plot almost seems to represent what Bioware themselves are doing with this game. This is their first game based on their own completely unique world, with no licenses to worry about or major companies hovering over them, approving every line of dialogue. Unlike with KOTOR, Lucasarts is not breathing down their neck this time, telling Bioware what does and does not fit in a Star Wars game. And anyone who's played either KOTOR title knows that if Bioware or Obsidian Entertainment had had full creative control for those games, they'd likely be far better than what was delivered. This all adds up to a hope that Bioware can finally stretch their creative abilities to their fullest extent. And in many ways, this is exactly what happened.
Action-RPG titles nowadays are usually made up of about 60-70% action, with the rest of the game being some light RPG elements. Sure, you can level up, get new equipment, and pick from a basic tree of skills, but much of what makes RPG fans what they are gets left out. On top of that, the action is generally devoid of any type of tactics, where some simple button mashing will do most of the time. With Jade Empire, though, Bioware's done their best to make the action easy to understand early on, but the complexity increases as you progress. Sure, the gameplay mechanics are brought to much more of an action-oriented level, but this is not a Dark Alliance game - the cohesive world, highly imaginative visuals, days worth of well-written and acted dialogue, and complex tactical options are still here. On top of that, the action itself is unique, and if you move to the hardest difficulty level, it becomes a much more interesting game from a tactics standpoint.
At first, Jade Empire seems to be a pretty simplistic game in an admittedly beautiful world. I was not impressed with what Bioware had done during my first couple of hours with the game, as the fighting seemed way too simplistic and many of the early characters seemed one-sided and dull. Each of your fighting styles only has three basic moves: tap A for a three or four hit combo that never really changes, hit X for a power attack that punches through enemy's defenses, and press A+X for an area-effect attack. That's it. Tap the Y button to go into the slow-motion "Focus" mode, or the Black button to use your mana to power up your attacks - more tactical options are nice, but it doesn't add anything truly satisfying to how the fights look or feel.
What does add to this, though, is the massive number of styles you can use and switch between to beat your enemies to a pulp. While you can use basically any two simple styles to get through the whole game on the medium difficulty, that won't fly in Grandmaster difficulty, and it's just not that fun to fight that plainly anyway. Players will find themselves experimenting on their own, seeing which types of styles (there are martial, weapon, magic, and support styles, and several specific ones in each class) are more fun to use and are more effective when put together sequentially.
My first impression of the character creation was also negative, as it seems really shallow. You can't customize the look of your character at all, and the initial options for changing the starting styles from the start are also limited. But Bioware did both of these things for a reason. First, let's think about KOTOR for a minute - all three classes for each gender had the same body type, and all you could really do was switch between a dozen or so faces for each sex. That was it. Here, you get six characters to choose from (seven if you have the Limited Edition version), each of which have vastly different looks. They're all preset to start with different abilities and styles, but there's nothing inherently set in any character - if you customize your character's abilities how you want, then all you really are doing during character creation is picking how you want to look. Some quests and certain opportunities change depending on your sex, but otherwise the game's the same.
This has a rather nice side effect that I didn't actually notice until I was a few hours into the game: Bioware has made movie cutscenes for each of seven main characters, and each of these cutscenes has certain complex animations that you generally don't see in a cutscene drawn in the game engine. Anyone who has studied the cutscenes in Bioware's past games might have noticed an almost complete lack of unique character animations - now, we get to see something that's much more like a real movie with the character you picked to start. It makes your character more believable, like someone who was the only one meant to be there. You're not just an everyman with one of twelve faces: you're Monk Shen, or Radiant Jen Zi, fighting through tyranny (or causing it if you really want to) and taking on the whole Jade Empire if you have to.
One bad side effect of this is that your character's equipment will always look the same. The various things you can pick up and use are part of an amulet that the plot kind of wraps around, which isn't visible on your character. While you'll need to pick and choose what goes into the amulet out of all the upgrades you find, it's not like putting on a new piece of armor or upgrading your lightsaber. In fact, it's just not as cool as doing any of those things. At least the combat styles you can choose from (and you can switch to literally any of them in mid-fight, even if only four can be quickly selected at once) increase the many ways you can dish out damage in fights.
