Jade Empire: Special Edition Review
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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 and 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, and 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.
