Jade Empire - SE Review @ RPG Codex

Jade empire lasted me 14 hours. The combat system was one of the most boring and repetitive I have had the displeasure of using. Full of crappy level scaling, you are actually better off in the long term if you don't do all the quests. At least it didn't have randomly generated items, because it didn't have any items :lol: I might have enjoyed the story more if I hadn't of played KotOR 1 and 2.

edit: I also can't stand the trend where they (bioware) love to have romances in their games. It's a bloody videogame not a damn romance novel. I was banging the "escape" key to no avail during that scene (I knew I shouldn't have selected those conversation options - but I was hoping I would get some benefit to my character)

aries100 said:

Bioware making the game more about the party than the player's character (and yes I did mean single player pc, where you only have control of one character, like Daggerfall etc.) To me, this is the feature, or trade mark, of Bioware, that you have friends with which you travel, and the story unfolds just as much around the party as it does around the player's character (or the avatar, the pc).

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But there have been different approaches to this. The Baldur's Gate series and Neverwinter Nights, for instance, don't focus on this as much as Knights or Jade Empire. To me, the difference has been quite noticeable - whereas companions in Baldur's Gate had their place, their specific situations and interactions, in Knights and Jade these interactions are almost suffocating. They're everywhere, they happen all the time and obfuscate much of the sense of personal freedom and importance of the main character. It was not as troubling in their first games.

rp said:

and just spawn the potential hetero and homosexual relationship characters in a cramped hallway so they can ask you whose heart you *really* want. I’m not kidding, they actually spawned all three of the romance possibilities despite my male PC not being involved in a homosexual relationship; though looking back, I guess a name like Vigorous Wang gets the wrong kind of attention.

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There's gay romance in Jade Empire? That's the last straw in Bio's writing before becoming borderline retarded. Did Gaider really write that shit?

Thanks for the good review rp.

An entertaining, detailed and honest review. Good job, Role Player.

Thank you

While I don't like the Codex forums, I have always found their reviews and articles to be excellent. I may not always agree with those articles, etc, but then that is to be expected. After all, I frequently try to be controversial in the pieces I write. (Stay tuned for the Watch's review of NWN 2 coming soon!!) Disagreement is good, as it promotes discussion and debate about the games which helps inform the buying public.

I can't get into this game at all. I played it for about an hour and I found it to be pretty boring. Bioware has a formula that has grown stale, especially when it comes to NPC's and dialog. One thing that I never realized while playing Kotor was how much the Star Wars license added to the game to make it so good. Bioware basically copy-and-pasted the dark side/light side points into Jade Empire and it just isn't interesting to me.

Jade Empire screams "missed opportunity". There's an appealing setting, a solid (though unspectacular) combat model, and a morality system that actually tries a different approach. But as you've said, they seemed to just run a design template and aplly these interesting elements into it. This results in the game's main pitfall: the concept is appealing but the execution is severely underplayed.