Finished Jade Empire. It's a fun enough game for a single play through. Took me ~ 15hours to complete, I don't think I've finished all available quests, but I'd say about 80% or so of all quests.
The game has terrible pacing issue. The first chapter is mind numbingly boring, things start to pick up slowly in the second chapter, and the game peaks at the third chapter. From here on, the game/story progresses so fast, the remaining 4 chapters were over in a few hours (I think roughly about 2.5 hours). Also, too many cut scenes towards the end.
Some quests are quite well-written, but overall very predictable. The world and lore didn't really draw me in. The people within Jade Empire is so boring (including the companions you travel with), I found the arrogant snob from the "Western/foreign" culture who wants to educate the boring "Eastern peasants" the most interesting character of all.
The story was ok - if I went into this without knowing the "big surprise" plot twist, maybe I would have been more impressed, but even so, the events leading up to that point was so underwhelming and told very poorly in my opinion.
The combat is RT, so there is not much "tactic" involved. You just need to time the attack or dodge/block and switch the fighting style as some enemies have immunity to certain "school" of fighting style. In the early game, the combat is really boring but gets more fun as you learn/unlock more fighting style.
As I mentioned earlier, the game is very short (~15 hours for me). I personally didn't mind it - any longer, it would have dragged on and I would have lost interest.
The game has quite a lot of similarities to Bioware's other games around that era, like KotOR and Mass Effect. Personally, I enjoyed JE more than KotOR. Although the JE universe failed to draw me in, I still found it more interesting than KotOR where the game assumes the player as SW fan.
I know some may disagree with me, but I really found the whole "Tho Fan" recording irritating and immersion breaking. While I found the "alien language" in KotOR annoying due to the same voice recording playing over and over, I could at least agree it "makes sense" for alien species to speak their own "foreign" language. With JE, my character is suppose to be able to understand "Tho Fan", so at least should be somewhat familiar with it, but it just sounded plain weird and silly on top of American/Canadian voice overs. Yes, the VO in general was really terrible in JE.
Overall though, I enjoyed it for what it is for $5 I've paid on GoG. I'd say if you are in a mood to play a game set in Eastern setting, grab it on sale and have a go. Not worth more than $5 though in my opinion.
@SpoonFULL; thought you might be interested to read this. Happy to provide more detail if you want