It’s trouble-time in ancient, mythical China once again. A dark, demonic power is on the rise, the gods are in a state of unrest, and angry undead spirits are ravaging the lands, searching desperately for a way to end their torment. Who else would be a prime candidate for saving the Empire but an innocent young student training at the quiet martial arts school of Two Rivers, unaware of the adventure fate has in mind for him? Jade Empire is a new RPG from Bioware (a name synonymous with the phrases like “awesome RPG” and “game of the year”) that takes the basic established concept from their previous release of Knights of the Old Republic and takes it in a new, more action-oriented direction. Given how “new direction” is a term that can send fanboys-aplenty into something of a tizzy, a peek at how this game holds up under scrutiny is definitely warranted.

Like typical RPGs, Jade Empire begins by giving players the chance to define their character in the game, either through a pre-assigned configuration, or by customizing his or her basic statistics. However, thanks to the way the cutscenes and certain game events are set up, players are a lot more limited in choosing their character’s appearance than they were in KOTOR, and are essentially limited between several pre-assigned appearance packages (complete with gender, clothing, and hair selection being a static part of the selected model). A bit of a let-down, but as I said, the way the approach taken to the game doesn’t seem to permit vast appearance customization anyways. In any case, once an appearance is chosen players can either go with a pre-assigned set of statistics or customize their own. Three primary stats round off a character’s abilities: “Body”, “Spirit”, and “Mind”, all of which affect a number of secondary traits (mainly the number of health / magic points the player will have, as well as his charismatic potential). After that, its off to the “Styles” dialogue to pick two attack styles the player will prefer (“styles” basically act as “weapons” in the game, and players can have a maximum of four on quick-access at any time with the rest stored on stand-by in their inventory), and that’s it: you’re done and ready to begin the campaign.

Really though, while Jade Empire’s RPG aspects might be only skin-deep and the gameplay heavily slanted towards direct action rather than number-crunching, that hardly makes it a bad game. One of KOTOR’s leading traits was its involving and insanely personal storyline, and Bioware has naturally carried on by producing another epic plot for Jade Empire, rich with history, politics, and events of both natural and unnatural proportions. The player’s role in the story may be a point of contention for some who don’t want to go through KOTOR’s “prominent figure with a huge destiny and no memory of his past” style of presentation once again (Jade Empire effectively does the same thing), but I personally don’t consider a repetition of this approach to be a problem given how well it’s done. Indeed, your role in the game’s storyline starts off as an unassuming student under the guidance of Master Li, but events quickly come together that sends the player out amongst the empire to unlock the secrets of his past so he can preserve the future, and ultimately save the Jade Empire from a dark corruption lurking within. Okay, a bit cliché, but the presentation is certainly solid.

The average player’s time with the game is divvied up into three general categories: Exploration, dialogue, and, of course, beating people up with super kung-fu. The first two elements are effectively synonymous with what players experienced with KOTOR, and players are given the opportunity to explore their environments for assorted loot, treasure, and any other junk they can pilfer from the homes of the peasant population. Some caskets and “treasure chests” in general are booby-trapped, which is where a player’s “Focus” stat comes into play for determining the success of an evasion. There’s also plenty to explore in the game, although a player’s exploration paths are basically limited to a kind of “free-form” linear pathing. Again, this harks back to KOTOR’s familiar design of layouts that are strictly regulated, yet still offer enough side-paths to make poking around worthwhile – just don’t expect a freakishly huge non-linear world to wander around in like Morrowind.

Dialogue is of course another integral part of Jade Empire, and not surprisingly there is a huge amount of it to go around. Entering a new area for the first time in fact will yield NPCs literally almost every few feet who always have something significant to say, and while conversing with most of these people is hardly mandatory, the sheer number of side-quests and interesting conversations that can be withdrawn from these interactions make them worthwhile (plus, some of the special charismatic dialogue choices can be hilarious). Of course, the big thing about Jade Empire that prevents it from simply becoming “medieval KOTOR” is the combat system, which is no longer based on simple number-crunching. The action-oriented approach to gameplay the developers have taken now depend on both the player’s reflexes and his sense of strategy to out-maneuver and out-fight his opponents.

Combat in Jade Empire is real-time, and when a battle starts up the player character pulls out his weapon (or his fists) and orients towards the nearest target. From here, combat is a very straightforward affair, although hardly basic. Movement around or closer/farther away from a target is manipulated by the left analogue stick, and attacks are carried out simply by jabbing the A button. Holding down B invokes a defensive state where he’ll take little-to-no damage from standard attacks; although a power-attack (X button) can still overwhelm this when enemies are attempting to block your own assaults. The B button can also be used to roll sideways or leap towards/over or away from targets, letting players add a great degree of maneuverability and unpredictability to their attacks. By making use of “Focus Mode” (which is basically a stat-limited form of “bullet time”, accessible by the Y button), a personal healing mantra (which drains a player’s “Chi” meter when in use), and the “Chi Attack” function (which augments all of the player’s attacks and adds a bunch of extra damage, again at the cost of the “Chi” meter), players have a wide variety of options at their disposal for dispatching enemies. And as mentioned earlier, many differing combat “styles” are available for both unarmed and weapon-oriented players, with a surprising number of cool and unique attacks at a player’s fingertips – literally. Examples include the “Thousand Cuts” style, which assaults an opponent with numerous punches and jabs that are individually weak but keep him off-balance, the “Staff” style, which pulls out a large stick of smacking with a long reach which excels against armed enemies that might be otherwise difficult to get close to, and “Spirit Thief”, which drains an enemy’s Chi and gives it to you. There are even some cool “transformation” styles which physically alter the player’s appearance into a given demonic creature, potentially making him many times more powerful.

All of this variety sounds really great and cool, but they sadly culminate into something I found ultimately useless for 90% of the situations I ran into thanks to how incredibly easy the game’s combat becomes once you discover the tricks to it. My own character was a little weak in the “Body” and “Spirit” stats, but he made up for it with an enlarged Focus meter, which let me enable “Focus Mode” for very long periods of time. Because I was able to run around like crazy and smack the hell out of the enemy with rapid attacks while they were slowed to a crawl, I could basically take down entire groups of enemies without ever getting touched once. But even without abusing Focus Mode, the ability to make my character jump around the clumsy enemies with such swiftness by dodging around them (it’s incredibly easy to wait for an enemy to begin an attack animation, jump behind him, and bean him on the back of the head while that same animation is still in the process of finishing) ensured that the only enemies that truly ever gave me any trouble were boss monsters that had some crazy gimmick to make them immune to my usual attack patterns.

Granted, I mind combat that is too easy much less than I mind combat that ends up too hard, but as the game’s storyline so strongly promotes, there must be a balance in all things, and Jade Empire’s combat system certainly doesn’t feel balanced (although another complaint I have regarding how hard it can be to select the targets I want in the middle of a fight sometimes helps artificially inflate the difficulty curve a bit). My only major consolation on the matter is that my own character’s god-like fighting potential caused the subsequent NPC conversations wooing over my awesome talent to make a little more sense.

On the topic of graphics engine, Jade Empire is very generous with gratuitous displays of artistic greatness, and takes every opportunity to show off stunning vistas laden with grass and trees that sway quietly in the breeze, amazing backdrops with impressive sunsets and waterfalls, and other forms of impressive splendor. The animations have been created in a very fluid manner and really have a chance to shine during combat (although additional effort has also been put into giving the emotional expressions of NPCs a bit of extra flair). Framerates stay consistently high, and each sector in the game is surprisingly large (some of the areas are just plain huge), but loading times for each area can be as high as 10-20 seconds – not a horrible factor, but it just goes to show that all the game’s detail isn’t simply free.

With everything it has to offer, Jade Empire is a very solid game that I feel should satisfy RPG and action fans alike. Granted, the lack of indepth stat-management or extensive character customization may offset hardcore RPG fans, but those looking for an action game that offers much, much more than simple “action” will definitely want to check this out. The campaign, with all its dialogue / character choices, skill sets, cutscenes, side quests, and plot twists is more than long enough to delight people in search of a refreshing singleplayer experience, and at its core this game just really god damned fun. The only negatives I’ve found are that the side quests tend to get slightly repetitive after some time (after being sent aimlessly through a town to satisfy the demands of your millionth angsty ghost, the process may get a mite tiresome) and, as I said, the combat in general is just a little too easy-going at times, but those are honestly the only significant issues that spring to mind when I try to think of something I dislike about Jade Empire. I think it’s safe to say that Bioware has churned up another winner with its latest RPG title, and I find it refreshing to see that some developers can still keep the magic going.