Xbox Originals Review

Jade Empire Review:- Epic Xbox Original release

Master Li battles the Lotus Assassins

by GrathiusXR

©2008 Arthur Kotsopoulos

An exceptional RPG available for the 1st-Gen Xbox is now readily available as an Xbox Original via Xbox 360 Marketplace, for 1200 MSP. BioWare’s Jade Empire is an RPG of epic proportions and a game that any serious fan of the genre must experience at some stage or another, as while it may not be the best, it surely is one of the more interesting and engaging additions to the genre.

The game starts off with you having to select from a list of 6 warriors, who you may wish to use during this epic journey. From the moment you choose the character you are thrust into the world of Jade Empire, starting off as one of the more trusted students under the teachings of Master Li, head of the Two Rivers Martial Arts school.

After a few short yet knowledgeable training sessions and conversations with various people throughout the school the action picks up and the story gets rolling. An attack is made by an aggressor who has the ability to summon ghosts and serves as a member for the Lotus Assassins, a force that serves the Emperor of the Jade Empire.

After getting to grips with the combat system and testing out your characters moves you gain some experience points from the battle that allow you to upgrade your abilities and in typical RPG fashion they include, speed, damage and health naturally.

The ability to attack with greater damage and quicker actions really helps build up the game to an enjoyable state. When you initially start off, attacks are slow and you can get annoyed at the fact that it takes a while to defeat various enemies. Regardless of the slow combat at the start, every battle plays out in real time, which in RPGs in today’s standard is actually quite normal when compared to the turn based style you see in titles such as Lost Odyssey on the Xbox 360.

You can have up to 4 different styles of martial arts mapped to your D-pad. This is quite useful, as certain enemies are immune to different styles. So a quick tap of the D-pad allows you to change your style and in turn deal damage to your enemy more efficiently. With enemies that are immune to certain styles and such, it also allows you to mix up the combat to an extent. Changing styles, flipping, and jumping around your opponent, and sometimes using your focus, which is a matrix style power where time slows down, is a great way to vary up the real time combat.

After many hours of playing the game however you may feel you would get a tad bored of it, but what BioWare has done to keep the game fresh and interesting, in it’s rather simplistic combat system, is allow the player the ability to also learn new styles of fighting. For example, in a certain cave level you fight a frog type monster and upon defeating it you learn how to fight like it, which means once mapping the style to your d-pad you transform into this frog and damage opponents with its special abilities.

This feature keeps not only the game fresh but also allows the player to try out a variety of things while doing battle. Of course that isn’t all there is in the game, a little vertical-scrolling airplane shooter is included in Jade Empire as a mini-game and is activated during certain sequences throughout the game. You can also carry out interesting side quests given to the player by interacting with NPCs, and have the ability to form romantic relationships with several characters that are non-playable, even characters of the same sex.. hmm I can see where that feature carried on to… and much more…

Now seeing as Mass Effect was developed by BioWare and has an extensive dialogue system where your response in a conversation affects the attitude of the speakers, we see the early form of this feature in Jade Empire. Depending on your response and attitude towards each main character and decision throughout the game you change what ending you receive after completion along with the outcome of every other character.

This early system is a bit of a drag though as the way it is set out is a bit clunky and it a chore to sit there and flick through the responses available, but of course you can skip each conversation and randomly choose a responses but then you rob yourself of knowledge of the happenings in the game.

With an RPG you would expect a long experience and upon release Jade Empire was criticized for its lack in length which round up to almost a 20 hour experience, however if you actually take the time to carry out every side quest, find every secret, learn as much as you can about the world of Jade Empire and so forth you would get a game with almost 30 hours of playing time which is a very reasonable amount.

Sitting at 1,200 MSP and 6.17GB on the XBL Marketplace Jade Empire is certainly a worthy purchase and a must have for any fan of the RPG genre and looking to kill some hours with an Xbox Original that offers its own unique spin on the genre.

©2008 Arthur Kotsopoulos

“9/10

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