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Jade Empire - Mithrandir - 04-27-2005
I wasn't expecting a whole lot going into Jade Empire - I'm not a huge fan of console RPGs in general (minus the Phantasy Star I-IV, Chrono Trigger, early FF's, etc.) and I was a bit skeptical of the no-pausing combat system. I suppose that saying "I wasn't expecting a whole lot" is a bit of a lie since it was coming from Bioware. To rephrase, "I was expecting it to be a good game, but not necessarily my cup of tea." JE surpassed my expectations (which were high for a normal game, but low for a Bioware game) but didn't blow them out of the water... my original issues I thought I would have turned out to be minor, but there were other issues that detracted from the overall experience that were unanticipated.
First, let's get the good stuff out of the way. The graphics are above-average (but no Splinter Cell) but the art direction in this game is simply amazing. I often found myself taking time to just stand and look around - the environments are just *that* good. Every single area was imaginative and distinct and was a pleasure to run through cracking skulls. The music is also outstanding and I loved it. Very reminiscent of Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I loved it when the Chinese-drum heavy piece would fire up during a battle.
The various styles gained throughout the game (whether martial, weapon, magical, support, or transformation) all succeed at feeling unique and creating different and interesting effects... for the most part (I'll get to my gripes with martial and weapon styles later). Your characters "Focus" ability (think: bullet time for martial arts) was cool and very useful, but also quite unbalancing (once again, I'll address this more later).
The game length was acceptable - I clocked in at just over 34 hours to complete the game (and I did everything). It made me nervous at first when I heard that some people had completed it in under 15 hours on their first run through, but these people must have just blasted through the game and skipped all the side quests to boot. I have also read of people taking 45+ hours to beat it, but I have no idea what these people are doing that is taking so long... maybe leaving their Xbox on all the time? Who knows. That ~35 hours of gameplay consisted of me doing every single quest, just wandering around some of the extra sweet environments, going back to previous towns and seeing if dialogue changed, talking to almost everyone multiple times, etc.
The story was well done, it was probably my favorite of all the Bioware RPGs to date. Someone spoiled the end bad guy for me though, so one of the major plot twists in the game was completely expected for me, which was kinda of a bummer. Bio did a good job of dropping some subtle hints along the way though, so I suppose people could get at least an inkling of what is going to happen without someone spoiling it for them beforehand. The followers were also excellent and the best of any Bio game I have played. Never has a more motley assortment of heroes been put together, I assure you. The dialogue between your followers is pretty limited though, they are almost always addressing you and rarely bring up issues with each other, which was disappointing. Until the last 2 chapters, I got the feeling like my followers were invisible to each other or something.
Finally, JE has a good "alignment" system on paper: The Way of the Open Palm vs. The Way of the Closed Fist. It's sort of a order/chaos relationship, although not quite that simple, and there's room to be good or evil within either theoretically. In practice though, it tends to boil down to good vs. evil. There are very few actual opportunities to be evil within Open Palm (in harmony with your environment) or good within Closed Fist (strength is the ultimate virtue) which shouldn't be the case, according to the way the alignments are explained anyway. But that's fine. They tried to do something more innovative and original and had a modicum of success.
Now, unfortunately, it is time to discuss my gripes with the game.
The length of the game itself is good, but the time distribution itself is out of whack. Out of the ~35 hours spent in the 7 chapters of the game, I spent just shy of 26 of it in just chapters 2 and 3. Chapters 2 and 3 are the equivalent of chapter 2 in BG2 - you can power through it if you want, but there's a ton of area to explore and lots of quests to do if you want to. Granted, the much less time spent in the other chapters is semi-justifiable based on the story, but it would have been nice for the time distribution to be more spread out. (This was also one of my same gripes against BG2)
The martial and weapon styles (and to a lesser extent, all the styles in the game) just don't get the job done in my opinion. They succeed in "feeling" differently (whether jumping 10 feet in the air with Leaping Tiger, or backhanding people with White Demon, or even the gentle swaying of Spirit Thief), but in essence they're all the same really. Every style has strong attack (X) which breaks blocks, normal attack (A), an area attack (A+X) which knocks enemies back but does no damage (with two exceptions I believe: Storm Dragon and Spirit Thief), and one combo (A A A). And that's it. This is supposed to be an action RPG and there's one friggin combo in the entire game which all the styles just share. Very, very lame and a big disappointment. Combat is pretty formulaic once you get down A, A, A, roll, X to break block, A+X if surrounded, A, A, A... repeat ad infinitum. And it's the same for all the styles. The only real difference between the styles is look and a slight difference in rate of attack. I presume slower styles do more damage, but I honestly have no idea since Bio has elected to remove almost every single number they possibly could from the game - only XP and your basic stats are graced with the honor of being given a number. This also annoyed me since I'm a numbers person and yet had no idea how much damage I was doing or taking except in relative to my own health bar or my enemies.
There are also a couple balance issues with the game. A certain Transformation Style is extremely overpowered. The final boss was giving me trouble, so I morphed into my maxed out overpowered form and wiped the floor with him, whereas before my maxed out magic, martial, and weapon styles weren't terribly effective. Harmonic combos, Bio's attempt at creating a form of synergy (I guess) between magic/support and martial styles are just horribly overpowered. A single extremely easy to perform harmonic combo is a one-shot kill on 90% of the enemies in the game (the other 10% are just flat out immune to any harmonic combos at all, which seems to be a very band-aid fix to me to just throw immunities down). Needless to say, the combat is this game is pretty easy. The hardest enemies are ones that use Spirit Thief and Paralyzing Palm and are immune to harmonic combos. But they're rare and the "trick" to fighting them is mostly just slogging through them and accepting the fact that you're going to be stunned or drained a bit along the way.
Speaking of the combat system, blocking is useless. It is almost always more effecient to just roll or jump out of the way. There was only *one* time I used blocking a lot, and that was against an enemy with a ton of HP and a slow power attack. So I would just block until he'd charge is power attack up, jump over him, and hit him a few times in the back. It took a while of just chipping away for him to go down too. Another oddity of the combat system is "Chi Strike" mode (Chi is like mana or magical aptitude I suppose). The tradeoff is supposed to be that extra damage is added to your attacks in exchange for Chi. But there's never any reason for Chi Strike not to be on for the most part since the drain is pretty minor and the extra damage is quite nice. I think I spent probably 95% of my combat time in Chi Strike mode. Focus mode is also pretty silly. 1 on 1, I could kill any enemy in the game, except a couple bosses, before Focus mode ran out. In fact, most *groups* of enemies I could take down before my Focus was spent. Do't get me wrong, it was impressive the first couple times I took down a gang of bad guys without taking a scratch and before most of them had even turned around completely, but it kinda trivialized a lot of the combat.
You have three stats in the game - Body (HP), Spirit (Chi), and Mind (Focus). Unfortunately, the Body stats is absolutely useless. More HP is pointless when you can avoid damage altogether using Focus or heal yourself and add more damage to your attacks with Chi. I honestly cannot possibly think of a situation in the game where I would rather have more Body than Spirit and Mind (which I raised evenly).
Despite the fact that you have a party of followers, you're only allowed to have one accompanying you at a time. I hate when games do this. It feels ridiculously forced, makes no sense with the story (until the last couple chapters which your character makes a "umm, you 5 stay here and watch this while you come with me" offhand comment before running off to kill more people). For 80% of the game they don't even attempt to justify why only one person is coming around with you and all the rest are just chilling at the camp (and then of course magically run forward, say any lines that are needed for story purposes, and then high-tail it back to the camp) and in the other 20% it feels very artificial. I know game companies do this for the sake of balance or gameplay mechanics, but I feel as though band-aid fixes shouldn't be used to cover up things disliked in the gameplay if that is what is truly wrong. Plus, I prefer having larger parties. It also doesn't help that the one companion you bring along is almost always more useful in support mode recovering your chi or focus or health, than fighting along side you since they tended to get their butt kicked.
JE uses the same "focus on the face of the talker" dialogue system that KotOR used and it suffers from the same flaws. Occasionally (seemingly randomly) the camera will zoom in on the ground or the wrong person speaking, and it can be annoying and confusing. It's rare though, so it's not a huge problem.
Finally - my last gripe - what is supposed to be one of the surprises in the story is painfully obvious since the end on chapter 1... and your character doesn't learn the truth until the end of chapter 6. I was pulling out my hair with my character's seeming inability to put 2 and 2 together. It is seriously forehead-slapping obvious and I don't know how else to articulate how stupid it was without spoiling it :)
Looking back, I realize that my rather long complaint section may give the wrong impression about my feelings towards the game. It is a genuinely good and enjoyable game, and I'm going to play through it a 2nd time - this whirl as Closed Fist (I played as Open Palm for my first run) on the highest difficulty (my first run was on normal). I loved the music, I loved the art in the game, and I enjoyed the story. Oh yeah, and the 1942-esque mini-game was absolutely sweet. 1942 was awesome BTW and sucked more quarters than it should have from me as a young lad. With a better combat system (different combos for each style, harmonic combos producing different effects and not being one-hit kills, etc.), allowing your whole party to accompany you at once (and adjusting battles upwards to compensate), and a bit more polish, JE would have been absolutely phenomenal. Instead it's "only" darn good.
Jade Empire - chiefin - 04-28-2005
I don't post on here often (obviously), but just wanted to mention a few things as I played through the game as well.
For the martial arts, while still sharing the 'a' quick attack and 'b' power attack do have some noticeable differences. From playing around it seems to me that:
White Demon: Slow attacks but good damage without chi strike. Chi strike does not seem to help this that much since it hits slow and infrequently. The power attack is the quickest of all the martial styles. Good for low chi focused characters.
Legendary Strike: Seems kind of average all around, decent speed, decent range, the power attack sends you flying forward for the best range of all the power attacks. Good for everything as it's easy to use.
Leaping Tiger: My favorite, Wolverine baby! The quick attack has good range and does decent damage. The power attack is lacking in damage, but the fact you fly up in the air sometimes avoids enemies attacks, and looks the best to of all the power attacks to me. Good for characters that need a decent range.
Thousand Cuts: While the power attack is slow, and you the range on this style isn't the best (for quick or power attacks), if you hit focus mode to get it in on something with chi strike on you are going to hurt it. Chi strike does the best with this move as it hits more times than the others. Good for focus characters.
Twin Axes: Well not a martial style but I wanted to mention it because I was howling with glee the entire time I was using these. I was a mostly chi character and I still pretty much used these every chance I could from when I got them to the end of the game.
That's my two coppers anyways. I think you'll enjoy Grandmaster more than Master, it was more challenging although a lot of the same strategy applies. I switched over to it by the end of chapter 2 and actually died a few times, ymmv. The ravager fight on gm was quite the match.
What I didn't like about the combat is that martial styles are in general so much better than weapon styles because very few enemies in the game are immune to martial styles. My initial playthrough I used leaping tiger 90% of the time despite my love for the twin axes, and those same two attacks do get quite old. I tried to mix it up as best I could though. So I agree that a more in-depth combat system would be in order for Jade Empire 2, I would say so even if it meant fewer styles in the game.
Oh and some spoilers about the ending of the game (the three endings), since it was something I really didn't like:
END GAME SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDiNGS OF JADE EMPIRE!!!
The three endings don't matter if you are closed or open fist. At the water dragon (where you actually see the water pouring out of it) if you choose to use the water dragon's power like Li is then you fight some of your party and you will get the 'closed fist ending.' Likewise the neutral ending is when speaking to Li right before you would fight him, let him defeat you and he will immortalize you as a hero. If you play through the whole game as Open Palm you can save at the water dragon and see all three endings, I thought that was kind of cheesy. You might still enjoy replaying through for the closed fist dialogues, you can do some downright diabolical stuff.
END END GAME SPOILERS
end-ramble
Jade Empire - Jester - 04-28-2005
Agreed on pretty much all points.
Combat: innovative, yet repetitive. All styles essentially the same, except for the aforementioned abusive transformation smackdown style (I never upgraded it *at all*, and still it clinched some of the hardest battles for me). Never used harmonic combos. If they're powerful, they're also unnecessary.
Open Palm/Closed Fist: I was really hoping for some kind of philosophical 'bad guy' role, wherein you actually obeyed some set of precepts that differed, somehow, from "kill everyone for fun and profit." Nope, that's exactly what it is. No philosophy or subtlety. Plus, that caveat that Shining Mountain puts in at the beginning of the game, about "tyrrany from without/tyrrany from within"? It comes up exactly *once*. So much for philosophy, which is annoying.
Pacing: not at all impressed with how fast the game goes after chapter 3. Could have used another large chapter. Say, the Prosperous East? The Wall? The domain of the Horselords? Hou's wife? Anything?
But yes. Gorgeous. Still a bioware game. Allies pretty cool. (too bad dawn star's the best, yet dumbest; Hou's the coolest, yet nearly worthless...)
Jester
Jade Empire - Mithrandir - 04-28-2005
Jester,Apr 28 2005, 12:24 AM Wrote:Open Palm/Closed Fist: I was really hoping for some kind of philosophical 'bad guy' role, wherein you actually obeyed some set of precepts that differed, somehow, from "kill everyone for fun and profit." Nope, that's exactly what it is. No philosophy or subtlety. Plus, that caveat that Shining Mountain puts in at the beginning of the game, about "tyrrany from without/tyrrany from within"? It comes up exactly *once*. So much for philosophy, which is annoying.
Yeah, the lack of many real philisophical choices after they set the two Ways up so well at the beginning was a big disappointment. I think PS:T completely spoiled me in this regard. Sometimes I wish I could just wipe PS:T from my mind so that I wouldn't have such high expectations for RPGs... but then I inevitably end up just going back and playing it again.
Quote:Pacing: not at all impressed with how fast the game goes after chapter 3. Could have used another large chapter. Say, the Prosperous East? The Wall? The domain of the Horselords? Hou's wife? Anything?
It was odd how they kept talking about The Wall, the Horselords, and the Prosperous East/Phoenix Gate and yet you never visited any of those places. The closest you got to any of those - MINOR SPOILER - was fighting Zeng Hai's spirit in the Lotus Assassin fortress. Maybe they wanted to just show off the admittedly pretty good back story they wrote for the Jade Empire? Maybe stuff got cut out? Maybe they were laying the groundwork for a sequel (Jade Empire 2: Attack of the Monkey King)?
*shrug*
I also wasn't a fan of how they brought in the "European" culture as Sir Roderick. Took away from the focus as the game being mythical Asian. I would rather have had the game stay centered around the Jade Empire 100% of the way through and not drag in imperealistic European tones.
Quote:Allies pretty cool. (too bad dawn star's the best, yet dumbest; Hou's the coolest, yet nearly worthless...)
Me getting Hou for the first time:
"Drunken style? Shweeeet."
5 minutes later
"Holy crap, it's still the exact same as the other styles. This blows and Hou sucks. Back to Dawn Star meditating in the corner."
Jade Empire - Jester - 04-28-2005
"I also wasn't a fan of how they brought in the "European" culture as Sir Roderick. Took away from the focus as the game being mythical Asian. I would rather have had the game stay centered around the Jade Empire 100% of the way through and not drag in imperealistic European tones."
Well, I get the impression that they wanted to establish a China-Europe relationship around the 1500 mark, when China still held most of the cards. Plus, you have to admit, it's kinda snazzy to actually have John Cleese in your game.
"Holy crap, it's still the exact same as the other styles. This blows and Hou sucks. Back to Dawn Star meditating in the corner."
Exactly. Dawn Star meditating in the corner. Except for a brief period with "turbo Dawn Star," there's just nothing in the game anywhere near as good as slow chi regeneration, since chi can be turned into practically anything: life, damage, magic, you name it.
Jester