Jade Empire is a brilliant RPG with many unique elements. It has a focus on martial arts and is set in old time fantasy Asian environment. It is beautifully presented and has a great story line with plenty of plot twists and turns, and the open ended gaming offers many possible paths to choose altering the final outcome of the game.
Before you begin your adventure you can choose from 7 customizable characters. This gives you the ability to choose a character that will suit your preferences and will give a different playing experience with each different character.
The visuals are excellent; the atmosphere is really set well thorough the games brilliant looking environments. The characters and creatures are also great and should impress most gamers. The audio also does its bit to set the atmosphere, awesome music and sound effects all the way.
The game is played from a 3rd person perspective; you will traverse the wonderful environments focused on a main goal while completing many side quests. You will also fight many creatures and characters along the way, there are many ways you can defeat your opponents, there are lots of fighting styles and magic styles as well as transformation and support styles.
Changing from one style to another is pretty easy and quite seamless, the D-pad has four different styles assigned to it, which you can also customize, and hitting the appropriate direction will instantly change the style becoming usable immediately.
Leveling up (by acquiring enough experience points), gives you a decent variety of options to improve your character, you can improve martial, magic, weapon, transformation and support styles. You can also improve your health, chi and focus. Health is pretty self explanatory and governs how much damage you can take, chi is like fuel for your magic styles and focus slows down your enemies. All of which are very important to your overall adventure.
As you progress through the game you will meet new characters who will become "followers" and will stay with your party, you can have them follow your lead and assist you in battle either by directly attacking your enemies or by meditating which will help restore your health while you battle alone, while they are in meditation mode they will be ignored by your attackers.
There are many different outcomes this game may allow you to experience, however there are two main paths similar to the dark and light side used in Knights of the Old Republic. In Jade Empire they are "the way of the open palm" and "the way of the closed fist". The open palm is more of a "good guy path" and the closed fist a "bad guy path" you will sway toward one or the other depending on how you play the game, giving the game even more replay value.
There is also a fun little mini game you can play. You can travel the Jade Empire world using an unusual flying machine. While you fly from place to place you engage in air battles which take the form of a top down shooter. It's done pretty well and is good fun. Completing levels in the mini game will unlock them and can be played at any time by selecting it in the games opening menu.
Jade Empire isn't huge for an RPG but has plenty of replay value due to the mass of possible paths you can take, and is good fun all the way.
This game is very good and well worth a look whether you're into fighting games, RPG's or other wise, check it out.
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