Jade Empire - The End

Done. I’ve finished Jade Empire, and fulfilled my “great destiny.” After the torturous ten hour grind that was Chapter 3, the final four chapters of Jade Empire came as a very welcome surprise. To be honest I was absolutely dreading playing the rest of the game. The tedious fetch quests had completely killed my enthusiasm for playing Jade Empire. Little did I know though, I’d done my last substantial fetch quest!

The final four chapters contained relatively few subquests and as a result the rest of the game progressed very quickly. The final chapters took a total of about 5 hours to complete. The main storyline was resolved through a series of battles in two key locations, one new and one old. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, so I won’t go into detail. I’ll just say, the story does not disappoint, and managed to grab my attention back to this game in a spectacular fashion. Rather than save the resolution of the story for one big grand finale cut scene, the game spreads it out over the final two chapters. Each battle leads to a new development in the story and often a beautiful cut scene. Speaking of the cut scenes, they were absolutely amazing, both in terms of content and graphics. They also did well adding to the overall atmosphere of the game. I am definitely going to have to study up some more on Chinese mythology. Even though the main storyline was wrapped up neatly, I hope there will be further installments in the Jade Empire series. I think the series has a lot to offer in terms of an interesting and unique setting.

The gameplay in the final four chapters did not provide anything very new. The most interesting new combat/gameplay feature that was offered was the ability to actually get to fight as some of the other members of my party. I especially liked fighting as The Black Whirlwind. His attacks were so powerful and could dispatch enemies so quickly, the game added a counter to indicate how many bad guys I had defeated in a given amount of time. The mini-game also featured Henpecked Hou tossing bottles of wine to replenish my health throughout the battle. It was a fun twist on the somewhat stale combat system.

The combat remained the same for the most part, and the battles remained fairly easy. I have to admit, by the end of the game I was getting bored with the combat system. I had tons of styles to choose from, but I had several favorites that were fully powered up so I tended to use them the most. I think the style of this game would have worked well with a combat system that was even more fluid and more like a fighting game. The semi-turn based combat just got tiresome after a while. Part of the blame for things getting boring also lies on the difficulty of the game. I was surprised that even some of the characters that had been built up as ultra powerful were so easily dispatched. The very last fight of the game was the only battle that gave me any sort of a challenge in the final chapters, even then, I was able to win on my first try. If the difficulty was a little higher and the strategies involved in defeating enemies a little more varied, I might have been motivated to experiment with the other styles more frequently. Even though I was disappointed in the difficulty of the battles, I was very pleased with the way the battles did not seem out of place, and fit into the overall story nicely. The battles all served some purpose in progressing the overall story and didn’t feel like meaningless exercises for XP. This had been a problem in the earlier chapters, most notably in Chapter 3.

Overall, even though I got a little bored with the combat and not much new was offered in terms of gameplay, the story of Jade Empire more than compensates. In the last five hours of playing the game I found myself sitting at the edge of my game chair on several occasions, eagerly anticipating the outcome of my battles with the evil forces of the Empire. I thought the story telling in Jade Empire was excellent and definitely made the repetitive, easy combat more palatable. If the third chapter hadn’t jacked up the pacing of this game so much there would be very little to complain about. I will definitely be playing through the game a second time. I plan on using the Path of the Closed Fist in my next play-through. It will be interesting to see how the game changes when playing the darker path. I strongly recommend any RPG fan to give this game a try, it may be short, but it’s a heck of a ride.