We have plenty of news threads re. JE reviews, but no organized home-grown impressions. Since I was out sick the last few days and had time to play the game beginning to end (around 22 hours...I'm not proud 
), I figured I'd start.
Volly said "It's a Bioware game - if you like them, you'll probably like JE", and he's right on the money. It has a lot in common with KotOR in terms of pacing, some storytelling design, travel, and companions, which means it shares some of KotOR's flaws - but it's also an improvement in some areas. A few rough impressions:
* Quests are mostly hub-based (with some mini-hubs off of larger hubs), but more free-form than in KotOR. There are basically two large hubs in the game, and you encounter them in linear order, but the quests surrounding each are deeper and generally more interesting than in KotOR. Some quests require more back-and-forth travel than I would've liked, but this also adds some resource-management concerns that I actually found tolerable - e.g. managing your character energy (Focus and Chi) in a large hostile area when you don't know where you'll be able to "refill".
* Some areas feature genuinely beautiful design, while others are just mind-numbingly illogical. I don't get it. In any case, just as in KotOR, there are no interesting "dungeons" - that's not how the game is organized - but some of the larger "levels" and hubs are great.
* KotOR's multiple solutions to individual quests were pretty much organized into Dark Side and Light Side baskets. JE is more sophisticated: there are often 4 or 5 distinct solutions (tho they often differ only slightly from one another), with multiple options granting Open Palm/Closed Fist points or neither.
* That said, the Closed Fist/Open Palm dichotomy itself only seems more sophisticated than Dark Side/Light Side. It's a good idea that just isn't carried very far; most of the options boil down to the same familiar "good/evil" approach you recall from every other Bioware game; the only significant difference here is that the "evil = thug" theme makes a little more sense. Overall it's a matter of Bioware presenting a moral system that more closely tracks their approach to game design, rather than adapting their game design to a more interesting moral system.
* Yes, Virginia, the rumors are true: just as in KotOR, there are late-game decisions that can basically reverse your entire in-game history up to that point; you may clock in at 100% in the Open Palm meter, but a single choice can knock you down to maybe 75% on the Closed Fist meter. I'm so tired of this kind of design.
* The plot is nothing earth-shattering or even surprising - in fact, you'll probably always be two or three steps ahead of the story - but it's told reasonably well and doesn't follow all the usual cliches. There are a few disappointing logical discontinuities, but nothing more egregious than your average prime-time TV show.
* Yes, it's a "Chosen One" storyline, but at least this is apparent from the very beginning and isn't handled like a super-secret. Deal.
* The companions are somewhat disappointing, but I think my expectations were too high. For those who care, the two "romanceable" women are somewhat unengaging imo, but three or four of the others are interesting. Characterization is overall pretty shallow - we're talking B-movie over here - but the "shtick" characters tend to be better done than the more recognizable types (mostly, I expect, because it's easier to make a shallow character interesting when he's a freakjob).
* The characters are almost all forced on you. You can almost always choose the companion who will accompany you at any given time, which is good (but usually boils down to choosing someone based on combat skills rather than personality), but you have very little choice in who will actually join your group; they pretty much just show up and stick around. This makes sense for a few of them, but others have less interesting motivations.
* Character interrelationships are amusing but extremely under-developed. The player's relationship to the companions is also under-developed, in that you can probe them for dark secrets about their past but there's no "influence" system a la KotOR2 or NWN2; it's pretty much an automatic pass, with some occasional checks for Open Palm/Closed Fist. It made me realize that, as flawed as KotOR2 and NWN2 were in this department, I've come to view a companion influence system as pretty much de rigeur.
* Dialog is mostly well-written, tho dialog trees sometimes loop back on themselves in strange ways. (E.g. Line D may be present if you get to it through Lines A, B, and C, but it can disappear when you go A-B-C-E-C...if that makes sense.) There are three dialog skills, but they overlap about 90% of the time - i.e., you'll usually see options for [Charm], [Intimidate], or [Intuition], and they all get to pretty much the same place (with the occasional difference of Open Palm/Closed Fist points). Otoh you don't actually develop those skills - they're derived stats, based on Body, Chi, and Mind - so they're not RPG skills in the most traditional sense.
* I found combat enjoyable once I got the hang of it. Unfortunately, most encounters end up being handled as in Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia - with hit-and-run tactics, jumping around the board. This ends up running afoul of a stupid design limitation: you're surrounded by an invisible fence once combat begins, forcing you to deal with the enemies rather than running away, and it's sometimes possible to bounce into that invisible fence and be stopped in your tracks while you're trying to evade enemy attacks. Think of it as fighting on the ropes in a boxing match, except you can't see the ropes and they have no relationship whatsoever to the landscape around you.
* Each individual fighting style is pretty shallow, but using them in conjunction can be enjoyable. As a big fan of wuxia and martial-arts film, I got a kick out of the animations; styles like Paralyzing Palm and Longsword are lifted faithfully from movie martial-arts combat. The game's best fights were the longest ones, facing off against multiple very distinct opponents or sometimes against one opponent utilizing multiple distinct styles. Unfortunately, there wasn't nearly enough of this.
* JE is punctuated at numerous points by bizarre 2D arcade action sequences, only somewhat better than the turret sequences in KotOR - which is to say, they're higher-quality than the turrets, but they don't make much more sense than that. Most can be avoided, thank god, but some are mandatory and can be off-putting. Even worse are some mandatory combat minigames near the end, particularly one which uses a camera view, control scheme, and sensitivity which you encounter nowhere else in the entire game. Maybe I was just frustrated from being sick, but I found that design choice to be mind-bogglingly stupid.
That's about it for now. I enjoyed the game well enough and I may try a different character again in the future, but I was also disappointed in many of its elements. Will you like it? I'd go back to Volourn's assessment, since Jade Empire, tho an improvement in some notable areas, doesn't dramatically rise above KotOR - and is grounded in a Bioware design tradition going back at least as far as BG2.
), I figured I'd start.Volly said "It's a Bioware game - if you like them, you'll probably like JE", and he's right on the money. It has a lot in common with KotOR in terms of pacing, some storytelling design, travel, and companions, which means it shares some of KotOR's flaws - but it's also an improvement in some areas. A few rough impressions:
* Quests are mostly hub-based (with some mini-hubs off of larger hubs), but more free-form than in KotOR. There are basically two large hubs in the game, and you encounter them in linear order, but the quests surrounding each are deeper and generally more interesting than in KotOR. Some quests require more back-and-forth travel than I would've liked, but this also adds some resource-management concerns that I actually found tolerable - e.g. managing your character energy (Focus and Chi) in a large hostile area when you don't know where you'll be able to "refill".
* Some areas feature genuinely beautiful design, while others are just mind-numbingly illogical. I don't get it. In any case, just as in KotOR, there are no interesting "dungeons" - that's not how the game is organized - but some of the larger "levels" and hubs are great.
* KotOR's multiple solutions to individual quests were pretty much organized into Dark Side and Light Side baskets. JE is more sophisticated: there are often 4 or 5 distinct solutions (tho they often differ only slightly from one another), with multiple options granting Open Palm/Closed Fist points or neither.
* That said, the Closed Fist/Open Palm dichotomy itself only seems more sophisticated than Dark Side/Light Side. It's a good idea that just isn't carried very far; most of the options boil down to the same familiar "good/evil" approach you recall from every other Bioware game; the only significant difference here is that the "evil = thug" theme makes a little more sense. Overall it's a matter of Bioware presenting a moral system that more closely tracks their approach to game design, rather than adapting their game design to a more interesting moral system.
* Yes, Virginia, the rumors are true: just as in KotOR, there are late-game decisions that can basically reverse your entire in-game history up to that point; you may clock in at 100% in the Open Palm meter, but a single choice can knock you down to maybe 75% on the Closed Fist meter. I'm so tired of this kind of design.
* The plot is nothing earth-shattering or even surprising - in fact, you'll probably always be two or three steps ahead of the story - but it's told reasonably well and doesn't follow all the usual cliches. There are a few disappointing logical discontinuities, but nothing more egregious than your average prime-time TV show.
* Yes, it's a "Chosen One" storyline, but at least this is apparent from the very beginning and isn't handled like a super-secret. Deal.
* The companions are somewhat disappointing, but I think my expectations were too high. For those who care, the two "romanceable" women are somewhat unengaging imo, but three or four of the others are interesting. Characterization is overall pretty shallow - we're talking B-movie over here - but the "shtick" characters tend to be better done than the more recognizable types (mostly, I expect, because it's easier to make a shallow character interesting when he's a freakjob).
* The characters are almost all forced on you. You can almost always choose the companion who will accompany you at any given time, which is good (but usually boils down to choosing someone based on combat skills rather than personality), but you have very little choice in who will actually join your group; they pretty much just show up and stick around. This makes sense for a few of them, but others have less interesting motivations.
* Character interrelationships are amusing but extremely under-developed. The player's relationship to the companions is also under-developed, in that you can probe them for dark secrets about their past but there's no "influence" system a la KotOR2 or NWN2; it's pretty much an automatic pass, with some occasional checks for Open Palm/Closed Fist. It made me realize that, as flawed as KotOR2 and NWN2 were in this department, I've come to view a companion influence system as pretty much de rigeur.
* Dialog is mostly well-written, tho dialog trees sometimes loop back on themselves in strange ways. (E.g. Line D may be present if you get to it through Lines A, B, and C, but it can disappear when you go A-B-C-E-C...if that makes sense.) There are three dialog skills, but they overlap about 90% of the time - i.e., you'll usually see options for [Charm], [Intimidate], or [Intuition], and they all get to pretty much the same place (with the occasional difference of Open Palm/Closed Fist points). Otoh you don't actually develop those skills - they're derived stats, based on Body, Chi, and Mind - so they're not RPG skills in the most traditional sense.
* I found combat enjoyable once I got the hang of it. Unfortunately, most encounters end up being handled as in Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia - with hit-and-run tactics, jumping around the board. This ends up running afoul of a stupid design limitation: you're surrounded by an invisible fence once combat begins, forcing you to deal with the enemies rather than running away, and it's sometimes possible to bounce into that invisible fence and be stopped in your tracks while you're trying to evade enemy attacks. Think of it as fighting on the ropes in a boxing match, except you can't see the ropes and they have no relationship whatsoever to the landscape around you.
* Each individual fighting style is pretty shallow, but using them in conjunction can be enjoyable. As a big fan of wuxia and martial-arts film, I got a kick out of the animations; styles like Paralyzing Palm and Longsword are lifted faithfully from movie martial-arts combat. The game's best fights were the longest ones, facing off against multiple very distinct opponents or sometimes against one opponent utilizing multiple distinct styles. Unfortunately, there wasn't nearly enough of this.
* JE is punctuated at numerous points by bizarre 2D arcade action sequences, only somewhat better than the turret sequences in KotOR - which is to say, they're higher-quality than the turrets, but they don't make much more sense than that. Most can be avoided, thank god, but some are mandatory and can be off-putting. Even worse are some mandatory combat minigames near the end, particularly one which uses a camera view, control scheme, and sensitivity which you encounter nowhere else in the entire game. Maybe I was just frustrated from being sick, but I found that design choice to be mind-bogglingly stupid.
That's about it for now. I enjoyed the game well enough and I may try a different character again in the future, but I was also disappointed in many of its elements. Will you like it? I'd go back to Volourn's assessment, since Jade Empire, tho an improvement in some notable areas, doesn't dramatically rise above KotOR - and is grounded in a Bioware design tradition going back at least as far as BG2.
