Another past-generation game on the table, here, but Jade Empire is quite different from RE4.Jade Empire is a strange game. All I saw that made me want to play it was "BioWare RPG" so I decided to check it out.
For it's time, I'm sure it was pretty cool. I played Mass Effect and ME2 before I played Jade Empire, and I don't want to let it affect how I see Jade Empire when I play it for the first time. It's odd, though.
It's like they had too many repeated ideas and threw them into the same game. The reason I say that is because in Jade Empire you have fighting styles, that can be dramatically different. There seems to be a few different, distinct classes of fighting styles, such as straight damage, support (slow an enemy, for example), fighting with a weapon, changing into another creature, and using ranged magic attacks. But within each one of those classes, most of the different styles all feel the same, so I don't see what the point is of having more than maybe 4 (considering you can only map 4 at a time). All of the non-weapon fighting styles intended to deal damage feel the same to me, but yet they give you a choice of several dozen of these kinds of fighting styles to fight with throughout the game. Seems like all you need is one and continue to level that up, then it's not worth using another style that gives you the same results.
Besides overlapping design, I also feel like the universe the game is set in is really confused.. almost like they couldn't make up their mind. It's set in an Eastern-themed environment, where the buildings look like they belong in an Asian country, all of the characters look Asian, the game's fighting revolves around Kung Fu and martial arts, but they all speak and act like they are from North America. To appeal to a Western Audience, why set it in an Eastern setting with Eastern characters? It also blends in fantasy into the genre, and typically in fantasy you can't really tell what part of the world they'd be from because it's supposed to be on a completely different world anyway. It seems like you'd be better off adopting a more fantasy-themed setting, instead of an Eastern-themed setting.
Because of the setting of the game, the story is hard to care about. I'm trying to think of it more as a Final Fantasy game in terms of setting instead of a Kung Fu movie, but it's hard to separate the two. The basic events of the story are straight-forward enough, but they don't make you care about any of the characters. Reading their intended role off a piece of paper would give you about the same result. It's not that it's poorly written, everything just isn't cohesive enough to compete with a game like Final Fantasy 7 or 9. You don't feel wrapped up in that universe, but rather that you're watching an obscure foreign movie that is somehow fun to watch.
I'm still only part of the way through the game.. maybe 1/3 of the way if I had to guess. These are just my observations thus far. I do plan on finishing it, but I'm never inspired to play in really large blocks at a time. From what I've seen and played, it's a pretty average RPG. Playing it nowadays probably isn't worth your time.
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