I just beat the game and thought I'd offer my opinions. It should be known that KOTOR is my favorite XBox game to date, and the only other "BioWare" game I've played is KOTOR II (which is really obsidian).
I thought Jade Empire was a very good game. The plot took awhile for me to get into, but I really enjoyed it in the end. I was Lu the Prodigy and I think I was a level 22 or so Open Palm balanced character. In the end, I had mastered three styles almost completely, Spirit Thief, Flawless (Staff style), and Dire Flame. The level up/inventory system was a pretty interesting twist on the basic rpg style. I think my next play through I will save most of the points used to level up styles until I learn a lot. My style points ended up wasted sometimes on styles I never used. The three tier body/mind/spirit level ups were pretty basic and self-explanitory.
I finished the game at around 28 hours, although probably 2 hours of that was idle time. I enjoy the voice acting, and I explore every nook I can find, I'd say 20 hours is a reasonable time if you listen to the lines being spoken. If you rush through the dialogue or just play based on your quest screen, you could easily finish the game in 15 hours or less. It's kind of unfortunate as the game seems huge in scope when you first start, but when you look back, you realize the actual play area is pretty tight. You have a few mini-levels (such as the beginning village,
,
, and
) which consist of little travel area but have a lot of events. And you have two main areas which have both a lot of quests and area to travel (Empire City and Tien's Landing). The problem with the two big areas, especially Empire City with the arena, was the loading times. In Empire City, as I was wrapping up quests, it would sometimes take three loading screens just to get to the area I needed to visit, only to have a conversation and have to run back. With the force run (very cool effect btw), the loading times were even more apparent. It made me wish for the mass transport travel that KOTOR had.
There were a few pretty interesting puzzles in the game, but most of the focus was on plot (if you haven't had it spoiled for you, you should enjoy it, I speculated and was still thrown for a loop), and fighting. The fighting is what you make it out to be. I played on normal difficulty, and died plenty of times getting the handle on the timing. I doubt I'll die very much my second time through unless I bump up the difficulty. I never attempted or completed a harmonic combo, but I will focus on that the second time through. My toughest and most interesting fights were in the Arena. The last fight was a beast. There was a lot of different strategy, but each individual enemy was vulnerable to one style. There would have been some more depth if an enemy could force you to change styles during fights. Towards the end I found myself matching whichever style the enemy chose. I didn't do much more than dabble with the transformation styles but holy shit
is a badass. I think I'd like to level up that style. You can really make your fights look as cool as you want, and there are a lot of different styles you can switch to on the fly. I didn't use my followers much, I pretty much stayed with Dawn Star and her chi support.
Overall, I still enjoyed KOTOR more, but don't take that as a slight to this game. I'm impressed with how different both the games are even being in the same genre. KOTOR forces you to rely a lot more on your friends in battle, where in JE you really are the ultimate badass. The level up system in JE feels like a dumbed down KOTOR however. The graphics in JE are pretty impressive for the most part, but it does have some frame rate problems. The music was an integral part of the game for me, and was very moving in some spots. The mini shooting game was enjoyable, but it suffered from some frame rate problems too.
If you are on the fence, don't worry. This may not be a "9.9", what is? It's a solid 9+ though, and shouldn't be missed by anyone who enjoys an excellent plot and a fun experience.
really wanted to like this.. but Fable owns this fighting system for example)
lol Never knew this movie existed until just now)