Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Immersive"

Jade empire is a great ride from beginning to end, it might take a bit for you to get into the whole story, and the bland fighting might put you off at first, but if you manage to stick to it, you are in for a pleasant experience.

At first this game gave me the feeling of re-playing mortal kombat quest mode from deception or armaggedon, some of the scenery, the names used in the game, some fighting stances characters have and even some of the sound effects bring mortal kombat to mind, not that is a bad thing, actually quite the opposite, it made me feel at home, maybe cause I played those mortal kombat games before or maybe because there are so few martial arts rpg out there that once you play one, the others bring you back to the first you played.

The story deserves a ten for being that gripping, and it will leave you jaw dropped at every plot twist, I won't get into spoilers though, very few games have had that effect on me, usually games have pretty dumb and predictable stories, this title right here was a real surprise under that aspect.

There is a lot to do in the game as well, from the main plot to the numerous side missions, a lot of replay value is also due to the fact the you have different endings depending of what decision you make at certain points in the story and even in the sub missions, they call it open palm or closed fist alignment and it's pretty much being either good and selfless or bad and selfish, you decide, bear in mind that your decision will affect the ending.
You also get to fly between cities and choose if you want to attack or dodge, when you choose to attack you start a mini game which is a sort of modern day galaga, when you dodge you'll skip that.

Your not alone in your journey, you get to make friends who'll become followers and you can also talk to them, get to know them better and unfold their stories, and you can even have romantic relationship with some of them, apparently even with the same sex ( if you're into that kind of thing )

The only beef I have with this game is the over simplistic fighting, you can have four different styles equipped, and there are martial styles which cause damage, weapons who deal damage but consume your focus bar, magic styles that are more powerful but will consume you chi bar and some enemies might be immune to them, support styles don't cause damage but have effects on your enemies, they might stun them, paralyzed them and so forth, plus there are also transformation styles which turn you into one of the enemies, usually demons, you took the style from.
This sounds like a lot of diversity, and it is, the problem is with the actual moves of each style, they only have three attacks each, a fast attack that is not longer than three moves ( six for a particular style ) a slow though more powerful attack, and a 360 degrees all around attack; they all have their strategic use in battle, but they get repetitive real soon, if they where to develop that side better, making it as deep and engaging as, say, the fighting in the Yakuza series, this game would have been a masterpiece with no equal, it's still enjoyable, though you will most likely have the same feeling of something being missing when playing it.

As I said earlier, this is a truly epic game, I got it from the xbox marketplace on my 360, it looks great, the graphics are better than some next gen games I have seen, even though it doesn't support 16:9, which is a shame, you can't even stretch it like some other games they have re-released for new consoles, it still looks awesome.
I suggest to pick this game up to anybody who even has the slightest curiosity to try it out, you might even find it cheap at your local game store, trust me, it is well worth it, best original xbox game I ever played so far, hands down.