The way of the Open Palm...

You will encounter a wide variety of characters in your journey.

Jade Empire: Special Edition is quite a treat for those of us who enjoy a good story. The journey is full of twists and turns, and new allies can turn up in most unusual places. The writing is quite solid and extremely funny in places; voice acting covers the whole game, and is definitely well done.

The character advancement system is a nice mixture of leveling and finding items. As you gain experience, your three main attributes - Body, Spirit and Mind - raise, and you gain skill points to distribute across your fighting styles for extra speed, damage and efficiency. Additionally, your character finds a magical Dragon Amulet early on, and you can customize your character by socketing different gems that you find along the way to the three available slots on the amulet.

You can also learn new Techniques and Fighting Styles during your adventure. Techniques give various stat bonuses to your character and Fighting Styles give new attacks and abilities to use in combat. For example, the style of Spirit Thief allows you to drain Chi from your opponents to fuel your special attacks, and the style of Heavenly Wave allows you to slow or immobilize your opponents. Some fighting styles are essentially magical spells, giving you limited ability to fight from range.

Combat is done in real time, and your ally of your choice will fight alongside under AI control. Once you get used to the style of fighting, the controls work a lot better than one might assume, and while Jade Empire's fight system is no Tekken or Virtua Fighter, different fighting styles and magical attacks ensure that there's definitely more than just button mashing here.

... and the Closed Fist

While the scenery and the game areas do look nice, one can't ignore the fact that the play areas are strictly limited, and in many places there is only one possible path to travel. While your actions and discussion choices can alter things in many ways, in the end you are still forced to do certain things - one way or the other - to advance, and the illusion of a real world is bruised by strict limits on where you can go. The game system is familiar to the fans of the Knights of the Old Republic, and Jade Empire is very similar to it - in both good and bad. I personally got used to the way the game was designed, and just enjoyed the great story, but some players might want more free-form adventuring and exploration and find the system constraining them too much.

The cutscenes are the same as on the Xbox.

Surprisingly, there is also no "gear" to collect beyond the gems you socket to your amulet. Your weapons depend on your fighting styles, and there is no armor to wear, so there is no visible character customization to speak of. And while your character selection and starting styles do affect things, you will find the "essential" fighting styles along the way every time.

While the conversion to PC has been done well, one bit hasn't been touched - all the pre-rendered cinematic cutscenes are presented in their original Xbox resolution. While the transition between gameplay and cutscenes was originally almost seamless, the difference is jarring on the PC.