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Jade Empire: Special Edition

With the critically acclaimed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic under their belt, BioWare moved on to create an original fantasy world with Jade Empire on the old Xbox. PC ports from consoles are far too often just an afterthought, but in the case of Jade Empire, tacking on Special Edition is definitely warranted.

Storyline of Jade Empire is a great version of the familiar hero's journey set in the oriental lands of the Jade Empire, loosely based on ancient China - spiced with demons, spirits and plenty of sorcery. The player's character is a martial arts student who ends up finding startling details about his or her own past, and about the Master of the school. Without spoiling the storyline too much, things quickly get in motion and thrust the player into a long journey across the magical lands of the Jade Empire.

In his travels, the hero of the story will learn new fighting styles, find new allies and has to choose his way between the "light side" of the Open Palm and the "dark side" of the Closed Fist. Like in KOTOR, your choices and actions alter your character and determine your story, which differs in many ways depending on the moral choices you make. Most choices are pretty clear-cut though: you can either be a hero - helpful, compassionate and skip any unneeded killing or you can be a bad boy - selfish, cruel, slicing everything in your path into teeny bits. However, in some places the story does give you small dilemmas to ponder, and in some cases there is no clear "right" or "wrong" answer. This gives the story some well-earned replayability, and while Jade Empire's storyline is a bit on the short side, there's plenty of reason to play the whole game at least twice.

So, Special Edition?

BioWare definitely took their time in deciding to bring Jade Empire to the PCs, and while they could have taken the easy way and just directly ported the Xbox assets over, slapped on a clumsy control scheme and tossed the box out of the door for a quick buck, that is not the case with Jade Empire: Special Edition.

Instead, they have gone over almost the whole game, and polished it up to the PC standards with new effects and properly designed PC-style control layout with mouse and keyboard - without forgetting to support also gamepads. Other additions include new monsters, new fighting styles and improved combat AI. While the changes are not dramatic, and the storyline remains the same, Jade Empire: Special Edition is definitely a good conversion, taking the target hardware into account.

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