Jade Empire makes the third BioWare game I’ve written an article about for this column, so after my next one (on Morrowind and Oblivion), I’m going to pick some crazy shit and stay away from BioWare games for a while. My apologies to anyone getting fed up with my shit, but I’m still just getting used to writing these editorials, and I’m in my comfort zone right now. Maybe I’ll get a little zany later and write about Halo or something. Probably not, though. If you have any requests, definitely send me an email, message me on the forums, anything you can do to get me to write about your obscure choice, and I’ll assess it briefly before writing about something else entirely, coming back to it months later for reconsideration.
Anyway, Jade Empire is what I feel like writing about this time. I wanted to pick a game that, for a change of pace, had a truly awful storyline. It’s something that, when reduced down to its basic premise, is so stereotypical and unsurprising that one of my ambitions when writing for a development team is never to have my plots compared to Jade Empire’s. Here goes nothing.
You play some guy or girl who is so unique, they’re the last of their kind, and you are the only remaining person in ancient China with the ability to perform the secret power of whatever. When you were a baby, the black and red-armored agent of doom himself came to your tiny peaceful place of birth and burned the mother down, to the surprise of none. He busted everyone up, and some old monk escaped with you in his clutches, bringing you to the safety of his martial arts school. Uh oh. There, you developed a close friendship with and, if you were playing as a boy, a crush on your fellow classmate, girl number one. Long story short, some douche kidnaps her or something, you run to fetch her from the cave of scary, and your school burns down as the bad guys bust in and tear ass. From here, lots of stuff goes down, but it basically boils down to ‘we tried to get to the bad guys for like ever but we kept getting detoured and shit happened in every place we visited.’ Eventually, it turns out your schoolteacher is actually the main bad guy himself, and was betrayed by bad guy number two way back when, which is why, when you defeat bad guy number two, your old prof. runs in and wrecks your shit, requiring your use of that sacred ability, allowing you to return to life and totally dominate him in the throne room.
The girl ninja is the princess, sneaking off to perform sweet aerial flips, the big hulk fighter man has a sad story in his past, and just about every other RPG cliché that ever existed comes to be in the story of Jade Empire. Fortunately for us, going by the formula is not always a bad thing to do. In this instance, the main storyline is as generic as it can possibly get, but this allowed the writers to focus on different areas. From my perspective, it’s almost as if someone at BioWare convinced everyone to take part in a very expensive experiment in order to answer a question of theirs; if we write a half-assed main story, but write everything else fantastically, will it still be a good game?
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. Actually, the answer is yes. Jade Empire is a good game despite this horribly uninteresting storyline. The secondary characters are, for the most part, fantastic, rich creations. There are a few that don’t go too deep, like the vengeful father of the kidnapped little girl, or the aforementioned princess in disguise, but the conversations with them throughout the game are so natural and believable that I have a hard time not spending 1200 Microsoft Points to permanently add this game to my collection via the Xbox Live Marketplace.
One of the very best parts of the game, again to do with the secondary characters, is the credit sequence, in which party members break the fourth wall and talk about their roles in Jade Empire and other games. Here BioWare’s staff shines, with some of the best-written banter I’ve ever witnessed occurring between the characters you grew to love over the hours spent in the game. They joke about failed auditions for other titles, about how they felt portraying the characters you met through the course of the game, and the quality of the writing staff from BioWare they had to deal with during the development. For example, Dawn Star, after explaining that she plays “the childhood friend,” goes on to tell us that “the writers at BioWare didn’t know [her] early work, which is odd, because [she] thought you could find anything on that interweb thing.” Or Sagacious Zu, who describes his part as “the conflicted anti-hero” tells us during these credits about how get got the job. “I was set to be the bad guy in a kids movie about a dog that rides a champion racehorse, uh, Air Biscuit I think it was called. But the guy who plays Zhong the Ox Carrier told me BioWare was auditioning. Well, I decided to take the pay cut to broaden my horizons.” My absolute favorite moment, though, actually comes from and near to the climax of the main storyline I’ve spent so much time lambasting in this article. I would prefer that you play the game and experience the shivers in your spine when you see it untainted, but just so that I don’t leave those who have played the game wondering what I’m talking about, suffice it to say that I’d never been so sympathetic toward a giant blue snake.
On that note, if you haven’t played the game, I’ve definitely ruined the main story for you. Still, I think you ought to play it, because the writing elsewhere is worth your time. The game as a whole is solid, and I remember it fondly regardless of the obvious draw. If some brave employee really did conduct this strange experiment, it was an overall success, because I hate stereotypes far more than the average bear, but I still love this game for the strengths that far overpower any disappointments.
