What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[Psyren]

I never actually finished Jade Empire, but I did love

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the whole mentor betrayal that hinges on the highly specific vulnerability that everyone has been noticing and commenting on, but assuming there's a secret reason for. Very fun payoff for a plot twist that was hidden boldly in plain sight

Jade Empire does have one of the greatest Bioware twists of all time. On top of being a groundbreaking game on other fronts such as martial arts action combat, LGBT representation, and Chinese-inspired mythology.

Honestly though, I do think it gets a bit more of a pass than perhaps it should because of those positives. The combat is horribly balanced (you can very easily end up *massively* overpowered relative to every challenge in the game, and deal/soak so much raw damage that the status effect styles are often a waste of time); the environments are a slog to get through even if you focus-dash everywhere, and other than the celestial realm they tend to be very sparse and samey; and talking to your companions means needing to physically run all the way back to camp to talk with your companions etc. The shmup minigame struck me as the devs just throwing up their hands when tasked with coming up with any kind of system that would break up the gameplay as well.