The flaws of Jade Empire

Jade Empire is a Bioware RPG consistently finding itself on the top 50 lists of RPGs of all time. Unfortunately before its release, it was hyped to be one of the best RPGs ever made. So what happened? Well there are a few critical mistakes I think were overlooked when developing the game.

1. The vastness of the Empire was never established-
        The driving mechanism of Jade Empire is twofold. The first driving mechanism stems from your own personal quest to find out your fate as a spirit monk/help your peers achieve their long term goals as well. The second mechanism is to save/rule the empire. When you reach the end of the game you essentially decide whether to save the empire or rule it. Unfortunately while the game tried very hard to convince you to care about the Empire and prove how large it is (think of the progression of areas, small town, to medium size city, to large city) it doesn't provide you a diversity of culture one would expect with such a large place. We need to go to the Prosperous East or the North to view how the Empire is from the eyes of others. The fireworks ending of the people applauding your victory is only sweet if you actually believe you saved something massive. The sheer scope of the Empire is never proven to the player, making it hard for the player to leave the game with chills when they finish it.

2. The moral scheme doesn't work-
     Now there has been a series of critiques placed against morality schemes in general, especially when it works with the good/evil (open palm/closed fist) dichotomy, but barring all those critiques the morality scheme still falls flat in the game. That's because being good is favored in terms of character relationships. What I mean is that the characters in your entourage tend to all lean to either morally good or morally ambiguous backgrounds. The only real "evil" companion is Ya Zhen and he is literally counter balanced by Chai Ka, making most of the companions not very willing to support your heartless lifestyle. I know you can turn some of your companions to the darkside, but most of their background stories just don't make that kind of switch coat behavior plausible. Sky: saving his daughter Sagacious Zu: on a journey of repentance Silk Fox: Concerned with Father and Country. The rest of them are either clearly good (e.g. Dawn Star, Wild Flower, etc.) or ambiguous leaning on the side of good (e.g. Whirlwind, Hu). The point is that as a player you grow with these characters and the thought of treating them like shit the entire game makes no sense. It makes no sense that they stick with you and it makes no sense for you to have them around you. We face a similar dilemma in KOTOR 1 (Gasp did he just criticize KOTOR 1, blasphemy!). Nobody in your crew seems inherently bad except for maybe Canderous and even then that's dispelled to be a tough guy on the outside, soft on the inside ruse (HK is just an ass). KOTOR 2 is far more accommodating, allowing various companions who are both good and bad to join you. The point is I don't like being bad in JE because then I look like an ass to my companions.

  Furthermore, one might argue well Closed Fist does not equal evil. And theoretically that'd be true. And philosophically that'd be true. But your normal closed first interaction proves otherwise. Honestly all I do is pick the option that results with more people dying and that's how I get my closed fist points. Sometimes Closed Fist even leads you to senselessly killing people. Bladed Thesis' ghost makes it pretty clear that Closed Fist isn't senseless evil and must have purpose. But often it just feels like as long as you act like a complete ass, then you will consistently get closed fist points. A good way to demonstrate the nuance of the morality scheme would be to bait players into doing things that removed Closed Fist points. All of a sudden you can't kill willy nilly, you need to be purposeful in your evil deeds.

3. Broken Gameplay-
The gameplay in JE is tons of fun, until you realize how easy it is. The game tries to make combat difficult, but when you can jump out of any enemy attack, block nearly every enemy attack and do twice the damage of any potential enemy, then the game becomes a joke. By the time you reach the halfway point you're pretty much indestructible. Also, the lack of styles is pretty apparent. I guess a wider diversity of everything would have made this game better.

Jade Empire felt like a trailer to a much better game. I'm unsure if they ran out of space or simply wanted to cash in, but the game was clearly rushed out too early. 

Video Games and Intertextuality: Paradise Lost in Fallout 3

                         Time for my English major side to bleed into my interpretation of games and this time I have an excuse, we're talking about literature. Now every good Easter egg hunter knows that games make sly references to classical literature all the time. Hell, some guys are essentially video game versions of classical literature (e.g. Dante's Inferno [however regrettable that may be]). But when video games embed classical literature (or any literature for that matter) into a game, it opens up an interesting interpretative question. How does the game change the way we read that particular text and how does text change the way we experience that particular game. The theory of video games is a young one, but the literature seems to be in some sort of agreement that the difference between interpreting a video game and interpreting a piece of literature is in how one perceives the medium. We do not "read" games, instead we interact with them, making the action of "play" the central focus of a game. Now narrative structures can relate to play insofar that they embed meaning into our actions. For example, the entire Final Fantasy franchise uses narrative to make what is at best a lackluster turn based combat system meaningful. It's also the reason why games like Modern Warfare were given such high praise: shooting at people is far more gratifying when you know why you're shooting. But what happens when we work in reverse? How do we change the way we read a text given its new intertextuality within a game. Do we read it in a hierarchical sense, meaning we interpret the text in solely in the context of game? For example, the mere mention of the word "paradise" in Fallout 3 has huge connotations. Paradise is the yearning for all residents given the post apocalyptic setting. However, quite literally, the Capital Wasteland represents a Paradise that was lost. Furthermore, the Eden creation kit shows a yearning to regain paradise, much like how Adam and Eve wished to stay within Eden. Furthermore, the action of accessing the text requires you to gain "bad karma", so the text is turned into taboo for the player. What does it mean to read Paradise Lost as a text that is taboo?  Do we continue down this line of interpretation, drawing parallels between the vault 101 wanderer and Adam/Eve or do we work from the opposite direction? We can examine the interpretations of those passages and then ask how does this change the meaning of the game (or reinforce meaning). Or perhaps we can use the interpretation of the passages as the organizational structure for our interpretation of its intertextuality. What I mean is if we take a critical lens to the first excerpt from Book 2, anyone who has read Paradise lost knows this is one of the angels that followed Satan in the war against God. Book 2 serves as a role call for all of the demons in hell and Moloch specifically is cited to be deceiver. What does this deception mean in terms of the game? Who is the deceiver? Are you deceiving people within the game.? The questions are endless and there is a fruitful literary and video game oriented conversation to be had. I unfortunately am no longer a college student who has the time or resources to explore these questions (ehhh I probably have the time and will probably look into it more myself), but had I been allowed, this would have probably been my senior honors thesis for English. Soon our classics will be embedded in code, used to serve as foils for a new non linear story. The quicker our scholars recognize that, a new life of interpretation will exist for video games and literature.