“Do you remember what happened on that day…the day of the incident?”

Okay, let’s be clear about one thing. Jade Empire is most emphatically not Shenmue. There is no petting of kitties, no buying of toys, and certainly no driving of forklifts.

That doesn’t mean the two are totally devoid of similarities to one another. They both have an Oriental flavor, with plenty of martial arts thrown in for good measure; they both have several minigames; they both have mysterious artifacts that can be used to save or destroy the world as we know it.

But that’s roughly where the parallels end. Shenmue went down the fabled “immersion” path and tried to set up a world where you could do anything in-game that you might want to do in real life. Some, such as yours truly, appreciated the ambition of the effort, and enjoyed the game for what it was. Others found it to be the most boring piece of digital tripe the Dreamcast had to offer, and it’s hard to fault them for that. Shenmue was not a game that lent itself to universal adoration.

What sets Jade Empire apart, then? What allows it to capture some of the flavor of what Shenmue might have been without boring its audience to tears? Well, for starters, you aren’t playing Sherlock Holmes, not precisely. Shenmue had you running around trying to track down Lan Di, the man who murdered your father in front of you. As a result, far, far too many NPC’s faced the question of what happened on “the day of the incident.”

In Jade Empire, you’re attempting to track your Master Li across the Empire, but you aren’t asking every Tom, Dick, and Nguyen if they’ve seen your master. Instead, the story has several focus points whereupon a convenient interaction leads you in the proper direction. As with BioWare’s previous Xbox offering, Knights of the Old Republic, you can hear what virtually any character in the game has to say. What keeps that from getting tedious is that you always know before you talk to somebody if they’re going to be useful in some way – you can tell because they’ll have actual names – or if they’re just there to lend life to the city. That has the effect of streamlining the process, naturally.

More to the point, however, while there is also less trial and error involved with finding the plot threads and following them, there are fewer distractions as well. Your character is firmly focused on the task at hand, whether it be tracking down Master Li’s kidnappers, or dealing with the wider implications that get revealed later in the game. There are sidequests, naturally, and you have the option of completing these (or not) at your leisure. There are also minigames that are part of the plot advancement.

Some of these minigames will be familiar to BioWare veterans; KOTOR offered a fight ring, and Jade Empire has one as well. The difference is, the Empire’s fight ring is part of one fork of a plot advancement nearer to the end of the game, whereas KOTOR’s happens fairly early on, and isn’t terribly critical to the outcome.

There is also a vehicle-based minigame; KOTOR had you man the turrets of the Ebon Hawk, while Jade Empire serves up an ode to the top-down shooter of years gone by – you must navigate your “flyer” through enemy-infested skies, combat a boss at the end, and make good your escape. The latter is optional, which is a nice way of streamlining the game. If you’d prefer, you can simply choose to ‘evade’ the enemy flyers, which allows you to go from point A to point B with no muss and no fuss.

Getting back to similarities to Shenmue, the fight engine is also vaguely reminiscent, but different enough so that the comparison won’t be evident unless you’ve already been thinking about the two games along similar lines. In Shenmue, you learned different moves, and you practiced to increase your skill with that particular move. Button combination presses were necessary to utilize each move, and the style you created was basically your own, a mixture of your favorite moves.

Jade Empire replaces ‘moves’ with ‘styles,’ but the effect is similar. The difference is, the experience you use to increase your skill at the assorted styles is more along traditional RPG lines. As you gain experience – which you can do by talking to people to advance the plot, by defeating enemies, or by reading various books and scrolls to learn about the Jade Empire, you’ll gain levels, just as happens in every RPG of note. As you gain levels, you gain skill points – similar to the d20 system – that you can apply towards your different martial styles. As with the d20 system, there is a law of diminishing returns. Each subsequent skill increase requires more points, so as to preserve the illusion of a skill taking a long time to master.

In addition to the level increase differences, it’s also worth noting that a fight in Jade Empire uses a minimum of buttons. The B button combined with your right analog stick is your evasion maneuver, used to escape damage or place yourself in a more propitious position to dish out damage of your own. The A button is your attack button – although you can press A+X for area attacks that dish out the damage over a large area – and the D-pad allows you to select your styles by pressing up, down, left, or right. You can do so at any time, even during combat, to switch from one style and its pros/cons to another. Holding in a given direction pauses the game action and allows you to select from a list which style you wish to map to that direction.

One additional difference of note is that Shenmue concerns itself basically with your health. Jade Empire introduces the concept of chi – used to power your transformations and magical styles, as well as to heal yourself on the fly – and focus, which is used for weapons styles and for a powerful slow-motion that can be used to escape tight jams. Spirit Fonts restore your chi and your health, while Focus Shrines do the same for your focus.

Getting away from the Shenmue comparisons for a moment, let’s look at your companions and the effect they have on Jade Empire. Like KOTOR, Jade Empire has you traveling with a sort of entourage. You ultimately have around a dozen companions – corporeal and otherwise – available to you at any given time. Unlike KOTOR, you may only have one companion at a time. Your companion is restricted to his or her native style – you don’t bother with leveling up your companions the way you would in KOTOR - but you have the option of switching the active companion back and forth between attack and support styles.

An attack style is just what it sounds like – your companion joins you in laying a beatdown on your enemies, however many there are, with each character responsible for his or her own healing. A support style, on the other hand, makes your companion effectively invisible to your antagonists. The enemies focus on you, while your companion lends his or her strengths to you, boosting various attributes as you take on the world singlehandedly. Each style has its benefits and negatives, but you’ll find as you progress through the game that your character will eventually grow strong enough that support styles have limited usefulness, particularly during the occasional “no companion” fights.

Graphically, Jade Empire is attractive. The landscapes are varied, and the Imperial City teems with life. The animations are distinct enough to tell the difference between the various martial styles, and the character models are detailed and attractive to look at, particularly in the cutscenes. Perhaps the one visual ding against the game is that the transformations are fairly ugly – a large blob of color as your character turns into whatever demon form you’ve selected, and then poof, there’s the demon. It’s almost as though BioWare couldn’t come up with a suitably awe-inspiring transformation, and relied instead on obscurity to prevent “aww, that sucked” reactions. Whether they accomplished that goal, I leave to the reader.

Jade Empire’s audio, on the other hand, I don’t quite know what to make of. The voice actors are clearly talented, and you may even recognize John Cleese as the misguided “Outlander,” but there is a distinct American flavor to the dialogue in certain cases. Some of the characters are suitably formal, as you might expect of an empire set in rough equivalency to our own Middle Ages, and others, while delightfully wacky, still seem a little out of place in relation to the rest of the environment. It’s all quite polished, and a pleasure to listen to. I’m just not entirely sure that all of it necessarily adds anything to the game.

Jade Empire isn’t as long as Knights of the Old Republic was; I finished Empire in a little over 20 hours, while I spent upwards of 100 hours saving the galaxy in KOTOR. In both cases, you can choose an evil path, or a virtuous path, which extends the replay value somewhat, and opens up other characters you might otherwise not meet, but the essence of the game remains the same.

The Xbox has done many things well this generation, but by and large, RPG’s haven’t been one of those things. Fable was a disappointing example of the hype running roughshod over the game proper, Morrowind was maybe a little too large for its own good, and many of the lesser-known RPG’s on the system are that way for a very good reason. Microsoft is fortunate, then, to have experienced the efforts of the guys at BioWare with two separate projects. Jade Empire is not as outstanding as Knights of the Old Republic was in 2003, but that’s all right. It’s still easily one of the top three RPG’s on the platform, and a game well worth playing even without the BioWare pedigree. Besides, nobody will ask you about “that day…the day of the incident,” and that has to count for something, doesn’t it?