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Bioware surprised everyone when they released Knights of the Old Republic back in 2003. No one was expecting it to be the well polished experience that it turned out to be, for both the Star Wars fan, and the average gamer. Being so amazingly popular, it puzzled many when Bioware up and passed on the sequel to work on Jade Empire. After countless hours of play time with Jade, I don’t really care why they made such a choice, I’m just glad they did.

You’ll immediately notice resemblance to KOTOR after turning the game on. Both games share the dialogue-heavy experience, with dialogue options branching out to offer you different ways to interact with the characters of the game. Where KOTOR focused on letting players choose between the Light and Dark sides of The Force, Jade Empire offers you the choice between the Open Palm and Closed Fist lifestyles. The idea is the same, be the good guy or the bad guy, but instead of being so black and white, the game offers you explanation to the choices. While the Open Palm follows the belief that kindness and helping those in need will bring it’s own reward, the Closed Fist belief states that the strong will survive. So, where you might first think that the Closed Fist is all about blood shed and being evil, it’s simply just another way of looking at things. Instead of helping someone in need, you would say, let them fend for themselves, believing they will become a stronger person for the experience, or prove themselves helpless. In Jade, instead of each choice partially governing your skills and abilities, it governs your ability to learn new styles, accept certain quests, alter your dialogue options, and generally control your character on a deeper level than simply making the move and fight.

The world of Jade Empire itself is a mixture of Chinses mythologies and fiction created for the game. The land has a vast history that, while overpowering if taken in all at once, is handed out in perfectly divided pieces so that you, the gamer, can learn all there is to know about the back story without being bombarded by long, boring speeches that have little to nothing to do with the big picture. The history of the land is revealed through dialogue from certain characters, or through scroll stands you’ll find throughout the land, each with a piece of history written on it for you to read if you so choose. If that wasn’t enough to really suck you into the world that Bioware has carefully crafted out for us, some of the games characters even speak a fictional ancient Asian dialect. Impressed yet? We have only just begun.

When you first enter the world of Jade Empire, before you get to do anything with anything, you have to select your character from 6 different choices. The selection is divided up evenly into 3 men and 3 women, each with a specific proficiency for a certain fighting style, such as speed, strength or magic. You have the option to customize the characters stats, too, if you like a certain character, but want them to be a bit better with their magic, you can go right ahead. There is no physical customization of your character like in KOTOR, but seeing how great the choices you have look, you won’t really care all that much, anyway.

Where KOTOR was a turn-based RPG that took place in real-time, Jade Empire is an action-RPG to the fullest extent. Your character must physically hit their opponent in order to deal damage, and unless your target is blocking, you’re guaranteed your hit. No worrying about dice rolls here, folks. During combat, you have the choice between blocking, a quick attack, a strong attack, and an area of effect attack. You can also use the right analog stick to dodge during fights. When you sit back and think about it, that really doesn’t seem like all that innovative a combat system. Thankfully, we’ve only just scratched the surface on Jade’s combat. Right from the get-go, you’ll have access to several different Martial Arts styles, each complete with its own stance, attacks, and benefits. Certain stances allow you to wield a weapon (which are more powerful than hands, but drain chi, more on chi in moments), while others are labeled as Support Styles, dealing little or no damage (depending on the stance), but allowing you certain bonuses, such as the Spirit Thief attack stance which helps boost your focus with every successful hit, making it a prime choice if you’re caught in the middle of a battle with little health and no focus. Some styles even allow your character to transform into bruting creatures capable of dealing serious damage at the cost of plenty of chi. There’s literally dozens of these attack styles, some being earned via quests, while some can be bought from trainers, or learned from characters. Many of the styles are exclusive to either Open Palm or Closed Fist players, making one of the best reasons for a replay at least once.

As I’ve previously mentioned focus and chi, I figure now would be a good time to get it out of the way. Your character has 3 bars that govern their well being: red (health), blue (focus) and yellow (chi). The red bar needs no introduction, drain it to zero and it’s 6 feet under for you. The focus bar is your source of magic. If your character is a spell user of any sort, those spells will require the use of focus. You can also use a move called Chi Heal, which allows you to heal yourself at the cost of focus during battle. The chi bar allows you to initiate focus mode: a slow motion spell that allows you to deal plenty of damage while your opponent is slowed to a near-crawl. Chi is also the source of your ability to wield a weapon. Each swing you take while in a weapon stance will consume chi. Once you run out of chi, you will be unable to use a weapon stance until you accumulate more.

To the casual gamer, it may sound like a very complex system, but in execution, everything is put together so smoothly and simply that you’ll be barraging enemies with a thousand different moves from a dozen different styles before they even know what hit them. You can map 4 styles to directions on the D-pad, allowing quick access to your most used styles, keeping combat quick and seamless as you switch between styles.

And switch, you will, young grasshopper. Many of the enemies in the game require you to alter your strategy in order to take them down, such as ghosts, which are immune to weapon styles, for example. Some enemies are immune to support styles as well, making it very much a necessity to know what kind of fight you’re getting into before you dive in head first and come out battered and bruised. Generally you can get away with running in with a simple hand-to-hand style and feeling your way around from there, but it’s just a bit easier to know your enemy ahead of time.

Once you’re finished wrapping your head around all that, there’s even more to the combat in the way of Harmonic Combos. Using an area of effect attack with a lot (but not all) support style will illuminate a meter at the base of your enemy. If you can switch to a plain combat styles and hit the enemy with a strong attack before the meter depletes, you will perform a Harmonic Combo, the strongest and coolest moves in the game. Not only will a Harmonic Combo often kill your enemy in one powerful shot, it does so with a tremendous level of style as enemies explode into a rain of body parts, burn up into ashes, or end up with their heads 10 feet from their bodies. Harmonic Combos are also synonymous with “blood all over the place”. The combat system is deep to be sure, but the games excellent pacing helps ease you into it every step of the way.

Of course, as you progress through the 20 or so hours of the game, you’ll come across numerous interesting characters that eventually join your cause and fight along side you. While you’ll gain many followers, you can only bring one of them with you at any given time. With so many possible allies, making the choice can be a painful one. Each character has his/her/their abilities that make them useful during combat, some are stronger than others, some offer good support, and one is even required in order to use the drunken boxing fight style. Your allies can fight alongside you, or they can be put in support mode, which will take them out of combat and be ignored by all enemies, but in trade for helpful bonuses like focus regeneration or the like. Outside of combat, you can take time out during your adventures to get to know each character better and learn about them. You will watch in amusement as characters flirt, discuss and argue with one another throughout the game.

When you gain enough experience and your character levels up, you can choose to spend your points upgrading many aspects of their prowess: body, mind, and spirit. The body statistic governs your physical strength and intimidation ability, as well as your overall health. Spirit and mind govern intuition and charm, as well as your overall focus or chi.

You’ll also be given points to put into upgrading your fighting styles. You’ll be able to upgrade the power of a style, the speed the attacks are thrown at, the damage they can do while using chi, or duration (support). You have to be wise in spending your points in Jade Empire if you’re to ever hope to master any of the games styles. You could throw all your points into a handful of styles and become extremely powerful, or you could throw them away in a bunch of styles and not be good at much. The way you spend your points in a given style is also important, since you’ll want to pay attention to what kind of fighter you want to be; quick striking, or brute strength, etc. Not to say you can’t do both in a given style, but you’ll want to make sure you know where you plan on spending points, and when.

One strange change from the ordinary is that Jade features no inventory management at all. No, really, none. Instead of forcing players to run around with 10 greater healing herbs through half the game, or a hundred different long swords each worth varying levels of money, Jade Empire simplifies the experience by eliminating the unnecessary  middle man. When you buy a new weapon, it automatically overwrites the old one, you can regain health/focus/chi through shrines found within the world. Excluding the inventory system altogether helps keep the game flowing without the need to spend half your time in clunky menu systems trying to find items to use at a given time. It may sound strange, but once you’ve spent a lot of time with Jade, you’ll wonder when everyone else will adapt the same idea.

Of course, none of this matters unless the game has a solid storyline backing it up, right? And when you consider KOTOR as the new RPG standard for storytelling, Jade Empire better have a few tricks up it’s sleeve in order to compete. Compete it does, and above all else, at that. The game starts off almost in the same vein as Fable did, with your character knowing little about their past, but having a big part to play in the world. I can’t really say much more than that for fear of ruining the story for anyone who has yet to play the game, but rest assured Jade Empire topples KOTOR in terms of story.

Jade Empire, on top of being a great playing game, is also a visual feast ranking among the best looking Xbox games ever. Every environment of the game is painstakingly detailed, and looks gorgeously like a real ancient Chinese landscape. The country sides and cities alike will have you gawking jaw-dropped at the amazing detail put forth to create a feast for the eyes unlike anything on any console to date. Character movements flow smoothly, and combat and transitional animations all work very realistically. Spell casting features some great effects, like fireballs exploding on the ground, ice shard being thrown through the air, and so much more. Every character in the game feels very unique, thanks both to their individualized appearance, but also thanks to the games great voice work and dialogue.

Dialogue and excellent voice overs do wonders to help bring the world of Jade Empire to life. Just like KOTOR, Jade Empire features some of the best voice acting to be heard in years. Each character sounds just as unique as they look, with a wide variety of personalities just seeping out of the excellently written dialogue.  The games soundtrack accompanies the in-game happenings to beautiful results, offering a unique blend of stringing violins to thundering, fast paces battle themes to keep your heart racing while you fight.

Even after five pages of description, I have yet to do Jade Empire any justice. The game is so nearly flawless, and so expertly put together that even the most hardcore Sony fan boy would have a hard time nit picking it. From the games varied and interesting cast to the engrossing, expertly written storyline, Jade Empire will pull you in and keep you there until the credits finish. Not only is Jade Empire the best RPG on Xbox and a serious contender for the best Xbox game this year, it’s one of the best games to come out during this generation of consoles, period.