Jade Empire

Hand is healing nicely. Got to watch out for those darned veins. They don't like being cut.

Anyway, for those with an X-box and a lot of spare time: I highly recommend Jade Empire. I'm only about five hours into it. I'm having a hard time pulling myself away.

The gameplay takes a bit of getting used to and there's not a lot in the way of in-game training, but the storyline is very engrossing. A good friend of mine says it only takes 25 hours from start to finish if you rush and skip some of the side quests(compared to, say, most Final Fantasy games which take about forty or more), but there are multiple characters and multiple paths. So plenty of replay value. Plus, it seems to have a little bit of everything thrown in. The combat is very action oriented, which prevents boredom; but there is a lot of character interaction and storyline for those more inclined to that. There are even minigames that hearken back to the good ole Arcade days.

And as for the story, it's highly influenced by ancient Chinese mythology. Very interesting. I read that the developers even paid a linguist $2000 to create an entire new language just for the game. (To test the fullness of the language, they translated on of the Gospels. That's pretty good.)

Ah well. I spent way too long playing it, and I now have no time to write about anything else. So I think I'll just link to Bioware's official Jade Empire site and IGN's Review of the game.

So 'til next time, rock on.