"A good fight," Bruce Lee says in the opening minutes of his martial-mayhem masterpiece Enter The Dragon, "should be like a small play, but played seriously." The people at BioWare apparently think that's also a good philosophy for game development, as their new action/ role-playing hybrid Jade Empire is seriously deep with story, rich in texture, and thick with highly stylized flying-fist fury, all played just seriously enough to still be utterly enjoyable.
As the game opens, you're a student at a shabby little martial-arts academy in a sleepy backwater of ancient quasi-China. After a quick lesson on the game's simple but flexible fighting mechanics, you're pitted against deadly rivals—your school and honored master come under attack, which sends you off though a particularly gorgeous game world where each environment, down to the smallest hanging lantern, is a little gem, and each flying side-kick lands with a meaty, resounding thwack. Of course, there's something rotten at the heart of the Empire; the dead will not rest, the gods themselves are angry, and you and your ragtag followers must put things right, with only your legendary weapons, the good (or evil, your choice) in your heart, and the infinite power of your immense chi. Like BioWare's Knights Of The Old Republic before it, it's an ambitious game, hugely involving and just plain huge. It's amazing that it works at all, especially given the challenge of combining a fighting engine with role-playing mechanics. Its success as a small yet epic play, played seriously, will keep players coming back for a long time.
Beyond the gameplay: Tho Fan, the language spoken by many of Jade Empire's characters, is a synthetic language developed by Canadian linguist Wolf Wikeley. Yes, he also speaks Klingon. Yes, he's smarter than you.
Worth playing for: In a gaming experience chock-full of kung-fu side-quest fun, one of the high points is… a tricky garden-society debate over relative cultural merits with a mustachioed Sir Walter Raleigh look-alike voiced by John Cleese? Why not?
Frustration sets in when: Some of the optional fighting styles you come across can turn a game of death into a game of Whack-A-Mole. For a balanced challenge throughout the game, resist the dramatic allure of the paralyzing, carcass-shattering Storm Dragon Style.
Final judgment: When the worst thing you can say about a game this rich is that there's not enough of it, its kung fu is strong indeed.