The 4th Best Thing I Played This Year

Jade Empire

As a huge BioWare fan, by the beginning of 2013 I'd played all their games but two: Dragon Age 2, which, as the internet had led me to believe and I later found out myself, was a horrendous atrocity, and Jade Empire, which pre-EA days was widely considered to be pretty great, but still the worst game BioWare had ever made.

Not actually that much Jade in said Empire.

It was with the sentiment to patch up the last remaining hole in my BioWare knowledge that, after enduring Dragon Age 2, I sat down to play Jade Empire. What I expected was a tragically flawed game with amazing story and setting. Instead, I got the best story and setting BioWare has ever created accompanied by one of their best combat systems to date.

Whilst not as pleasing as Mass Effect 3's (which, despite the ending, I consider the best Mass Effect) fluid shooter gameplay or as tactical as one of their "proper" RPGs, Jade Empire combined both of these aspects to produce a strategic and meaty brawler which felt great to use and was, as cliched as this sounds, easy to learn but tough to master. Combine this with my favorite BioWare plot-twist and a criminally underused, ancient-Asian setting, and you get what, to me, is the best game BioWare ever made.