Sky high ambition minus the required know-how. It was, in a nutshell, one of those YouTube videos where a kid thinks he can pull off some crazy triple-spinning kick, only to fall flat on his face. Sadly, that pretty much sums up Jade Empire. For every moment of true complexity, I came across three or four others that basically boiled down to "Be sappier than one of Jackie Chan's family flicks or completely miss the point of your Way's teachings and take the lazy way out." Fight a bunch of normal enemies like a man or drop a boat on them and - in the process - kill an innocent slave. Even then, though, Jade Empire's moral code was inconsistent at best. So I did a terrible, terrible thing, but I felt great about it. I wasn't just saving this world from some Darth-Vader-wannabe Big Bad and his evil empire I was preparing it for what would inevitably come in the aftermath. And so, slowly but surely, I transformed into the cool-headed, cold-blooded lovechild of Yoda, Mr. It was a lesson that needed to be learned, and clearly, no one else was qualified to teach it.
Kung-fu fighting has been known to produce lightning. Served them right for trusting a stranger with their problems. Then I told the wily businessman who'd risen up to fill the power vacuum that - in no uncertain terms - he was to remind his skin-and-bones villagers that hardship brings strength. After nearly topping out my Open Palm meter, I chose to bust the dam at Tien's Landing, leaving the newly impoverished settlement high-and-dry for the foreseeable future. The world, its disciples said, was weak and complacent. Way of the Closed Fist was, in essence, a pull-no-punches answer to the nonsensical nature of RPG questing. The screams and cries and melodramatic declarations of "whhhhyyyyyy?" are too much for me. Honestly, though, that's pretty much par for the course with whiny, knuckle-dragging RPG quest-givers. Then it dawned on me: I hated these people. And I even made it through most of the drought-ridden Tien's Landing playing Kung-Fu Boyscout for a horde of overly trusting teashop owners, weak-willed ministers and cowardly townsfolk who categorically refused to solve their own damn problems. I spent all of my time at Master Li's school of not-so-hard knocks devoutly following the Way of the Open Palm - defending the innocent, and helping those who didn't feel like helping themselves.
See, I usually stick to the straight-and-narrow goodie-two-shoes path on my first playthrough of these things, but in Jade Empire, I just couldn't do it. I've played roughly a billion games with moral meters that paint in broad black and white stokes with the occasional sloppy shade of grey, but only one has ever made me turn.
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