History Headscratchers / JadeEmpire

* It rather bugged me that there was no way to avoid becoming a JerkWithAHeartOfJerk if you chose to bind Death's Hand. Up until that point, the game allowed you a rather large amount of leeway. Then suddenly it's a case of soulbind your party members or release Death's Hand. Why not an option allowing those who didn't agree with you to go their separate way and fend for themselves? It wouldn't have been difficult to implement in-game. Just don't allow the party members to follow you to the palace. I mean, you didn't even NEED the blood of your party members! '''You had just finished offing several members of the Lotus Assassins. Clearly they could have been used to poison the Water Dragon'''. Or hell, add an extra level of disfunction in there: You bind your party members but AREN'T forced to sacrifice them, and then you get the added bonus of having your sex slave(s) (depending on your romantic choices) at your beck and call! It's an opportunity for the protagonist to be event MORE of a monster an Bioware missed it!

*** Actually there's not really anything big in the game supporting the idea of changing one's station by one's power. Sure the Spirit Monks comes from nowhere to become a dominating figure but the Spirit Monk is, well, a Spirit Monk. It ''is'' hi/her station to fix this shit. And a member of the imperial family ends up on the throne no matter what you do. The only upset you can create is removing people who are themselves breaking the rules. Sun Lian, while a decent person, has something of a blind spot when it comes to her father. She defends him despite all the evidence during the game's timeframe right up until he outright tells her what he's done. The fact that the corruption of the Lotus Order was already happening plus the genocide of the Spirit Monks (taking out the fighters is one thing but the fact that the character is the last Spirit Monk means the Emperor's armies killed non-combatants and ''children'' as well) heavily suggests existing corruption. As for why the gods couldn't just kill the Sun brothers, it was probably not allowed. In Chinese mythology the Emperor possessed the Mandate Of Heaven, meaning a direct strike against him was not really allowed. I don't see Li taking any measures once he's in power. Everything is as bad as it was, just a bit better organised. Your interpretation of the Open Palm ending, while not invalid, is no more valid than mine. And no, merely being cryptic is not lying. Lying is saying something that one knows to be untrue, which the Water Dragon does not do.

*** And? If you take the evil ending the Water Dragon is still dead and Heavey powerless to act, so this has nothing to do with the subject under discussion.

*** It's also a setting where the idea of challenging one's station and changing the rules by virtue of their own ability is viable too. If all the Gods wanted was to kill off the corrupt Sun dynasty (BTW, there's actually nothing in the game presented that gives reason to believe the Sun dynasty was corrupt prior to the Water Dragon incident, in fact just about everybody including his daughter praises him as kind and caring before this) why didn't they just take the Sun family out, wave their hands and give them a disease or something if they wanted to do it through natural forces instead of have to kill practically everybody in the Jade Empire to do it? Being cryptic when it's unnecessary to the point that it's something the player can only possibly understand on the second playthrough is lying BTW. Li and Kin attempted to kill Hai because they believed he wasn't competent to rule, and if Li is anything he's one who knows these sorts of things, which he wasn't, this kind of power grabbing is common among royal families. It failed, but out of the two Sin Li would have been the better option because unlike his brother he wasn't arrogant enough to believe that there wouldn't be consequences for taking the Water Dragon's power, and sought to take measures to fix this once he was in power. Li is still evil, but not to the psychotic extent that his brother was. I take the ending where the Jade Empire is still there after the end of the Open Palm ending as the Gods simply not pushing their luck by trying to take the Empire out again after the player had demonstrated that the Gods weren't so all powerful and had basically saved their collective rears, either that or too busy cleaning up after the whole fiasco to bother at the time.

*** [[CompletelyMissingThePoint No. His wife never appears in the game.]]

** Li probably just threw the item to get the PC to look away for a moment... then, when they looked back, he was already attacking, forcing him/her to react instinctively with their most familiar training, and thus giving him his planned opening. The distraction itself wasn't the flaw, it was just Li taking advantage of his pupil's trust--to give him the opportunity to exploit the real flaw. By that point the PC had taken down demons, a signifigant branch of the Lotus Assassins, learned several other styles, and beaten the God-Emperor s/he was trained to beat in the first place. Sun Li probably just wanted to cover his bases even further with a little sleight of hand.

** Never brought up in game, but my personal headcanon is that it's a deliberate effect done for value of intimidation. To make them seem less human, and more like some demonic avatar of the Empire's judgement.

*** Most of the Closed Fist options were just plain ''dumb.'' Destroy the town's dam just so the wine merchant can make a fast buck when a ''thriving'' town would make him wealthier? Talk about stupid! And I don't give a rip ''how'' much silver that demon in the tavern is offering - not when that thing is probably weighing how I'd taste over rice with a side of black bean sauce! Side with Ya Zaen? Suuuuurrrre I trust that thing to keep up its end of the deal. And trying to kill the Water Dragon to pull AGodAmI? Well, it did [[SarcasmMode wonderful]] things for the Brothers Sun in terms of sanity - Sun Hai was pretty much foaming at the mouth and Li wasn't much better by the time the endgame hit. The Lotus Assassins also made the [[KnightsOfTheOldRepublic Korriban Academy]] look like a bunch of geniuses. If they hadn't been so keen on backstabbing each other, and so utterly bonkers about harming ''everything'' (including themselves), they could have nailed your PlayerCharacter to the proverbial wall.

* What is up with the Lotus Assassins and their weird blackend and clawed hands? Is it ever explained why they all look like that?

** Because neither of those make sense. Health is a measure of the wounds you have received. Hard to see how you could heal yourself by wounding others. Focus is mental control. I can see a style based on distraction and irritation being able to reduce another's focus but that's not going to grant you any. Spirit is an actual magical energy that can be transferred between people.

* So what's up with Spirit Thief? Every other category has multiple styles, but in the category of Spirit Thief, there is only one Spirit Thief, and that Spirit Thief is Spirit Thief. Why wasn't there a style for stealing health or focus?

*** My understanding is that you were supposed to get the "romance plot completed" text for both characters but there was a bug and only Silk Fox's one played but it was too late to change it. A bummer but canonically you do still have both.

** I liken it to learning how to spell or pronounce a certain word. For example, imagine you were brought up knowing that chronometer was pronounced kroNO-MEter (like Chrono Trigger), instead of the correct pronunciation of kroNOMeter. You use it every day. It's what you know. Then, someone corrects you. You're not likely to say it wrong again, but until you were told it was wrong, you had no problem with it. Same with the fatal flaw in technique. If you base ''all'' your learned techniques on your initial learning experience (as the protagonist did), then you'll make the same mistake with ''all'' your techniques. It's not far-fetched at all.

*** My understanding is that you were supposed to get the "romance plot completed" text for both characters but there was a bug and only Silk Fox's one played but it was too late to change it. A bummer but canonically you do still have both.
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** Maybe they were trying to avoid charges of {{Lolicon}} by making her as ugly as they possibly could. They succeeded. I kinda feel it adds to her woobie status though, I felt sorry for the poor kid.