Jade Empire's Ending Set Up A Three Kingdoms-Style Sequel We Never Got

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Among Bioware's original video game IPs (the Mass Effect space opera franchise, the dark fantasy Dragon Age RPG series, and so on) Jade Empire stands out for having a martial arts-focused combat system and a colorful setting inspired by the heroic fiction of Chinese culture; the various fighting styles players of Jade Empire can master draw inspiration from the pugilist heroes of Wuxia fiction, the cosmology of spirits and celestial bureaucrats in the game world homages Journey To The West, and the theme of empires rising and falling homages the epic Chinese novel called Romance Of The Three Kingdoms. Indeed, any Jade Empire sequel released by Bioware would likely have a plot based around the collapse or fracturing of the titular Jade Empire, leading to a Three Kingdoms-style narrative where heroes both brave and ambitious try to build a new empire in their own image.

The notion of cycles, be they of nature or history, lies at the heart of Jade Empire, a 2007 eastern fantasy action RPG and one of the first original-setting games made by Bioware. The seasons change, empires rise and fall, and souls live and die under the guidance of the divine Water Dragon and her ghost-banishing Spirit Monks. The main villain of Jade Empire, a scion of the imperial dynasty, annihilates the Spirit Monks in order to capture the Water Dragon and absorb her power — a heresy that breaks both the cycles of history and reincarnation (much like the villains in Avatar: The Last Airbender). The protagonist of Bioware's Jade Empire RPG, a martial arts prodigy and last of the Spirit Monks, comes of age in a land tyrannized by the empire's sinister Lotus Assassins and plagued by mad ghosts unable to pass on to the afterlife. The protagonist's wise