Trivia
While the game was being ported to PC, the developers nicknamed it 'Jade Empire on Steroids' as the game was modified to take advantage of modern hardware and also running at ridiculously high resolution(ie 1600 by 1200) at full speed.
Some of the stories mentioned in Jade Empire are indeed myths from ancient China. One of the game characters is associated with the myth of Wan Hu. In the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Wan apparently constructed a chair with rockets attached to it that enabled him to fly to outer space. Other accounts treat this story as historical true but with a different outcome: Wan blew up into a thousand pieces that may or may not have made it to outer space.
This story was a segment entitled "Ming Dynasty Astronaut" on the much too popular Discovery Channel show "Mythbusters" (Dec 5, 2004).
Jade Empire, a Chinese-themed game with Chinese characters set in a mystical Chinese world, has no Chinese language in it whatsoever. All the signs and titles in the game have characters that look Chinese but in fact say nothing (both in modern cursive script and old disused ones). The old tongue "Tho Fan" used by certain characters (like the first weapon maker) is not Chinese but a constructed language developed by Wolf Wikeley, a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at the University of Alberta.
The German version had all of the gory in-game effects, like decapitations or bursting bodies after Harmonic Combos, removed. Inconsequently, the cutscenes still feature blood.
