Jade Empire vs My Time at Portia
Jade Empire
Jade Empire is a martial arts-themed action RPG where you get the freedom to choose to become either a noble hero or a treacherous villain. The game also provides you with a vast open world to explore and a host of interesting characters to interact with. As you play an aspiring martial arts master, you'll have access to a wide range of nicely-animated fighting moves and styles that you can mix and match. While you increase in your proficiency of the martial arts, your enemies' difficulty level will scale up accoridngly as well, so every battle you engage in will be as challenging as the next despite having better gear and skills.However, being a rather old game, the combat sequences may feel a bit choppy and awkward today. The graphics looks weathered as well. And if you want to play this game for its story, you might want to reconsider. Jade Empire is famous for mainly its cool moves and well-made combat system back then, and having a completely original and immersive plot isn't one of the selling points.
That said, there isn't a lot of oriental-themed RPGs out there and Jade Empire happens to be one of the best ones. If you love martial art games, you might want to try this game out.
My Time at Portia
My Time at Portia is a charming fantasy-themed adventure RPG that is set on a gorgeous, revitalized world after a post-apocalyptic event wiped out the previous technologically-advanced civilization. In this game, you play as an up-and-coming Builder, a respected role in society, whose sole purpose is to help solve the town's problems by engineering a solution.With a gameplay which may fondly remind you of games like Harvest Moon, My Time at Portia may be grindy in an RPG sort of way (think repeated dungeon runs or resource-harvesting), but the game has a nice relaxing pace, where its quests (both main and side quests) are slowly revealed as you progress. Being a Builder, you can also complete a commission request daily to collect some cash. The game also features an elaborate gifting/relationship-building system, fun ruin-diving areas, tons of interesting characters to meet, and challenging dungeons. You can even romance and eventually marry an NPC (not all though) you like!
The best part of the game is definitely its in-depth crafting system. There are tons of machines you can build to help you generate a wide variety of materials to build other stuff. You can also unlock new machine technologies via the Research Center.
My Time at Portia feels a lot like an adorable MMORPG minus the MMO part. It has the grind, the dungeon runs... but of course, this game places a lot more emphasis on its resource-collecting, as well as crafting and building aspects. Sounds like a game you'd like to play? Well, despite still being in early access, the first chapter of the game is already ready and bugs-free, so if you do buy the game, know that you can at least get a good 40 hours or so out of it.