Jade Empire

- The White Demon style is extremely powerful, but the combo is not very flashy. Thousand Cuts has a drawback that the end of the combo has you step back a bit, so keeping in range can get annoying. Every style works though, so it's mainly a case of taste.

- You don't have to max Open/Closed Palm to gain most of the benefits. They main link is the special magical styles Stone Immortal (open) and Tempest (closed), where you need more than 75% to gain the highest boost. You do get an item near the end of the game, if you max it, but it's not a gamebreaker. That being said, you are probably still best off just picking a path and sticking to it, because the differences in philosophy are quite different.

- Talk to your companions after each major mission. They usually have something new to say, and if you miss too many, you may not have enough triggers left to actually get to the end of certain dialogue chains.

- You get enough point to max about 4 lines through the game, so pick carefully. You can skip some of it (f.inst Support styles never do damage unless you burn Chi, so putting points in Chi Damage is mostly wasted), so you don't have to max all three attributes to get the most out of a style.

- Transformation styles can be very overpowered, especially if you sink points into them early. I tend to avoid them because they do take away much of the challenge of fights.

- You can influence some of your companions to take either an Open Palm or Closed Palm view of the world, regardless of their natural inclination. You have to reinforce this attitude through dialogue, and some of it requires you pass a speech check.

- Stones that give bonuses to major stats (Body, Mind, Spirit) are a much better choice than those that only add to minor stats (Charm, Intimidate, Intuition), because the bonuses also increase the derived stats.