Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver

[JaySevenZero]

Here is where you can leave your thoughts regarding the Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver for possible inclusion in the podcast when it's recorded.

[Mechner]

3 WORD REVIEW:

SEQUEL IS BETTER

[ashman86]

Kain is deified. The clans tell tales of him, few know the truth

I can still hear the harsh horns echo in the recesses of my mind along with Raziel's narration of Soul Reaver's opening cinematic, which is burned into my memory virtually word for word. Before ever having actually played the game, I must have watched that introduction at least a dozen times, completely enthralled with the Hollywood-quality animation, the otherworldly aesthetics, and the dramatic and poetic writing.

I was first drawn to Soul Reaver by a magazine ad featuring the protagonist, Raziel. His character design was quite striking to me, particularly because I couldn't quite make heads or tails of him at first glance. I had no idea who or what the clawed and decaying being was, and I would never have guessed at his vampiric lineage, but that was all part of the intrigue to me. Looking back on him now, Raziel's a quintessential artifact of the nineties, reminiscent in design to McFarlane's Spawn, and given that I was 13 years old at the time, I'm sure that was part of the appeal for me (although I still think he looks cool even today).

Being a Sega fanboy at the time, I didn't own a PlayStation when Soul Reaver first launched, but I did download and play a demo of the game on my PC. I immediately fell in love with its Zelda-like puzzle solving and its gothic environments, but I resolved to wait until the Dreamcast port of the game before playing it again.

There was only one possible outcome: my eternal damnation. I, Raziel, was to suffer the fate of traitors and weaklings, to burn forever in the bowels of the lake of the dead

The Legacy of Kain's series' take on vampiric lore is one of its greatest accomplishments, and while Soul Reaver's story sections were sparse and separated by vast swaths of wasteland, it was my fascination with Nozgoth and its denizens that drove me to return to it time and again. It wasn't easy at the beginning to divorce my expectations from traditional folklore. The vampires of Soul Reaver were grotesque but often fragile, susceptible to sunlight and water (all water, not just holy water). They were also the dominant lifeforms of their world, with the last bastions of humanity relegated to heavily guarded villages that were few and far between.

It's Soul Reaver's worldbuilding that appeals to me even today. For all its emptiness and dreariness, Nozgoth felt like a living world, a feat accomplished in no small part due to the excellent writing and voice acting in the game. It was my first encounter with Amy Hennig, who I think remains one of the best writers in the business, as well as with Michael Bell and Simon Templemen. It was rare in the 90s to find dialogue of this caliber and even rarer to hear it so elegantly and believably performed.

Its storytelling was not its only success, however. Soul Reaver pushed the evolution of open-world action-adventure titles in ways we often take for granted now, particularly in that players could traverse the entire game world without load times. Streaming data was brand new tech, and cutting-edge. The first time I stepped through a portal to an entirely different portion of the game world, I was in disbelief. There wasn't so much as a stutter. I was just there. It was a philosophy the game carried even into the player's death, doing away with Game Over screens and saving/loading in favor of a more novel system. The spirit world always felt like a bit of a drag to me, but I appreciated that Soul Reaver never disrupted my sense of immersion. Once you were in Nosgoth, you didn't have to leave it until you decided it was time.

I was a less experienced gamer then than I am now, so hindsight may be rose-tinted for me, but I remember also enjoying the puzzle and level design. In a mechanic similar to those of the Zelda or Metroidvania titles that undoubtedly influenced it, gaining new abilities by devouring the souls of Raziel's mutated and hideous brethren in order to traverse more of the world was addictive fun and really lent substance to a sense of character progression and growth. When I finally gained the ability to swim, and the once-deadly bodies of water throughout the game no longer presented a threat, I felt borderline godlike.

Tumbling, burning with white-hot fire, I plunged into the depths of the abyss. Unspeakable pain. Relentless agony. Time ceased to exist.

Soul Reaver is not a perfect game, however, and I understood even at the time that it wasn't for everyone. Combat had a certain charm, particularly in how it allowed you to consume the souls of your enemies with a satisfying animation in which Raziel pulls down his cloak to reveal his jawless, fanged maw, but it lacked depth and grew stale over the course of the game. The gothic atmosphere, too, felt heavy at times, and I found I had to take regular breaks from it whenever a certain feeling of fatigue set in.

Most frustrating, however, was that Soul Reaver felt unfinished. At the behest of the Elder God, Raziel fights his way through all of his siblings, one by one, consuming their souls and their unique vampiric evolutions, except for Turel, who is inexplicably missing from the game and wouldn't be seen again until the series ultimate chapter, Legacy of Kain: Defiance in 2003.

Even worse was the cliffhanger ending and anticlimactic boss fight with Kain that appears at the climax of the story, with all its many revelations, and leaves literally no time left for even a semblance of denouement. Unfortunately, the serial approach to storytelling was something that LOK fans would have to grow used to, but Soul Reaver has always felt like the most grievous offender. The final product is something that feels like a middle chapter in a much larger whole more so than any sort of self-contained story.

The descent had destroyed me, and yet, I lived

And yet, Soul Reaver is my favorite entry in the series for two reasons.

While it felt incomplete from a storytelling perspective, I'd argue it's the most polished, mechanically. Subsequent games were rushed through development, with three full-fledged titles hitting shelves over the course of the following four years, each more action-oriented than the one before it. The open world of Soul Reaver 1 gave way to increasingly more linear design, culminating disappointingly in a less stylish Devil May Cry wannabe. And don't get me started with the bizarre story choices and retcons of Blood Omen 2.

Finally, Soul Reaver's central plot twist--the revelation that Raziel was once a Sarafan knight, dedicated to defending Nosgoth from the vampire scourge begot by Kain's unfortunate (or misunderstood) choice at the end of the original Blood Omen--is one of my favorite in all of gaming. It's just so deliciously ironic and so wonderfully delivered.

I've always hoped that Square Enix would give us a chance to return to the LOK universe. Nosgoth was an interesting shooter but one that ultimately failed to capitalize on the richness of its own game world and never really earned a place in the series' canon, and the canceled project, Dead Sun, looked promising but never saw the light of day. With Amy Hennig now involved in Star Wars, it's unlikely we'll ever see a truly fulfilling conclusion to Kain's eponymous legacy, but I'm very grateful, at least, for those chapters I did get to play, and this one in particular.

Three word review: Nice going, Kain

[seansthomas]

Soul Reaver felt to me like the future of gaming when I played it. I had bought a PS1 after seeing Tomb Raider playing in a store and I knew I had to make the jump to 3D gaming. But by 1999, the series had gotten stale and Lara Croft's movement felt rigid and restrictive. Raziel on the other hand felt nimble and free. His ability to move on multiple axis and use his enemies weapons against them was a huge generational leap for the adventure platformer.

I played the Official PlayStation Magazine demo disc so many times, trying to get across that giant void over and over to no avail. So it was a game I bought as soon as I could afford it.

It's full of ideas that even now, games rarely explore due to the complexity of such systems; but the one that stayed with me was moving between two plains of existence. Dark Souls allows you to exist in two forms like this did, but succumbing to the more brutal demonic realm here felt truly punishing, especially if you were mid puzzle solving. And what a system being able to navigate the world in two different environments was. My abiding memory of Soul Reaver was regularly thinking 'how is this on a PlayStation One?'

The summer that it launched in hindsight explains that. Everyone I knew was talking about the PS2 announcement and Dreamcast and this game ended up spanning both generations of console, meaning it felt like you were playing something far more complex than what you were accustomed to.

But that's probably why I still remember it now. There were chunks of the game that felt broken, or not playtested properly, or like something had been removed on the PS1 version. And worse than that, it felt unfinished. I recall the final sequence in particular threw me off guard and left me with a real sense of anticlimax, due to its abruptness.

And yet despite this, I hold Soul Reaver in very high regard. There are ideas in here used in many of the great games we play today and, whilst I can imagine this is a pretty torturous game to play in 2017, in 1999 it felt like the start of an exciting new era for gaming.

[ThirdDrawing]

I went into Soul Reaver with a cursory knowledge of the first game. I was blown away by the sheer spectacle of it. I loved the visual design of the characters, the music and the voice acting, which all created a specific, Gothic mood that wasn't in a lot of games at the time.

The aesthetic of an almost Fallout style (decayed and cataclysmic as its described) world was really interesting and I liked the idea that vampires had gotten so comfortable and lazy after ruling so long that they degenerated into baser creatures, which I hadn't seen before.

I already know there will be complaints about the block puzzles. However I do feel that the fighting itself worked quite well for a PS1 game and I never felt like the boss fights were unfair. Additionally, it deserves credit for running almost seamlessly throughout the world, even on the PS1.

Amy Hennig's writing deserves to be commended. Athough it can be a tad melodramatic, I think it works within the context of the world and the voice actors sound like they really had fun chewing the scenery, so to speak. Yes, I was pissed off about the cliffhanger, but I'm more forgiving of it now that I know about the development of the game.

This game came out at the right place and time to really grab me (My last year of high school) and helped get me into industrial music and the industrial scene on Queen Street in Toronto in the late 90s. (Ah, those were the days) There were so many people into Buffy the Vampire Slayer around this time and it always made me shake my head. The villains on Buffy felt like cartoon characters, whereas these felt dangerous, mean and legitimately like monsters.

I wish they had continued this series, but unfortunately it doesn't feel like Kain and Raziel can survive in a post Twilight/Hunger Games world, where teens are the heroes AND the monsters. Kain's railing against destiny for centuries and stodgy old characters like Morbius don't seem audiences will accept them anymore. On the other hand, audiences are more used to serialised stories on television now and I wonder if the time isn't ripe for a return trip to Nosgoth......

[NokkonWud]

Some really nice feedback already for this episode! That's exciting, one I'm looking forward to recording.

[Slim]

When I first played Soul Reaver I was only 12. Up to that point I had played a lot of different games even story rich games like Final Fantasy, but had never really experienced something like Soul Reaver. I think what Sean has already said really summed up my feelings "Soul Reaver felt to me like the future of gaming when I played it."

Soul Reaver felt to me like the future of gaming when I played it.

I think what really struck me but I couldn't articulate it at the time is that the visual design is so strong, so different and amazing that I think it blew my twelve year old mind. I'd never even though of a vampire as anything but dracula but just the opening cinematic changes all that. You've got Kain simultaneously looking like nothing you've ever seen and exactly like what a millenniums old being should look like, Raziel turning into a soul sucking monster and he looks perfect, the bizarre and grotesque brothers, the elder god and the spectral realm. Even now it does my head in how much work must have gone into the design of this game and it really shows in how engrossing the world and story is.

The basic combat with vampires was also so satisfying, It was always fun thinking of creative ways to permanently kill your immortal foes and the way that translated to the boss fights was also really cool. I was always disappointing that Turel?
(the other brother) didn't make it into the game and I later learned about a cool other boss that was going to be a human cult leader but was also cut. I get that all these things would have been expensive and time consuming to add, but it would have been much more fun than block puzzles.

In summary, this game really showed me as a young gamer that video games have a lot more to offer than just 'cheap thrills' (though honestly there is nothing wrong with that) and though many people have a similar game that did this for them, for me is was Soul Reaver.

[seansthomas]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... orld-epics

[SnakeyDave]

Interesting vid on the world bending of Soul Reaver that might be of interest for the pod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVdiC38eJCo

My only memory of Soul Reaver was a demo that I played on repeat. I may be misremembering but I think I played that and a demo for Rollcage on the same disc for months. I loved the gliding and the way your tattered wings/ cloak would flutter. The effect of absorbing a soul was really cool too, I think. Even with just a demo, there was loads of atmosphere, I kept wanting to go back.

Really looking forward to podcast on this one. Playing PS1 games can be a risky move. I could discover a classic or I could just end up wiping the rose tint from my glasses.

[Alphizzle]

It is fitting that I discovered the existence of Cane and Rinse when I entered "Denis Dyack guest podcast" into Google and clicked 'search,' with my fingers crossed hoping that there was an interview somewhere out there on the web, where I could hear the man himself talk about the origins of arguably my most beloved video game series, before Silicon Knights lost the rights. I then immersed myself in the Cane and Rinse/Denis Dyack interview and thus began my Cane and Rinse allegiance.

The 'Legacy of Kain Series' was the first Cane and Rinse podcast suggestion I ever made.

My introduction to the LoK series began with a late installment - Blood Omen 2. I remember being a young teenager shopping in one of the big three with my mother. I wanted a new ps2 game and came across an intriguing cover of a vampire holding an armoured man against a wall by his throat, with the vampire raising a rather odd looking sword in his other hand. Curiosity had won me over... As soon as we arrived home, I popped the disc into my ps2 and....wow...

Instantly, the tone of the game had captured me - the environments, the music, but most of all, the writing (which of course doesn't compare to Soul Reaver). When I consumed the blood of my first victim, I was hooked. Even still, the moment which arguably imprisoned my interest, was when the game teaches you how to use the 'Mist' ability, which is arguably my most vivid memory of BO2.

Following this introduction to the LoK series, I later came across Soul Reaver. I remember being initially disappointed that the main protagonist wouldn't be Kain. However, Raziel's ability to traverse realms quickly made up for this.

Soul Reaver's narrative as a series is arguably the best I've played, with great attention to detail and engaging plot twists at every turn. The camera/character navigation is clumsy at best, but the glide ability, along with the player's patience provides a work-around.

Whilst not always remaining of a consistent standard, the approach to level design is appreciated, utilising varied traversal mechanics and even implementing spirit real specific abilities, such as phasing through gates.

The voice acting is splendid and I find myself watching VA recording sessions for the game 'til this day. Rest in peace to the great Tony Jay.

The technical execution of LoK always impressed me. The multiple layers that came together to provide an overall in-depth experience is one that cannot be forgotten.

I was gutted when I heard that the successive title, Dead Sun, was cancelled by Square - especially when their reason for this was that the game performed terribly in "focus groups," thereby indicating to Square that there's no place for single-player narrative-based games in today's market. Nosgoth, the game built from Dead Sun's remnants, was surprisingly an entertaining experience, but guess what...they cancelled that too. It has become apparent that Square are incapable of properly managing their titles. Heck, look at the games they've decided to shelve this year alone. With this in mind, I read a fan wish online, suggesting that FROM software, the creators of the Souls and Bourne games, would make a great LoK game. Speaking of which, someone should creative a fan fiction where Raziel enters the souls universe, ultimately having to face one of the souls' protagonists for...you guessed it...souls.

To end, I'm really excited that you're covering this series. My love for this series is how I discovered Cane and Rinse. Thank you for deciding to cover this game.