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