Well I finally played the Legacy of Kain games in sequence. For a long time I never could get my hands on Blood Omen and I kind of skipped around between the other ones. This time I just went Blood Omen 1, Soul Reaver, Soul Reaver 2, Blood Omen 2, Defiance, as is the canonical order and definitely the best ordering plot wise.
Some thoughts:
Blood Omen - This one definitely has a bit of a different feel than the rest. It's the only one that isn't in 3D and its world feels a bit more "generic dark fantasy" than the rest. It feels weird to say that since Blood Omen has some really strange stuff going on, especially in terms of the domains of the Pillar Guardians you must defeat. This game largely bills itself as an edgy Legend of Zelda and it works in that capacity. There's plenty of exploration, satisfying item/spell/ability upgrades to access new areas. Combat is a bit clunky and all the bosses suck, but when you are just going through dungeons it's usually fine. However you have to switch around items way too damned much. This is particularly true in the late game where you'll probably be using the blades of chaos or the soul reaver. Both of these weapons lock you out of casting spells and even if you don't want to use spells for combat, you need to use things like telekinesis and mind control to solve puzzles. You can swap extra spells through a quick menu but not equipped weapons and armors, so expect to go to that screen a lot.
Being a vampire who needs to constantly suck blood to not die is an interesting mechanic, and leads to some emergent "morality" gameplay. (For example you don't have to kill innocent townsfolk, but it's pretty tempting when you're low on blood.)
I've always wondered if I've been confused about the overall plot due to not playing the first game. The answer: Yes and no. There are definitely a huge number of allusions to Blood Omen in later games, and knowing that the final bit of Defiance takes place in the same time period (through time travel shenanigans) makes it seem much more impactful. But at the same time Soul Reaver starts you off fresh since you play a new character who doesn't know about this stuff and all the really essential information is explained to you. Plus some stuff explained in later games as if it appeared in Blood Omen wasn't actually explained in that game, but rather was retconned into it. So it's definitely a better story experience to have played Blood Omen first, but at the same time you understand at least 90% of what you need to without it.
Soul Reaver - This game is the only reason that people still love this series. Not to say that the other games are bad per se, I think that Blood Omen and Defiance in particular would have stood on their own (with their plots updated to be standalone.) But this is the only truly great game. If Blood Omen is Silicon Knights/Crystal Dynamics's answer ton Link to the Past then this is their Ocarina of Time. Partially I just mean that it is a 3D entry that does the transition well. But it also makes a much more interesting world.
I don't think it's spoiling too much to say that Soul Reaver takes place far in a dark future where not only have vampires taken over the world, but their empire has also fallen into decay with nothing to replace it. This results in a weird, inhuman, bleak landscape where you can get glimpses of how things used to be relatively normal, but where things have been bad for a long, long time. On top of this, you play as Raziel, who is no longer a vampire but instead a wraith, meaning that his true home is now in the spectral realm of ghosts. A lot of the game revolves around shifting from the spectral to material realm and vice versa, since they exist conterminously but with slight variations (a lot of platforming puzzles where you do things like get on a pillar which is shorter in the spectral and then shift back to its taller version in the material.) This is all done with cool transition effects that require no loading. In fact, there is no loading beyond some door opening cutscenes after you start, which is pretty damned impressive when you remember that this thing came out for PSX.
Like Blood Omen, there are a huge amount of extra areas to find which are unlocked by new abilities. The puzzles in this game are probably the best, even if many of the health unlocks and such use variations of the same block pushing puzzle. The plot keeps ramping up throughout, with Raziel at first being completely unaware of the history of his world or Kain's motivations but slowly learning more and more. Main problem with the game is that it ends on a pretty huge cliffhanger. (A lot was cut from the game, but as best as I can tell this was all content before the cliffhanger.)
Soul Reaver 2 - This game has a pretty big graphical update from Soul Reaver 1, though of course it still looks dated today. It also has a huge update to the plot; if you like "lore" and time shenanigans, this game is for you. A big part of the game revolves around powering up the Soul Reaver through elemental shrines (the only cut content from Soul Reaver 1 which did show up in the sequel) and these all look distinct with separate architectural styles and puzzle types. These in turn unlock new abilities for the titular blade which allow for new puzzles. This game also ends on a cliffhanger, but at a much more natural ending point than Soul Reaver 1. With all of this fans generally like this one.
However upon reflection, I think it might actually be the worst in the series. It lacks a lot from previous games. Most notably, there is no reward for exploration. The only powerups are the elemental forges which you must collect as part of the plot. No health bonuses, elemental glyphs, etc. There isn't even any out of the way locations which are interesting to see for their own purposes. (For example, Soul Reaver has an area which appears to be a decayed version of Nupraptor's lair from Blood Omen.) I think they did this because Soul Reaver 2 involves time travel to three time periods and for the plot to work they all have to be one way. So once you go to a new time period you can never go back, hence they didn't want you to miss out on powerups. But it takes away a lot of the wonder when there's no real reason to go anywhere except directly where Raziel was told to go.
Combat is also less interesting. There's basically no bosses (there's technically one at the end, but due to plot reasons it's literally impossible to lose.) You fight a lot of mooks, but these are less interesting than the vampires in Soul Reaver 1. In SR1 vampires could only be killed permanently by being impaled, burned, immersed on water or exposed to sunlight (at least without using special secret glyphs.) So you would often need to find a weapon to impale enemies with, a spike/fire/water pool to throw them at, etc. in order to kill them for good. In SR2 you mainly fight humans who can be killed by hitting them repeatedly with attacks. In SR1 combat became kind of trivial if you had the soul reaver out, but you could only use it at full health in the material realm making it necessary to not be careless and get hit, and if you did get hit you'd have to go back to the old techniques you used before earning the reaver. In SR2 you can summon the reaver whenever you feel like, with the only reason to not use it being to avoid having it drain your health when its "rage" meter fills. But you can avoid that pretty easily, and it's not like it instant kills you or anything anyway, so summoning the reaver and continuously swinging will win most combats. (Or often you can just run past enemies.)
So it's an interesting game for its plot and especially its new look at Blood Omen's story, but as a game it's below average at best.
Blood Omen 2 - This is the one that people usually hate. It's easy to see why: the plot initially seems to have nothing to do with the previous games. It's sort of a "midquel" between Blood Omen 1 and Soul Reaver, so Kain lacks most of his deeper motivations from the Soul Reaver games. There are inconsistencies with other games. Some of them are not actually inconsistencies but one (Vorador still being alive at this point in history) was never resolved. It also becomes truly linear, being broken up into levels and once you beat one level you can never go back. Combat also is pretty crap, except here instead of offense being king the name of the game is defense. You get a "rage" meter that fills when you block attacks. Early on you have a powerful attack that will take maybe 50% of the more powerful enemies health. By the end of the game you get a rage attack which will instakill anything but the final boss of the game. At that point there's little reason to do anything but block until your meter fills up, making sure to dodge the few unblockable attacks enemies throw at you.
All that being said, I did grow to like this game somewhat, even though I'd still put it as second worst. Even though the game is divided into levels there are still out of the way areas to explore, as well as health upgrades to reward you for going there. Even when you don't get directly rewarded you'll often hear conversations from enemies that give you more insight into the world. You also have puzzle bosses like Soul Reaver 1 did, which is about the only time the combat gets fun.
The world is not at all like Soul Reaver, but it's hundreds of years before that point. It does feel like a more developed version of Blood Omen, and honestly I think if this game was released directly after Blood Omen 1 it probably would have been received better. The game introduces an entirely new enemy that had only been hinted at by one word in previous games, but it's important to remember that this only seems like a big change because by this point we were used to following Raziel. If you showed Soul Reaver 2's cutscenes to someone who only played Blood Omen 1, he'd wonder what the hell was going on there.
That being said, some of the areas really don't fit in the established universe. There are literal invaders from another universe and their stuff is weird as hell and I like that, but other environments don't seem to have anything to do that and are still weird for no good reason. There are definitely points where you think "was this part really meant for a Legacy of Kain game?"
Defiance - This game could have been the best, but it has some issues. Most notably, the camera. It has a fixed camera for some reason I can't understand, like it's a survival horror game. This causes the standard sorts of problems, for example running through a door and suddenly turning around because the camera did 180. Or not seeing things because they are behind the camera even though your character should clearly see them. (To be fair, they did add a first person view mode so that you can survey rooms.)
The game is setup like Blood Omen 2, in that you go through levels in a linear order, though the levels tend to be larger and more involved. This makes the camera more annoying since you almost always go through the same area multiple times but the camera doesn't change. So for example when you have a stairway the camera will either always pointing down it or up it, but either way you'll have to run directly into the camera half the time. There were even moments when I had to fight enemies that I couldn't see due to the camera (and first person view doesn't work in combat.)
Another issue is that Raziel's section rehashes much of Soul Reaver 2. I don't know if they thought that people didn't buy that game or what, but you spend the first 60% of the game reforging the soul reaver with effects you already got in SR2. Technically there's a reason you have to do this (in SR2 you had to imbue the sword with elemental energy at special spots before you could use that power again, including a reset every time you came back from the spectral realm. After forging the sword in Defiance you can use the new elements at will.) But it feels like doing the same thing again for no good reason nonetheless, and making matters worse the six elemental forges are basically just palette swaps of each other, rather than the creative and distinct architectural styles seen in Soul Reaver 2.
Putting that aside, there's a lot to like in Defiance. The combat isn't exactly great, but it's the best of the series with some basic combos, juggling, super attacks and different attack modes you can swap between. This game also lets you control both Kain and Raziel, alternately, and while the combat is very basic you can still feel a difference in their styles. (It helps that Kain starts the game with stronger telekinesis abilities than Raziel, so he can throw people around with his mind while Raziel can only knock them back slightly.) They did a good job making Raziel's gameplay feel like Soul Reaver 1 and 2 and Kain's gameplay feel like Blood Omen 2. I would say that the spectral realm is even better than the Soul Reaver games, with weird camera effects and ambient sounds making it feel haunting and alien while still being easy to navigate.
Probably the most impressive thing about it is the plot. Somehow Defiance makes Blood Omen 1, 2 and the soul reaver games all feel like part of one coherent game, whereas previously there was a big shift in tone between Blood Omen 1 and Soul Reaver, and as I said previously portions of Blood Omen 2 felt like they came out of left field. The enemies from Blood Omen 2 go from "who the hell are these guys?" to "ah, these guys were behind half of everything!" without feeling like a huge ass pull. In fact most of the lingering questions about the previous games are handled rather nicely. (They still don't explain how Vorador stuck around though; if anything this game only makes it more definite that he dies before Blood Omen 2.) There is a downside in that it does sometimes feel like less of a plot than a fan doing retcons, but usually it goes pretty naturally. The bigger problem is that while this game has the most hopeful ending, it does not fix everything and to understand the ending you must play all previous games. Without spoiling too much the end of Defiance ends at a time period before Blood Omen 2, but understanding what happened in Blood Omen 2 and Soul Reaver (i.e. in the future relative to the final cutscene of Defiance) is required to make the ending feel like an ending. Otherwise a lot of the resolution just seems unresolved.
Conclusion - Is the saga complete after Defiance? No, none of the main antagonists are dealt with in a final way and they were clearly hoping for another game. But it does have a very nice resolution to the arc of Kain and Raziel, so I'm glad they got that far.
Are the games worth playing? I'd say that Soul Reaver definitely is, and since it can be played as a standalone game (the confusing interactions with Blood Omen 1 don't really start until Soul Reaver 2) if you are interested in it you should play it. But unfortunately this series is cursed and shortly after Blood Omen 1 became available again Soul Reaver 1 was yanked from stores. (No one's really sure why, but the main speculation is that it's in preparation for the remaster being done.) If Soul Reaver 1 were avaialble I would still say play it, it doesn't really need a remaster as long as you are comfortable with old 3D graphics. (And Soul Reaver's graphics are quite nicely done for the era, definitely more Chrono Cross than Bubsy 3D.) If you really like Zelda style games and vampires you could start with Blood Omen 1, but I think that's pretty rough around the edges. If you like one game and want to keep going the rest are worth playing if you are interested, but I definitely wouldn't start with them. (Plotwise you could start with Blood Omen 2 without being that confused, but the game is definitely not high enough quality to warrant it.)
November 6, 2022