Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver

"Hmm...soul vampire...I like it!"

The advantage to buying into a dying system is they sell for cheap, and the games which were $40-50 when first released are suddenly $10-20. So that afforded me a lot of experimentation in the Dreamcast's game library. Fortunately, Soul Reaver did not end with me naked on a bus headed for Orlando. That was an odd weekend...

While it helps to have played the Blood Omen games starring Kain, it isn't necessary to get into Soul Reaver. Though if you have played the Blood Omen games, you may not be surprised to find out Kain is technically the antagonist in Soul Reaver. It all begins when Raziel, one of Kain's lieutenants, comes before him and suddenly sprouts wings. Having shown an evolution of the vampire race Kain himself has not achieved, ol' Mr. Kain gets mighty upset, and tears Raziel's wings asunder, then tosses him into a giant whirlpool (water being deadly to vampires in this game universe). The game officially begins when the Elder (voiced by the same guy who does Megabyte in Reboot) transforms Raziel from a blood-sucking vampire to a soul-snatching angel of death. Revenge is now the order of the day, served a'la Kain.

While it may not sound like it's much more than a simple hack-and-slash, Soul Reaver actually packs a deep plot of ancient conspiracies and power struggles, made more poignant by the fantastic actors supplying voices for the cast. It's told in almost a Shakespearean tone, with bits of Old English sneaking into modern speech. It'll keep you guessing right up till the end, then open up a whole new bag of demon cats for you to ponder over.

Even though technically dead twice-over, Raziel is quite the nimble demon. While he can't fly any more, he still glides, leaps, climbs, fights, and solves block puzzles. Battles are fought in real-time and in a number of ways depending on what's around you. You lock onto a nearby enemy and Raziel can use spears, swords, large candlestick holders as a polearm, and even torches to battle his enemies, or if nothing is in grabbing range, his powerful claws do the job nicely. However, you'll need a weapon to deal the finishing blow, as the claws won't be enough. Then, even after the enemy's been impaled, inflamed or decapitated, you'll still have to swallow their soul (depicted as a floating ball of light) or they'll just cause problems in the Spectral Plane.

The Spectral Plane is sort of the dark world companion to the Material Plane. Colors shift to a palette of green and blue. The landscape warps and changes, reforming itself sometimes to fit your needs. Certain enemies dwell in the Spectral Plane, some of which can't be destroyed permanently, but instead only driven off for a time. Things like water have no substance in the Spectral Plane, so the once-deadly liquid is easily passable in this place. When Raziel takes too much damage, you'll go Spectral and have to find a specially-designated Planar Portal to return to the material world. Suffer too many attacks as a Spectral and you'll be annihilated. However, you can also shift to the Spectral Plane at will, which is often necessary to solve puzzles and progress through the game.

It's this balance of the Spectral and Material that drives the game. Very often you'll come to a place in the Material Plane that seems to be impassable, but upon shifting to Spectral, the world will shift and the path will become revealed. Likewise, certain barriers won't be passable and objects unable to be manipulated as a Spectral resident, so you'll have to find a Planar Portal to get a grip on the real world.

The puzzles in this game, while at times devious and even insidious, also consist of a good number of block puzzles. These merely involve pushing, pulling, turning and otherwise manipulating blocks into a certain order or shoved into designated slots. The trouble is there's a lot of these puzzles and some of them can take a long time to complete, not so much because they're complicated, but because it takes a while to manipulate all the blocks into their proper places.

As the game progresses, you'll encounter more unusual and strangely-wrought enemies, along with bosses that once had past ties with Raziel. Kain's other lieutenants, once Raziel's buddies, now hold the key to your further evolution as a vampire/soul reaver. Defeat one, and their souls will surrender powers and abilities that'll take you to new heights and depths. Soul Reaver takes a little from Metroid in that the game is free-roaming. You can go from the final area of the game all the way back to the beginning, either on foot or thanks to a teleportation device. And all these new abilities granted to you by the defeat of your old friends let you explore new areas that were previously blocked off to you. Doing so rewards you with power-ups and sometimes new abilities.

Probably my favorite 'feature' is the game has no loading screens other than the one that takes you into the game. As soon as it loads up, the game seamlessly and flawlessly takes you from area to area without interruption. While today it's nothing new, having been used in games like Jak and Daxter and Metroid Prime, Soul Reaver was one of the first to use this game engine to present the game in this way.

Aside from the abundance of block puzzles, there's not much standing in your path to revenge, excepting, of course, the multitude of vampires, demons, human demon hunters and more. The Soul Reaver, a weapon so named for the title of this game, helps out a bit. It's an incredibly powerful sword of energy that can only be brought about when Raziel is at full health in the Material Plane. It pretty much kills any enemy in one hit, so the only way you'll ever lose the Reaver is due to carelessness on your part. On the Spectral Plane, the Reaver feeds off the souls floating around automatically, so it's constantly with Raziel, no matter how low his health may be. There is a problem with this (if you see it as one) in that the Reaver makes the game too easy. It's more powerful than any weapon Raziel can find lying around, it can be brought anywhere and back and forth between Planes, and generally makes any given monster you encounter little more than fodder.

Though the game's challenge comes more from the puzzles than combat, it would've been nice if there were a little more difficulty in dispatching random thugs than just swinging the Reaver and watching them explode. Overall it's a fine game, a terrific story, and one worth the (roughly) 15-20 hours it'll take to beat the final boss and be utterly confused by the game's ending. Fortunately, Soul Reaver 2 is already out on PS2, so you can hop on over to that game and see the continuation in the Legacy of Kain series. Have fun!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/01/04