Here’s a sober look back at one of gaming’s most underrated franchises. What was it that made the Legacy of Kain games cult classics?
I love Uncharted. And I’m not a hipster. “What an odd two sentences to build an article off of,” I know, but stick with me. As the Uncharted games progress and gather the enormous and (mostly) deserving attention that they do, something keeps stinging me. A lot of the praise they receive is for their writing, and this praise goes to Amy Hennig – one of the best writers in the business. As much as I love Nathan Drake with his chiselled and boyish face, his hesitant ‘will do’ attitude, and the white-knuckle adventures he finds himself wrapped up in…I love Legacy of Kain more.
It has always stung me that the Legacy of Kain games have never gotten the recognition I thought they deserved, and purely looking at the quality of the writing in the games: I was ambivalent that Amy Hennig was finally getting the praise she deserved. On the one hand it was good, but every time I read about the game’s excellent writing it was like hearing about Scorsese getting his Oscar for The Departed and not Taxi Driver. Relief with a little sting in the tail. Where was all this before? Now it wasn’t as if the games were poorly received, in fact the first Soul Reaver game was received very well on the whole, the subsequent games all scored fairly well, but never well enough I thought. They are certainly not featured enough in the narrative cannon of gaming lore, this needs to change because not only are the games themselves underrated, but the impact the series had on the industry should be recognized as well.
Small Beginnings
Hennig had cut her teeth as a designer in the 1980s working on Atari games before being hired by Electronic Arts as a designer. Following the departure of the Lead Designer for Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City, Hennig took on the role. From here she went on to work at Crystal Dynamics on the first game in the series Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. Hennig was a designer for that game, but was given directing duties for its sequel Soul Reaver. It marked a clear point of departure for the series, whilst Blood Omen is a competent game in its own right, and does carry with it the seeds for everything that then grew, it doesn’t have the gameplay and the same sense of artistic merit that the future games possessed. The best thing about Blood Omen is its protagonist Kain. Perhaps the original anti-hero and one of the earliest examples of great writing and voice acting lifting a character and a game up to higher plane. Kain was a great character to play as, deliciously vicious and cruel, whose motivation was simply to escape his pre-destined death. He worked as a villain perhaps even more effectively for the next game in the series; Soul Reaver.
For Soul Reaver, Hennig, along with Seth Carus and Richard Lemarchand, designed levels that were very well measured, puzzles felt a part of the environment in a way that didn’t make them feel forced or out of place (I’m looking at you Resident Evil 2). Though the game was criticized — and perhaps rightly so — for leaning too heavily on block pushing puzzles, it did engage the player’s brain, striking a balance that is notably missing from the Uncharted games a decade later. The combat in Soul Reaver is simple hack and slash fare — dodge, hit and execute — a system that works well enough to be fun and rewarding. But crucially the combat is not the focal point, exploration and puzzle solving is, and this is why the game works as well as it does. If you were to strip all of the other aspects that come together to make the Legacy of Kain games as distinct as they are, at the heart of it you would still have a solid chassis built on a foundation of good puzzles, simple and effective fighting that broke up the game very nicely, and a slick control scheme that rarely found itself locked in combat with the camera — something that not many games in 1999 could boast about.
Striking the Balance
The games carried with them an ambition that defied their limitations. They played with themes of such a grandiose nature that you couldn’t help but be swept away. The plot was driven by strong characters, which had their own clashing motivations. There was the sense that every action had inevitability to it, and this lent the story an element of tragedy. Both central characters were bound in an inescapable mechanism, and like the heroes of Greek mythology, they contained the seeds of their own downfall. The road that both the player, and the characters were on, was locked and it was reaching its terminus. Playing with the idea of free will in a medium that centers on player choice is a novel idea; it gave the games an interesting intellectual edge along with an ironic twist.
The next games in the series upped the ante in almost all categories. The environments in Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance are some of the richest in tone and art direction ever made. The designers have a perfect understanding of the world, and there is an intimate permeation, through both the architecture and the colour palette, of a gothic and macabre mood. The aptly names Nosgoth played host to Raziel and Kain’s arching quests and the variation of locations were brimming with their own distinct touches. The environments were extremely involving of the characters, both had personality, and the dialogue between characters felt as if it could take place nowhere else. It is rare when art-design informs character and story with this much potency.
On top of this the games were brought to life with top-notch voice talent. Michael Bell, Simon Templeman, Tony Jay, and many others help to bring the cast and the world to life in all its spitting thespian glory. There aren’t many games as well-equipped to tackle the sweeping and massive plots as these games were. Not only did they rely on good writing, excellent voice acting, and inspired design, but they relied on these elements blending with one another to create a canvas on which these themes could play out. There is a lot to take away from the series once they have been completed, Raziel and Kain run through all the big hits: free will, self-conflict and self-sabotage, daddy issues and accepting responsibility and consequence.
Kain was a wonderful villain, carrying the momentum he had from the first game, in which we were in his shoes, his motivations remained the same. He wanted to preserve his own life and he wanted a way to defy the fate that was assigned to him…even if it meant damning the world to decay in the process. Every confrontation between Kain and Raziel reverberated with the player as the focus would shift from one to the other. The dialogue would ebb and flow with vim and vigour as an unstoppable force met an immovable object. These exchanges were tense and to use a weather-beaten word: epic. Villains that are developed, that have understandable and even relatable motivations and desires are a rare thing, rarer still when met with a hero with much of the same.
Legacy of Kain: Defiance concluded the series in memorable fashion by letting you play as both Raziel and Kain. It was a perfect move for the intertwining plot and the inseparable paths the two characters ran across the series. It also made for a good pacing mechanic, as well as a way to freshen up the formula of the gameplay, seeing as it was becoming stale by that point.
So Why Aren’t They More Renowned?
The gameplay doesn’t live on in the mind as vividly, starting at Soul Reaver and more or less peaking there. For 1999, the gameplay stood out and it did less so in 2001 for Soul Reaver 2 and even less in 2003 for Defiance. The puzzles always kept up a good level of challenge and environmental involvement and the combat – whilst improved – did nothing to innovate or evolve in any way. It wasn’t broken but it wasn’t all that interesting either. It is understandable that after Soul Reaver the games weren’t reviewed at the higher tiers. The gameplay was good, but it wasn’t really favorably comparable to other movers and shakers out at the time. The puzzles were done better in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, the combat was done better in God of War, and there wasn’t anything really innovative other than Raziel’s ability to shift between realms, which created some good puzzle solutions and some beautifully twisted imagery.
These complaints are the same ones I find myself leveling at the Uncharted games, so it’s fitting that I now compare the two series.
With Uncharted, the component parts are not what I take away from the experience, it’s the stuff in between — the interactions, the characters, the outrageous set-pieces, and the thrilling sense of adventure. The gameplay is borrowed from other games – and borrowed well for the most part – but it isn’t what lives in my mind. The same can be said of the Legacy of Kain games, but I just wish that they lived in the minds of more critics and players than they seem to right now.
