Soul Reaver – Legacy of Kain

It takes a lot of courage for me to even start this subject as I feel it’s very hard for me to do any kind of justice to this series. It’s funny that it has to hide behind a thick layer of the fighting that I so hate but from the start I could tell these games are so much more about the artwork. With each game in the series that I played I was amazed by the architectural & decorative styles, the concepts, even though they were hidden behind the limitations of their respective technology barriers I saw them for the brilliant concepts they are. Wikipedia has an excitingly good article of some of the concepts in the games. A unfairly short summary on my part would be this: the series is told through two very different points of view, to the point that each game could be considered defining and yet the others complete it. When playing the Soul Reaver games I totally felt Raziel’s outrage and desire for revenge and justice, his blaming of his cruel master both for his fate and that of the world, while when playing the Kain games you saw the other side of the coin, the trials and difficulties of one who wishes to combine self preservation with doing good for all, at any price, willing to work centuries in the amazingly idealistic hope that he will hit the "edge of the coin" situation, the improbable situation in the stream of time and fate in which he could reconcile the two mutually exclusive "bad" outcomes. Besides the many seductive themes for me I was thrilled to be faced with some mind twistingly delightful time paradox/solutions, all managing to form a story bigger than the pieces. I was blown away by how even though instead of playing the 5 games in the order they were made I played them like 2, 1, 5, 4, 3 and STILL shockingly enough the story was amazingly coherent and each fragment of memory that I could remember made all the others shine all the brighter. I warmly recomend the wikipedia article (don’t forget the amazingly deep links at the end of the article), from which I’ll just quote a bit I particularly cared about:

An underlying element of the story is heavily concerned with destiny and throughout the series fatalism is a strong theme. The idea that a person’s destiny can be foreseen and thus altered is presented to the player. Much of the final game Defiance is devoted to discovering whether this hypothesis is true. Some characters try to use this facet to their advantage by attempting to manipulate other characters’ (notably Raziel’s) destiny.

Free will is also challenged during the story and a great number of the in-game characters believe that no one truly possesses free will, except maybe Raziel. Therefore these characters believe that Raziel is the key to altering destiny. Manipulation also plays a major point in the progression of the story since nearly every character, at some point in the story, is manipulated by another.

I deeply cared for these themes, ones so very rarely treated. It feels like such a grand attempt for one to try to battle the immortal streams of time, to fight for one’s fate even in the face of it being foretold and locked… even when everybody tells you it’s impossible.

Just to tempt you further into the story I’ve been searching youtube for some story bits, such as this little compilation somebody made from bits for the 5th game:

and continued:

It’s a hard thing to express but all through the games I felt a LOT of artwork, a lot of artistic expression. In simple things, in the cracks in the walls, in the stories told through the murals, in the plotline: it pained me several times when I realized that I couldn’t share with book loving friends what to me might be one of the best crafted stories of all times. It hurts that it’s hidden behind a (sometimes way to thick) courtain of gameplay and what some have told me is frustrating controls and difficulty. I found it okay… but then again I was driven by a huge fascination with the story and I was willing to go through the frustrating parts (whenever I could I just ran by enemies to get to the next bit of story). I’ll end this little teaser with two links I found, one a tribute to Kain and the other a tribute to Raziel… they do little to express what fascinating characters they both are… but then again few things could.

PS: besides the artworks the games experiment with some brilliant game design puzzles.