History VideoGame / LegacyofKain

* YouCantGoHomeAgain: In the original ''Blood Omen'', the then-fledgeling Kain realizes that he will never be welcomed in Coorhagen, due to his new [[TheUndead circumstances]]. [[spoiler: He then discovers the entire city fell to the plague, further reinforcing the trope.]]

Kain and Raziel have also appeared as bonus characters in ''VideoGame/LaraCroftAndTheGuardianOfLight''. Furthermore, every game in the series is available on Website/GOGDotCom, while ''Blood Omen 2, Soul Reaver 2'' and ''Defiance'' are are available on UsefulNotes/{{Steam}}, although they may take some outside patches to run in a stable fashion on modern hardware.

* MultiPlatform: Every game in the franchise has seen a PC release, and different games in the series have been ported to the UsefulNotes/SegaSaturn, UsefulNotes/PlayStation, [[UsefulNotes/SegaDreamcast Dreamcast]], UsefulNotes/PlayStation2, UsefulNotes/{{Xbox}} and UsefulNotes/NintendoGameCube.

Kain and Raziel have also appeared as bonus characters in ''VideoGame/LaraCroftAndTheGuardianOfLight''. Furthermore, every game in the series is available both on UsefulNotes/{{Steam}} and Website/GOGDotCom, although they may take some outside patches to run in a stable fashion on modern hardware.

* DistantSequel: The franchise often jumps around by centuries or millennia between games – '' VideoGame/BloodOmen2'', for instance, takes place 400 years after the original '' VideoGame/BloodOmen''.

--> '''Zephon:''' And you are not His handsome Raziel anymore.

Then in 2022, Swedish holding company Embracer Group acquired several of Square Enix Europe's [=IPs=], with ''Legacy of Kain'' being among them. And with Embracer's history of reviving old franchises, fans may once again have the bitter taste of that terrible illusion: hope.

** Human Citadel in ''Soul Reaver'', again in a place where you have no need to go. There's also 'the Lighthouse' and the ruins of Nupraptor's Retreat.

* SlasherSmile: Kain puts on a good one when he finds Moebius after [[spoiler:returning from having his heart ripped out]].

* RippleEffectProofMemory: Raziel and Kain, though Raziel does not remember the 'new' history.

** At the start of Defiance, [[spoiler: Moebius chew Kain out for saving Raziel at the end of ''Soul reaver 2'', thus throwing the [[StableTimeLoop stable time loop]] off its intended rails. It's never quite explained why Moebius, and probably the Elder God, were happy with a time loop in which Kain is never really killed (the young one is bound to retrieve the Reaver with Raziel in it, and then go back in time while the resurrected Raziel chases him, at which point history repeats itself) and therefore the vampires are never really extinct. But it's possible that not even the bad guys were aware of being mere tools "used" by history as part of its effort to remain stable]].

* IWasQuiteALooker:
** Raziel was ''gorgeous'' as a vampire and not bad at all as a human. In ''[=SR2=]'', he references his wraith appearance as grotesque repeatedly.
** Ariel was quite [[http://legacyofkain.wikia.com/wiki/File:Defiance-Character-Ariel-Concept-Prefallen.jpg beautiful]] before she got half of her face ripped off.
** Kain as a young vampire had refined features, and [[https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/legacyofkain/images/c/c9/Defiance-Texture-Cemetery-KainHuman.png his portrait as a human]] shows him to be dashing, but millennia of 'evolution' have turned him into a scarred and scaly being.

* IHateYouVampireDad: Initially Raziel just hates Kain for executing him. Later, he hates Kain for making him a vampire [[spoiler:after discovering that he used to be a Sarafan warrior priest when he lived]]. Later, [[spoiler:he gets over the Sarafan by discovering them to be a KnightTemplar cult of butchers, but still hates Kain because hating Kain has been his driving emotion for the past subjective millennium.]]

* FutureMeScaresMe:
** When Raziel meets his human self during a trip to the past, he's more put off by the revelation of [[TimeTravelTenseTrouble his own involvement in... his own past]] than scared. Human Raziel doesn't recognize his own future self, believing him to be just another vampire and is angry but not scared.
** Played straight when Raziel realizes who the soul in the Soul Reaver is. [[spoiler:It's himself.]]

** Raziel keeps the abilities he learns in ''Soul Reaver'' throughout the next two games, save for the Constrict ability which was useless anyway. He does ''not'' keep the Elemental Reavers between ''Soul Reaver 2'' and ''Defiance'', but WordOfGod gives a HandWave that this is because Raziel originally needed to imbue the Reaver in an elemental forge to activate its ElementalPowers, and the Elder God destroyed the forges between the two games. Thus in ''Defiance'', Raziel is imbuing ''himself'' with the elements and manifests them through the Reaver. He also loses the Glyphs and Fire Reaver from ''Soul Reaver'' to ''Soul Reaver 2'', but this is acceptable since they were bonus features that the player did not need to find to complete the game, so presumably in the canon Raziel didn't find them.
** Kain keeps his mist form in ''Defiance'' for dodging and phasing through gates, his Blood Gout and Blood Shower spells return as his normal blood draining ability, his Energy Bolt is expanded into telekinesis, and he retains the ability to teleport and turn into a swarm of bats, albeit only in {{cutscene|PowerToTheMax}}s. He keeps his lightning spell from ''Blood Omen'' in ''Soul Reaver'', then lacks it in ''Defiance'', but gains an equivalent ability during the game. His abilities from ''Blood Omen 2'' do not appear in ''Defiance'', but this is excusable thanks to the TimeyWimeyBall – the events of ''Blood Omen 2'' haven't happened yet, and the events of ''Defiance'' will determine if they do or not. In ''Blood Omen 2'', he starts off with few abilities, but this is excused for story reasons, as he's been in hibernation between games after suffering a crushing defeat and has grown weak as a result.
** Kain in ''Blood Omen'' displays the ability to transform into a wolf, which he never displays again. It's particularly odd as his exposition implies the abilities are common among vampires, no other vampire seen in the series ever uses them after the first game.
** Though Kain retains a number of his special powers, where he gets hit especially hard is in the equipment. Gone are all his interesting weapons such as the axes Havok and Malice. He no longer has any armour and he also loses every one of his perishable items such as the Pentalich of Tarot and Flay.
*** This can be HandWaved due to Kain's age: by the time of Soul Reaver, Kain is over 1000 years old, Vampires get stronger with age, his skin, judging by how it looks, is probably stronger than any armor he could wear, and the Reaver itself, a powerful weapon that he has had since the end of Blood Omen 2, he is probably very well practiced with it.

** In ''Blood Omen'', one secret room in the basement of Avernus Cathedral had a bible that praised someone by the name of "Hash'ak'gik", but no further explanation was ever given... until several years and four games later in ''Defiance'', when we find out this is the alias for the Hylden Lord. ''Defiance'' also makes it clear that [[spoiler:the Unspoken, aka the Dark Entity, is actually the Hylden Lord who is controlling Mortanius, explaining his transformation at the end of the first game]].
*** To be fair, it's already made pretty clear in ''Blood Omen'' that [[spoiler:the Unspoken IS Hash'ak'gik. All we really discover in Defiance is that he's also the Hylden Lord.]]

The franchise begins with the first game, ''Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain''. In Nosgoth, the health of the land is tied to the nine Pillars of Nosgoth, {{Cosmic Keystone}}s that symbolize aspects of the world and the self – Time, Space, Conflict, Mind, etc. Each Pillar is ''supposed'' to have a Guardian that watches over them, but the current generation of Guardians have long gone mad and neglected their duties, causing the Pillars to weaken and the world to start to fall apart. Kain, a murdered nobleman resurrected as a vampire, hunts down and kills the Guardians in search of a cure for his vampirism, but in the process comes to revel in his vampiric nature and is manipulating into causing a genocidal crusade against the vampires. When Kain discovers he is the final Guardian, Guardian of the Pillar of Balance, he is told that his only cure is death, and he is given a SadisticChoice: perform a HeroicSacrifice so that new Guardians can arise and the Pillars will be saved; or rebuild his race and conquer Nosgoth while damning it to decay.

The franchise begins with the first game, ''Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain''. In Nosgoth, the health of the land is tied to the nine Pillars of Nosgoth, {{Cosmic Keystone}}s that symbolize aspects of the world and the self – Time, Space, Conflict, Mind, etc. Each Pillar is ''supposed'' to have a Guardian that watches over them, but the current generation of Guardians have long gone mad and neglected their duties, causing the Pillars to weaken and the world to start to fall apart. Kain, a murdered nobleman resurrected as a vampire, hunts down and kills the Guardians in search of a cure for his vampirism, but in the process comes to revel in his vampiric nature. When Kain discovers he is the final Guardian, Guardian of the Pillar of Balance, he is told that his only cure is death, and he must perform a HeroicSacrifice to restore the Pillars and save the world.

->''"Thirty years hence, I am presented with a dilemma -- let's call it a two-sided coin. If the coin falls one way, I sacrifice myself and thus restore the Pillars. But as the last surviving vampire in Nosgoth, this would mean the annihilation of our species. [...] If the coin lands on the reverse, I refuse the sacrifice and thus doom the Pillars to an eternity of decay. Either way, the game is '''rigged'''. [...] But suppose you throw a coin enough times... suppose one day, it lands on its '''[[TakeAThirdOption edge]]'''."''