History YMMV / LegacyOfKain

* SugarWiki/DevelopmentHeaven: The series featured a rich and complicated story fleshed out with hours of surprisingly eloquent dialogue that would not appear foreign in a work of Creator/WilliamShakespeare's.

* FoeRomanticSubtext: There's ''tons'' of it between Kain and Raziel.
--> '''Zephon:''' And you are not His handsome Raziel anymore.

* FoeYay: There's ''tons'' of it between Kain and Raziel.

* FollowTheLeader: ''Defiance'''s combat system is obviously inspired from ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry1'', which had come out 2 years prior. When you think about it, it was actually one of its first followers, before ''VideoGame/GodOfWarI'' and ''VideoGame/NinjaGaiden'' made everyone forget about it.

* FollowTheLeader: ''Defiance'''s combat system is obviously inspired from ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry'', which had come out 2 years prior. When you think about it, it was actually one of its first followers, before ''VideoGame/GodOfWarI'' and ''VideoGame/NinjaGaiden'' made everyone forget about it.

** "This edifice was clearly significant, but I did not yet have the means to reach it."

* PolishedPort: GOG's rerelease of ''Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain'' runs on modern versions of Windows, offers controller support, and is generally bug-free, thus easily making it the best PC port for any game in the series.

* PortingDisaster: The PC ports of the ''Legacy of Kain'' series are all varying degrees of broken. From not offering controller support, being unoptimized to actually run on later versions of Windows, and featuring numerous bugs, they are a slog to play through if one doesn't have the right mods. The worst part of this is that the PC versions are the only ones still available for purchase on platforms beyond the seventh generation, so in order to play the console versions of each game, one has to buy the older consoles in question as well as [[KeepCirculatingTheTapes second-hand copies]] that may be difficult to find.

* ItWasHisSled: [[spoiler: The Oracle of Nosgoth is the Guardian of Time, Moebius the Timestreamer.

** ''[[VideoGame/BloodOmenLegacyOfKain Blood Omen]]'': The fair boy-king [[TheGoodKing William the Just]], through the wicked influence of the time-traveling [[TheCorrupter Moebius]], came to [[FaceHeelTurn embrace evil]] and became a sadistic despot known only as the [[TinTyrant Nemesis]]. The Nemesis has his legions sweep across the land to [[RapePillageAndBurn torture, rape and murder]] all they find, leaving entire cities such as the once-academic Stahlberg a complete ruin with its population put up on stakes. The Nemesis intends to come down upon all Nosgoth and turn the world into blood, ashes and chains before him, and even curbstomps the King Ottmar and his noble army, forcing Kain to turn back time forty years to undo William's carnage upon the earth.

* AngstWhatAngst: For all the stuff Kain goes through, he doesn't seem too upset by most of it. Not surprising considering he is a sociopath.

** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNWSDvDqm9g Ozar Midrashim]] remains memorable as its one iconic theme.

* EvenBetterSequel: ''Soul Reaver''. ''Blood Omen'' was a top-down 2D game, and had a relatively simplistic depiction of vampires. ''Soul Reaver'' took the franchise into the third dimension and never looked back, while also introducing series staples [[AntiHero Raziel]] and [[EldritchAbomination the Elder God]], featured Creator/AmyHenning in the director's chair, made the vampire race more unique, and made the world of Nosgoth much more immersive and memorable.

* {{Mondegreen}}: So who's this "Victor" Kain keeps yelling about?

** The {{Necromancer}} Mortanius of the Pillar of Death helped to lead a rebellion that overthrew the vampires before he became aware of the Hylden being held back by the Pillars of Balance. Possessed by the Hylden leader, the Unspoken, and used to murder the Guardian of Balance, Mortanius sets the events of the series in motion by having the petty noble and heir to Balance, Kain, murdered and revives him as a vampire to kill the brigands who slew him to begin with. Once this is achieve, Mortanus manipulates Kain to steadily purge the Circle, ending with Kain killing him as well, all with the intent of returning the Pillars to vampire ownership.

** The {{Necromancer}} Mortanius of the Pillar of Death helped to lead a rebellion that overthrew the vampires before he became aware of the Hylden being held back by the Pillars of Balance. Possessed by the Hylen leader, the Unspoken, and used to murder the Guardian of Balance, Mortanius sets the events of the series in motion by having the petty noble and heir to Balance, Kain, murdered and revives him as a vampire to kill the brigands who slew him to begin with. Once this is achieve, Mortanus manipulates Kain to steadily purge the Circle, ending with Kain killing him as well, all with the intent of returning the Pillars to vampire ownership.

* NoYay: Many people ship Kain and Raziel. If you didn't know already, Raziel is Kain's [[ParentalIncest SON]].

** [[TheChessmaster Hash'ak'gik]], a.k.a. [[IHaveManyNames the Dark Entity, the Hylden Lord, and the Sarafan Lord]], is the commander of the Hylden, a race banished to a demon dimension. He [[DemonicPossession possessed Mortanius]] and used him to [[TheCorrupter corrupt the Guardians of the Pillars of Nosgoth]] by murdering Ariel and leaving her lover Nupraptor to find her body and drive the Guardians insane with his grief. This in turn corrupted the Pillars and caused the land to decay and rot with the Guardians. With the corruption of the Pillars, he possesses Janos Audron and rebuilds the Sarafan order of vampire hunters, driving them to endangerment and establishing tyrannical control of human civilization. He uses this control to construct a network of Glyph-powered machines around Nosgoth to direct the energies of the Device, an ancient Hylden war weapon. With Janos imprisoned and deformed to power the Device, the Hylden Lord plans to activate the Device and kill all non-Hylden life in Nosgoth through the Glyph network, including the human Sarafan that loyally serve him.

** One specific event that is forgotten is that Kain himself might have free will because of one thing that happened to both Kain and Raziel,[[spoiler: they both died and were resurrected unnaturally, outside of the regular "wheel of fate]].
* AngstWhatAngst: For all the stuff Kain goes through, he doesn't seem to react much to most of it. Not surprising considering he is a sociopath.

* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic: The series features an unconventional, ambient soundtrack, giving atmopshere to the rather unique setting of Nosgoth.

* BizarroEpisode: The Eternal Prison level in Blood Omen 2. It's origins are never explained, it doesn't really fit into the series' mythology and breaks several of it's rules, and the guardians don't seem to belong to any of the established races while covering everything with SigilSpam that doesn't resemble anything else in the series. Neither the prison or it's guardians are ever mentioned again.

** The announcement of ''Nosgoth'' created one between fans who were okay with the idea, and fans who were disgusted that after eleven years the series is brought back to life... bringing no resolution whatsoever to any lingering plot threads from ''Defiance'', not helped by the fact that since Nosgoth is a Team-based deathmatch game, the odds of any story ''at all'' are slim. This was ultimately rendered irrelevant, as the game was canceled before it got out of beta testing.

* MoralEventHorizon: Kain is initially believed to have crossed it when he chose not to sacrifice himself to restore the Pillars of Nosgoth simply because he wanted to rule of the world himself, and again with tossing Raziel into the abyss simply because he developed a Dark Gift before him. [[spoiler: He's saved from it with TheReveal in ''Defiance'': He found himself in a lose lose situation, where Nosgoth would be doomed to an invasion by the Hylden if he died as the last vampire in Nosgoth, and that his actions with Raziel he had no choice in due to YouCannotFightFate present.]]

* {{Sequelitis}} - With sparse dialogue, uninteresting villains and a plethora of block puzzles, ''Soul Reaver'' seemed to fall victim to this at first, but showed the depth of its morality and hints of a far-reaching plot - at the very end of the game, leading into ''Soul Reaver 2'' and ''Defiance'', which pulled the whole thing together into a far more interesting, many-sided and complex plot than even Silicon Knights could have foreseen despite the series' troubled development history. On the other hand, pretty much everyone agreed that ''Blood Omen 2'', which was handled by a different team entirely and conflicted in ''many'' ways with the established plot, was pretty bad.
** ''Blood Omen 2'' is a complicated case; it's contradictions exist because the events of the game don't exist in the original timeline; the entire sequence of events portrayed in the game is how history re-shuffled itself when Kain [[spoiler: delayed Raziel's imprisonment in the Reaver.]] Raziel himself noted that he could tell Kain was remembering things that didn't originally happen as history was re-written, and those new memories are ''Blood Omen 2.'' Of course, it's just as possible that ''was'' the original timeline and we saw the new one. The biggest loose end is [[spoiler:Vorador being inexplicably alive]], which ''was'' explained in ''Defiance''...in a scene that had to be deleted due to time constraints.

** Kain is an IronWoobie. Even though he's back from the dead three times, was condemned to death by his fate, was corrupted since he was born, felt the weight of the world on his shoulders for some thousand years (which alone without training, which he didn't have, could drive one mad) and got manipulated to kill his kindred before being told to kill himself, he always manages to stay strong and confident, really rarely letting his feelings show themselves.

* NoYay: Many people ship Kain and Raziel. If you didn't know already, Raziel is Kain's [ParentalIncest SON.]

** [[GreaterScopeVillain The Elder God]] orchestrated the war between the Hylden and the Ancients, resulting in the Hylden being banished to a Hell dimension and the Ancients becoming Vampires. The Elder God later decided he didn't like the Vampires anymore, so he orchestrated a war between them and humans, which wiped out most of the Vampires except Kain. Kain later began a second war that ended with humans enslaved by Vampires. So, as directly stated in the last game, the entire history of the series is full of the three major races in the world killing and enslaving and wiping each other out, over and over again for dominance, and [[TheChessmaster all this was caused by the Elder God]]. His motivation is he [[ForTheEvulz just likes being able to control the world however he likes it, so whenever he decides he doesn't like the guys in power any more, he has someone else overthrow them.]] He was also hungry for their souls.