YMMV / Legacy of Kain

• Alternate Character Interpretation: It's entirely possible that characters other than Raziel have free will. Free will seems to be a matter of existing outside the normal laws of time and fate, like Raziel and the Elder God do. As the Timestreamer, able to freely see through time and travel forward and backwards as he wishes, Moebius seems like he would fit the bill for that description. And he does seek to actively change history a couple of times, despite the fact that the series claims that's impossible to do without free will. Kain definitely has the power to change fate by the end of Defiance, but what gave him that power is ambiguous with all he goes through in the final chapters, and for all we know he always had free will and just never realized it. If a select few special individuals get to have free will, then it would make sense for the Scion of Balance, prophesied figure who will save Nosgoth to be one of them.
  • 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. They both died and were resurrected unnaturally, outside of the regular "wheel of fate".
• Angst? What Angst?: For all the stuff Kain goes through, he doesn't seem too upset by most of it. Not surprising, considering his nature.
• Anticlimax Boss:
  • The very final boss battle against the Dark Entity in the Blood Omen is extremely simple and rather tedious. The only thing the boss does throughout the entire battle is to sink into the ground and try to rise up underneath you to deal Collision Damage. That's literally all. For the most part the attack can be avoided simply by walking in a straight line. When above ground, he just stands in place and doesn't even swing his claws at you. You almost get the feeling they simply ran out of time to draw sprites for anything more complex.
  • Doing battle with Kain in Soul Reaver isn't very impressive in comparison to his sons. Each time you smack him three times while he stands still and shoots lightning bolts at you, and then you watch a cutscene.
  • The end of Soul Reaver 2, and the closest thing the entire game has to a boss encounter. While the Sarafan Inquisitors are really strong and you fight them all in a row, it's completely impossible to die because the Reaver keeps your health at maximum, and you can't even drop the sword to give yourself a challenge. Thanks to this, the final encounter against Sarafan Raziel becomes drawn out, but still unchallenging.
  • The Sarafan Lord in Blood Omen 2. For all the fear surrounding him, the fight itself proves to be little different from the combat in the rest of the game apart from the amount of damage it takes to kill him. The fight start with same strategy of blocking his attacks and hitting him back with Incinerate while avoiding his unblockable attacks, and when Kain gets the Soul Reaver back the fight is about the same as any another in the game apart from the boss's attacks doing more damage.
• Audience-Alienating Era: Blood Omen 2, which starts out with the traditional pseudo-medieval setting the series is known for and later descends into a Steampunk setting rife with Magitek and extra-dimensional demons trying to invade Nosgoth. Defiance explains some of it, but keep in mind Defiance originally came out after Blood Omen 2...
• Awesome Ego: Kain is one of the most smug, arrogant, self-righteous, cruel bastards you'll ever meet. But he's badass enough to live up to his own boasts, and moreover, the fans wouldn't want him any other way.
• Awesome Music: The series features an unconventional, ambient soundtrack, giving atmosphere to the unique setting of Nosgoth.
  • Ozar Midrashim remains memorable as its one iconic theme, used for both Soul Reaver's legendary intro and for the central region of Nosgoth that the Pillars of Balance are situated in as a reminder of the world's decay and the reason behind it.
  • Ariel's Lament is a powerful theme for the later part of the series, with a foreboding feeling creeping through its duration masked by triumphant drum beats and mysterious-sounding tribal motifs.
  • The Sarafan stronghold theme is a very haunting atmospheric track with a side of martial music.
  • Janos' Retreat captures Janos' intimidating aura with a haunting introduction, then slowly becomes more serene, conveying his kind personality underneath the exterior.
  • The Dark Temple theme is a great example of the series' dark ambient music direction.
  • Nupraptor's Theme is suitably melancholic yet intense, for the eponymous Tragic Villain.
• Bizarro Episode: The Eternal Prison level in Blood Omen 2. Its origins are never explained, it doesn't really fit into the series' mythology and breaks several of its rules, and the guardians don't seem to belong to any of the established races while covering everything with Sigil Spam that doesn't resemble anything else in the series. Neither the prison or its guardians are ever mentioned again.
• Broken Base: The wraith-blade in Defiance; in Soul Reaver and Soul Reaver 2, it looked like a simple blade of energy emminating from Raziel's arm. In Defiance, it looked like a complete spectral sword, complete with a hilt he would grab; this was the intended appearance of the weapon all along, but graphical limitations at the time prevented it. Some prefer the original look due to it feeling more primal and "otherly", some feel that it shouldn't have been changed simply for continuity's sake. Others enjoy the look of the new blade, noting that it lends itself better to combat more complex than Raziel flailing his right arm about, and point out that the previous reavers - especially the fire reavers - looked like Raziel just stuck a traffic cone over his hand.
• Complete Monster:
  • The Elder God is an ancient parasite upon the Wheel of Fate. Playing at being god to the ancient vampires, the Elder God orchestrated a catastrophic war between vampire and Hylden that saw innumerable members of both killed, as well as countless humans. Upon the vampiric curse of immortality, the Elder God callously abandoned the vampires, leading to the suicide of most of the race. Later swaying Moebius to his side and inspiring him to his vampire purges, the Elder God manipulates almost every conflict in Nosgoth's history to kill countless people in order to satisfy its gluttony and desire for control. Hijacking Raziel's resurrection and manipulating the former vampire as its champion, the Elder God sends him to satisfy its plots and kill Kain with no concern for the slaughter left in the process so it may continue playing god and feasting upon the Wheel of Fate.
  • Hash'ak'gik, aka the Dark Entity, the Hylden Lord, and the Sarafan Lord, is the commander of the Hylden, a race banished to a demon dimension. He possessed Mortanius and used him to 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.
  • Blood Omen: The fair boy-king William the Just, through the wicked influence of the time-traveling Moebius, came to embrace evil and became a sadistic despot known only as the Nemesis. The Nemesis has his legions sweep across the land to 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.
• Continuity Lockout: A hard example. You can play Soul Reaver and understand the story just fine, but from there on the series is highly serialized and knowledge of the previous games is necessary to follow along.
• Contested Sequel: Blood Omen 2; some fans hate it (see Dork Age, below) for being "out of place" with the rest of the series in terms of tone and content, and possessing the only true scrappy in the series, while at the same time presenting Kain with a characterization drastically different from what he showed in either Soul Reaver game. Others enjoy it for capturing the Puzzle Boss aspect that was dropped in Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance, and found its use of steam punk and magitech unique and interesting, and justify it by pointing out that the game takes place in a separate time period from the rest of the setting, and pointing out that elements of steam punk and magitech were present in both Blood Omen and Soul Reaver, just considerably less preeminent (and in the former case, sometimes harder to pick out due to the graphics), and that Kain's characterization is appropriate for the time frame.
• Disappointing Last Level: Blood Omen 2 - The game starts promising, and most stages are true to the "gothic", pseudo-medieval flavour of the games in the series, with some steampunk technology introduced to show that centuries had passed in the plot - an enjoyable and credible fantasy setting. Then, the last few stages are set in a pseudo-sci-fi alien facility that would look more at home in a sci-fi movie than in a Legacy of Kain game. A game where its fun-factor was playing as a vampire, exploring atmospheric gothic/baroque architecture, attacking human guards and knights, was turned into a mishmash of genres where you have to find the switch to progress in bland similar corridors with little lights on the walls. The Hylden themselves, previously alluded to in Soul Reaver 2, are something of a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, but Defiance brings them more in-line with the feel of the setting.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Somewhat downplayed, but a common criticism of the later entries in the series was that the gameplay had lost its way and in the end were only worth playing for the story. Soul Reaver is probably the last entry in the franchise in which the gameplay was praised just as much as the story.
• Even Better Sequel: 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 Raziel and the Elder God, featured Amy Henning in the director's chair, made the vampire race more unique, and made the world of Nosgoth much more immersive and memorable.
• Evil Is Cool: Let's face it, Kain wouldn't be as much of a badass as he is if he wasn't such a colossal dick.
• Fanon: Before it became a soul-sucking sword, the Soul Reaver was known simply as "the Reaver". Some in the fan community refer to it in this state as the "Blood Reaver", to better differentiate it from talking about the sword in either form, and because it makes sense in terms of Theme Naming.
• Fan Nickname:
  • '"Hash" for Hash'ak'gik.
  • "Blood Reaver" is the LOK fans' name given to the Reaver sword that doesn't yet have Raziel's soul inside of it.
• Game-Breaker: In Blood Omen, Repel spell + Chaos Armor = WIN.
  • Also in Blood Omen, the Flay item is the most commonly found item in the game, can kill most enemies with a couple hits, and can easily be acquired in infinite amounts at the very first spirit forge the player is likely to run into which even has a bat form beacon right next to it. Aside from the Energy Bank it's highly unlikely you'll have reason to use any other item in the game, and it makes all direct attack spells just about pointless.
  • Want to really crush the game? Just mind control a person and take them to a Wraithforge. Doing so, chains will descend to draw and quarter the poor victim. In return for this human sacrifice, the wraiths will give you 99 of whatever they make instead of the measly amount they normally hand out. Having 99 Hearts of Darkness almost guarantees you'll never have to retreat to your tomb.
  • In Blood Omen 2, the Charm ability can't control any enemy that can actually fight, but hitting them with it causes them to momentarily stop and do an animation to fight it off, which you can interrupt with an attack. Once you have the ability simply Charm an enemy, do a combo, then repeat and there isn't much in the game that can harm you.
  • In Soul Reaver 2 there's a really glaring example. After you're able to summon the Reaver at will regardless of your remaining health, hide the Reaver and you can use the infinitely spammable combo of Light Attack, Light Attack, Heavy Attack, which will not let enemies retaliate at all while you attack them (and others will not attack you while you're focused on one), thereby eliminating nearly half the challenge of the game. (The other half comes from the platforming segments, which aren't generally hard at all.) If you prefer fighting with the Reaver, just alternate between Light and Heavy Attacks for the same effect.
• Good Bad Bugs: The flying glitch in Soul Reaver, which can be activated on PC and Playstation (but not on Dreamcast) − first crouch and press the "autoface" button while spreading your wings at the top of your jump. It is mostly useless but allows you to reach normally unreachable areas and discover what might be some of the Dummied Out passageways.
• Genius Programming: A major selling point for Soul Reaver was that, due to various coding tricks, the game has no load times, which is pretty impressive given that it was a Wide-Open Sandbox game on the Playstation. While the claim of "no load times" is not technically true^note There are load times, but they're short and hidden by the animations for things like doors and gates opening, which is why such things are located in seemingly arbitrary places, in practice the game does allow players to travel across Nosgoth in realtime without ever having to view a loading screen.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The entire quest involving Elzevir the Dollmaker in Blood Omen -which involves a Princess presumed to be of child age being trapped in a doll, hidden in a bedroom of an old deranged man- becomes incredibly problematic -to put it very mildly- with the knowledge that Ken McCulloch, one of the lead writers (who also worked on other Silicon Knights titles such as Eternal Darkness), was arrested in 2013 on charges of having CSAM in his possession.
• Ho Yay: You don't need shipping goggles to see the mountains of subtext with Raziel and Kain. The two are obsessed with each other, and constantly talk about how the other is the key to their fate. Raziel particularly links Kain to his disfiguration, often lamenting he was good-looking in life. Then there's some of the dialogue...
  Zephon: You are not His handsome Raziel anymore. His precious first-born son...
  Elder God: To embrace a serpent is to invite poison into your heart. Kain is a sinuous beast; he will seduce and deceive you.
  Kain: Our destinies run together, Raziel, like two rivers that have met and can never be distinct again.
  • The end of Defiance in particular is straight out of a slashfic. Kain has Raziel pinned to a wall with his sword through him; when Kain tries to pull the sword out, Raziel grabs it and pulls it back in. And Raziel is busy groaning and gasping as Kain stares at him in awe and horror. And the scene is capped out with Raziel putting his hand on Kain's chest while reassuring him "I am not your enemy, not your destroyer. I am, as before, your right hand..."
• It Was His Sled: The Oracle of Nosgoth is the Guardian of Time, Moebius the Timestreamer.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Once a petty noble in the world of Nosgoth, murdered and revived as a vampire, Kain has chafed at the tyranny of fate. Establishing a vampire monarchy, but wishing for a way to save the world without sacrificing his own life, Kain condemns his right-hand man Raziel to the Abyss, knowing Raziel will survive and return as a wraith, allowing Kain to manipulate him, the one being with true free will, into changing fate to the point of even averting his own predestined death, as well as saving Raziel from his own fate of being consumed by the Reaver. Kain proceeds to overcome a multitude of dangers with his wit and skill, constantly able to keep pace with the most powerful players in Nosgoth to the point he is able to even defeat the monstrous Eldritch Abomination, the Elder God, who has been responsible for all the bloodshed and horror Nosgoth has endured for eons, while never losing his sardonic wit or dark charm.
  • 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 achieved, 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.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The series' use of Flowery Elizabethan English has resulted in several memes, though most agree that the series pulls it off extremely well.
  • The opening of Soul Reaver has proven to be very useful in memes among Legacy of Kain fans.
  • You pissed off Raziel? You bastard.
• Moral Event Horizon: 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. He's saved from it with The Reveal 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 You Cannot Fight Fate present.
  • The Elder God crossed it before the series began when he ordered the ancient vampires to go to war with the Hylden after they refused to submit to him, and then really crossed it when he contentiously worked to wipe out the vampires after the Hylden cursed them, even though they had done exactly what he ordered them to.
  • Moebius crossed with his plot exterminate all vampires in Nosgoth. Even with his Freudian Excuse it's made clear he sees all vampires, regardless of their actions, as a plague that need to be wiped out and doesn't even care if his actions lead to the return of the Hylden, which Defiance showed he was aware would happen.
• Narm: Moebius manages to get away with it thanks to his old body working with the graphical limitations, but most other humans in the series look some kind of off, whether it be the outdated CGI in Blood Omen, or very peculiar close-ups of Human Raziel in Soul Reaver 2. The faces the latter makes can become downright hilarity.
• No Yay: Many people ship Kain and Raziel. If you didn't know already, Raziel is Kain's vampiric "son".
• Only the Creator Does It Right:
  • Nosgoth, being an MMO action game, has not been very well received by most fans, who loved the original games for their gothics stories.
  • On the other hand, both Silicon Knights and Crystal Dynamics are equally liked as creators. It helps that Amy Hennig was retained as the lead writer.
• Paranoia Fuel: All the antagonists that can manipulate you across time to their benefit, and can observe your every action from the day you're born until the day you die without you ever realizing it.
• Player Punch: Raziel's Heroic Sacrifice. Even Kain is hurt by it.
• Polished Port: GOG's rerelease of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain runs on modern versions of Windows, has incredibly fast loading times, offers controller support, and is generally bug-free, thus easily making it the best PC port for any game in the series.
• Porting Disaster: Most of 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 second-hand copies that may be difficult to find.
• The Scrappy: Umah, can be a particularly easy character to hate for some players. Her character design is ridiculously sexualized, she comes across as condescending, her attempts to search the Industrial Quarter end with her getting kidnapped and needing to be rescued (and then you have to do what she was sent to do), and finally she steals the Nexus Stone from Kain with the intention of killing the Sarafan Lord herself. Predictably, she doesn't make it very far. And Kain isn't in a very forgiving mood when he catches up to her (He never is, but still).
• 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; its 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 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 Vorador being inexplicably alive, which was explained in Defiance...in a scene that had to be deleted due to time constraints.
  • Soul Reaver 2 does deserve a note, though, despite its contribution to the series plot: It cut out the exploration and much of the character advancement (with the Elemental Reavers being the only new skill, and those only really applying in the dungeons they are found in) from the first game, leaving only the story strung together by sequences of bland combat and a few interesting puzzles. The worst comes in the final stretch of the game, in which the player is subjected to a long corridor of unavoidable fights against highly frustrating demons, followed by another sequence of tedious fights that the players couldn't lose even if they tried.
• Signature Scene: A difficult call, as the series has a number of iconic scenes, but if you have to pick just one to represent the entire franchise then it has to be Raziel's confrontation with Kain at the Pillars of Nosgoth in Soul Reaver 2, where Kain delivers the immortal "coin landing on its edge" speech that heads up the main page.
• Spiritual Licensee: These are probably the closest to The Elric Saga videogames we are gonna get.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The sprite-based Blood Omen not withstanding, the entire series received acclaim for looking gorgeous, with the last game, Defiance, looking amazing for the PS2.
  • The Spectral Realm, and the process of shifting to and from it, creates some very cool visuals, and the Spectral Realm itself looks awesome. Zigzagged with Defiance, though — the Spectral Realm in that game has more severe visual distortion effects, which made some players physically ill.
  • The opening cutscenes of Soul Reaver and Soul Reaver 2 were stunning for their time.
• The Woobie:
  • Raziel goes through a lot. He gets destroyed and abused and manipulated so many times in so many humiliating ways that you can't help but feel sorry for him.
  • Kain is an Iron Woobie and Jerkass Woobie. 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.
  • Poor, poor Janos Audron.