Legacy Of Kain: Information Retrieval

 I always knew that the story told in the two Soul Reaver games had a deeper meaning than I had grasped because those two were the only games of the five-part saga that I have played, but for various reasons, one for example being that one of the other three games was based much more on combat than puzzling, I didn't feel the urge to play those. Because I hate this degree of combat/puzzle distribution in general. But with the help of Google, Wikipedia and YouTube I could feast on the story that is beknownst to the gaming world as the "Legacy Of Kain" saga. [...]
(show me)(don't show me)

Spoiler Alert: I won't spoil much - at least not deliberately - but if you still want to experience the story by playing the games then I don't recommend reading this.

I'm not here to retell the tale though, after I've read all this. I just want you to be able to acquire the same wisdom that I could acquire. The saga obviously depicts the "adventures" of Kain just as it shows Raziel's destiny. Speaking of which, there is a vague little difference between destiny & fate that I learned about during this excursion but it seems to me that it is so vague and unclear that it is hard to grasp. Or believe. Just like religion. But anyway, these two are not the only characters in this complex saga.

The saga itself consists of these five games created for several systems, spanning from Playstation One™ to Xbox™, Xbox 36o™, Playstation 2™, Windows™ and even the Dreamcast™, Blood Omen: Legacy Of Kain, Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver, Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver 2, Blood Omen 2: Legacy Of Kain and Legacy Of Kain: Defiance. While in the Blood Omen games you control Kain, in the Soul Reaver sub series you wander through Nosghoth as Raziel, whilst in Defiance you play as both of them.

Its story borrows ideas from different concepts, like the wheel of fortune or soul devouring fallen angels and the like. Or the aforementioned idea of destiny vs. the idea of free will. But because of these complicated features and many others - like time traveling which is always a big step to the genre "fantasy"/"surrealism" - there were quite a few story complications, paradoxes and similar things that diluted the saga a bit. Most of my questions that arose in that context vanished after I compared my new knowledge of the saga with this additional information though: firstly I found two timelines that describe the events of Nosgoth, an official one ^(source) covering only two games and describing history rather unbiased, and an inoffial one covering four games and describing the path of the Soul Reaver, Raziel as well as the blade in two parallel charts.

Secondly there is this Q&A session with Amy Hennig, the director & writer of three out of five of these games. It took place after (or in the course of) the release for the last game so far, Defiance. I guess this was the last chance for the developers to fill in some gaps for the fans. On an interesting sidenote, here you can see Amy's path through the videogame industry. It's not very long but all the more exciting. At least in my humblest of opinions.

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If you are a careful reader you might have noticed my phrasing "last game so far" which expresses my hope and strong feeling that there will be a next game some time in the future. It might be announced next year, it might as well be announced in ten years, but my stomach tells me that these developers want to add more betrayals and manipulations to this epic story. These easter eggs that can be found in Tomb Raider: Legend and Tomb Raider: Anniversary, two further games from Crystal Dynamics, the same development team of most of the Legacy Of Kain games, confirm my theory, although I'm absolutely clear about the possibility that these easter eggs could be merely a gimmick without further meaning.

Tomb Raider easter eggs


Last but not least, as I've played only two out of five, I still was very much interested in the whole saga and while reading is one thing, viewing the cutscenes is a completely different thing (completely in unison with the spirit of the cutscenes section of this website). What follows is the vid sub section of this article containing all the cutscenes (and therefore much of the story) from the first videogame, Blood Omen, the opening cinematic from the paradox Blood Omen 2 (or a trailer that could easily be the opening cinematic), as well as - what I believe is - all the cutscenes from Defiance, the latter being edited a bit carelessly so that you might be missing one or two seconds of dialogue. If the YouTube clips are down however - as it happens so often with these clips - feel free to try your luck here. I haven't included videos of the two Soul Reaver games, because of the selfish reaseson that I've played them already. Just recently. But again, feel free to try your luck here.

Have fun.

Blood Omen (2 YouTube parts)

• part 1
  
• part 2
  
  
  
  Blood Omen 2
  
• intro
  
  
  
  Defiance - The Fan Movie (7 YouTube parts)
  by Dunniebrasco
  
• part 1
  
• part 2
  
• part 3
  
• part 4
  
• part 5
  
• part 6
  
• part 7
  

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