Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver

Soul Reaver is a 1999 puzzle action video game that is the second entry of Legacy of Kain. It focuses on Raziel.

Raziel

• Kain is deified. The Clans tell tales of Him. Few know the truth. He was mortal once, as were we all. However, his contempt for humanity drove him to create me and my brethren.
  I am Raziel, firstborn of His lieutenants. I stood with Kain and my brethren at the dawn of the empire. I have served Him a millennium.
  Over time we became less human and more . . . divine. Kain would enter the state of change and emerge with a new gift.
  Some years after the master, our evolution would follow, until I had the honour of surpassing my lord. For my transgression, I earned a new kind of reward... agony.
  There was only one possible outcome – my eternal damnation. I, Raziel, was to suffer the fate of traitors and weaklings: to burn forever in the bowels of the Lake of the Dead."
  Kain: "Cast him in!" Raziel: "Tumbling, burning with white-hot fire, I plunged into the depths of the abyss. Unspeakable pain...relentless agony...time ceased to exist.
  Only this torture and a deepening hatred of the hypocrisy that damned me to this hell. An eternity passed and my torment receded, bringing me back from the precipice of madness.
  The descent had destroyed me, and yet I lived." Elder God: "Raziel. You are worthy."
• Kain: "...and that is why, when I must sacrifice one of my children to the Void, I can do so with a clear heart". Raziel: "Very poetic, Kain".
• Raziel: "Am I reduced to this? A ghoul? A fratricide?" Elder God: "Elevated, Raziel. Not reduced."
• Raziel: "These apparitions and portents... what game are you playing now?" Kain: "Destiny is a game, is it not? And now, you await my latest move..."

The Elder God

• To Raziel, as the earth shakes beneath his feet: "This world is wracked with cataclysms – the earth strains to shrug off the pestilence of Kain's parasitic empire.
  The fate of this world was preordained in an instant, by a solitary man. Unwilling to martyr himself to restore Nosgoth's balance, Kain condemned the world to the decay you see.
  In that moment, the unraveling began...now it is nearly played out. Nosgoth teeters on the brink of collapse. Its fragile balance cannot hold".
• "Deep in Nosgoth's northern wastes, the hushed silences embrace an ancient enigma."

Ariel

• "Beware - those blind with rage are by destiny ensnared".
• "Far in the eastern mountains, a stifled titan stands in mute surrender - unwilling host to a parasitic swarm".
• "Kain refused the sacrifice. The Pillar of Balance, corrupted to its core, stands as a monument to his blind ambition.
  Now these pillars serve only to bind me here -- my prison and eternal home, thanks to the avarice of your master, Kain..."
• "Like a corpse in a shallow grave, corruption rises to the surface... Beyond these Pillars, the defiled victim mutely screams its outrage".

Moebius

• "Raziel - Redeemer and Destroyer, Pawn and Messiah. Welcome Time spanned soul, Welcome to your destiny".
• "Where time is but a loop, A loose stitch in the Universal Cloth, A Streamer might seize upon a chance, a fatal slip And plunge the fate of planets into chaos..."

Dialogue

• Elder God: I know you, Raziel. You are worthy.

Raziel: What madness is this? What pitiful form is this that I have come to inhabit? Death would be a release, next to this travesty.

Elder God: You did not survive the abyss, Raziel. I have only spared you from total dissolution.

Raziel: [angrily] I would choose oblivion over this existence!

Elder God: The choice is not yours.

Raziel: [distraught] I am destroyed!

Elder God: You are reborn. The birth of one of Kain's abominations traps the essence of life. It is this soul that animates the corpse you "lived" in. And that, Raziel, is the demise of Nosgoth. There is no balance. The souls of the dead remain trapped. I can not spin them in the Wheel of Fate. They can not complete their destinies. Redeem yourself. Or if you prefer, avenge yourself. Settle your dispute with Kain. Destroy him and your brethren, free their souls, and let the Wheel of Fate churn again. Use your hatred to reave their souls - I can make it possible. Become my Soul Reaver, my angel of death...

• Raziel: Show yourself, creature!

Melchiah: Do you not recognize me, brother? Am I so changed?

Raziel: Melchiah?!

Melchiah: Yes, brother. You should have stayed where the master sent you, Raziel. You will find Nosgoth less pleasant than you remember.

Raziel: What has become of my clan? Answer me, little brother, or I shall beat an answer from your horrid lips!

Melchiah: Everyone is afraid, sibling. You awake to a world of fear. These times of change are so... unsettling. Do you think I feel no revulsion for this form? Do you believe for a moment that our Lord would risk his empire upon an upstart inheritance?

Raziel: Enough riddles – what are you saying?!

Melchiah: You are the last... to die!

• Kain: Raziel.

Raziel: Kain!

Kain: The abyss has been unkind.

Raziel: I am your creation, Kain, now, as before. You criticize your own work. What have you done with my clan, degenerate? You have no right--

Kain: What I have made, I can also destroy, child.

Raziel: Damn you, Kain! You are not God! This act of genocide is unconscionable!

Kain: Conscience? You dare speak to me of conscience?! Only when you have felt the full gravity of choice should you dare to question my judgment! Your life's span is a flicker compared to the mass of doubt and regret that I have borne since Mortanius first turned me from the light! To know that the fate of the world hangs dependent on the advisedness of my every deed! Can you even begin to conceive what action you would take in my position?!

Raziel: I would choose integrity, Kain.

Kain: [chuckles] Look around you, Raziel. See what has become of our empire. Witness the end of an age, the clans scattered to the corners of Nosgoth. This place has outlasted its usefulness... as have you. [draws his weapon]

Raziel: [narrating] The Soul Reaver, Kain's ancient blade. Older than any of us, and a thousand times more deadly. The legends claimed that the blade was possessed, and thrived by devouring the souls of its victims. For all our bravado, we knew what it meant when Kain drew the Soul Reaver in anger - it meant you were dead.

[When Kain strikes Raziel with the Reaver, it is destroyed in a burst of energy]

Kain: The blade is vanquished. So it unfolds... and we are a step closer to our destinies.

[Kain vanishes, laughing; as Raziel returns to the spectral realm, he sees the Reaver hovering before him as a wraith blade]

Raziel: [narrating] I swore I saw a glint of satisfaction in Kain's eye when the Soul Reaver was destroyed. I did not understand the game that Kain was playing. But I knew the finishing move.

[As Raziel grasps the Reaver, its energy melds with him]

Elder God: From this moment and ever afterward, you and this blade are inextricably bound. Soul Reaver and Reaver of Souls, your destinies are intertwined. By destroying the sword, you have liberated it from its corporeal prison, and restored it to its true form: a wraith blade, its energy unbound. No longer a physical blade, it can only manifest itself in the material realm when your strength is fully restored. Once manifest, it will sustain you.

Ariel: [appearing behind Raziel] What are you, little soul? Another of Kain's creatures, come to taunt this bound spectre?

Raziel: I did not intend to disturb your rest.

Ariel: Rest? A body is needed for sleep. Flesh and bones are required to recline. No, child. All I may do is watch, and remember, ceaselessly conscious as this wretched world's history unfurls. Ghastly past, insufferable future - are they one and the same? Am I always here?

Raziel: How have you come to haunt these Pillars?

Ariel: Kain refused the sacrifice. The Pillar of Balance, corrupted to its core, stands as a monument to his blind ambition. Now these Pillars serve only to bind me here, my prison and eternal home, thanks to the avarice of your master Kain.

Raziel: That bastard can claim no allegiance from me.

Ariel: Then we share a common foe, Raziel. Return here when you have need. Ariel remembers what others have forgotten...

• Zephon: The prodigal son! There is no returning for you, Raziel.

Raziel: Zephon. Your visage becomes you. It's an appropriate reflection of your soul.

Zephon: And you are not his handsome Raziel anymore, his precious firstborn son turned betrayer. You have missed so many changes, little Raziel. Look around you. See how the humans' weapon of destruction has become my home - indeed, my body. A cocoon of brick and granite from which to watch a pupating world.

Raziel: A crevice in which to cower, only scuttling from the shadows to devour a victim already ensnared in your cowardly trap. But you've made the mistake of leaving me unbound, and it is you who must succumb to my will.

Zephon: Will, instinct, reflex action... the insect mind finds little difference. I warn you, brother: as my stature has grown, so it is matched by my appetite. Step forward, morsel...

• Rahab: Raziel...

Raziel: Rahab. You have adapted well to your environment, for one so maladjusted.

Rahab: Do not mock me, Raziel. You, of all of us, should respect the power bestowed by a limitation overcome. Kain said you would come.

Raziel: You speak with the murderer?

Rahab: You would do well to mind your blasphemous tongue!

Raziel: What more did he tell you?

Rahab: That you would destroy me...

Raziel: I will indeed. But tell me, before I tear your soul from its moorings: do you know what we were before Kain spawned us?

Rahab: Human.

Raziel: Sarafan, Rahab. The antithesis of all we ever believed.

Rahab: Does it matter? We were lost. He saved us.

Raziel: Saved us? From what?

Rahab: From ourselves.

• Dumah: Unbound at last! I thank you, brother.

Raziel: Your thanks are premature, Dumah. I have not forgotten whose hands bore me into the abyss.

Dumah: The centuries in limbo have honed my strength. Not even Kain is my equal.

Raziel: Even the strongest vampire is vulnerable.

Dumah: We shall test your thesis, Raziel.

Raziel: My blood-thirst has been superseded by an even darker hunger. I will consume your soul before this day is done...

About

As I mentioned earlier, the original idea was very loosely inspired by the rebellious angels of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The spiritual structure of the world was based on the philosophy of Gnosticism, the belief that the cosmos is ruled by a malevolent "pretender" god, that humans are prisoners in a spiritual lie, and that mankind's struggle is a fight for free will in the face of seemingly insurmountable Fate. ~ Amy Hennig

• I don't know how many people know this, but initially, it wasn't actually a sequel to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain at all – our original proposal was a concept for a new IP we named "Shifter", loosely inspired by Paradise Lost. The protagonist was essentially a fallen angel of death, a reaper of souls hunted by his former brethren, and now driven to expose and destroy the false god they all served.
  The "Shifter" concept was the genesis of the game that would become Soul Reaver; the core ideas were all there. The hero was an undead creature, able to shift between the spectral and material realms, and glide on the tattered remains of his wing-like coattails. We conceived the spirit realm as a twisted, expressionistic version of the physical world. The hero was bent on revenge after being betrayed and cast down by his creator – like Raziel, he was a dark savior figure, chosen to restore balance to a blighted, dystopian world.
• There were so many different inspirations, it's hard to just name a few…
  As I mentioned earlier, the original idea was very loosely inspired by the rebellious angels of Milton's Paradise Lost. The spiritual structure of the world was based on the philosophy of Gnosticism, the belief that the cosmos is ruled by a malevolent "pretender" god, that humans are prisoners in a spiritual lie, and that mankind's struggle is a fight for free will in the face of seemingly insurmountable Fate.
  We wanted to give Nosgoth's dystopian future a decaying 19th-century industrial aesthetic, while the look of the spectral realm was inspired by the twisted architecture and disorienting angles of 1920s German Expressionist cinema.
  Regarding the dialogue, we obviously took a cue from Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, with its florid language and ornate monologues. We wanted to carry a similar style into the sequels. I also drew inspiration from the dense, literate dialogue of historical dramas like A Man for All Seasons, Becket, and A Lion in Winter.
• Our biggest challenge, hands-down, was getting the data-streaming working, to allow us to have a seamless, interconnected world with no load events. I think we were one of the first developers to tackle this problem (along with Naughty Dog, on Crash Bandicoot). It proved to be way more difficult than we had initially anticipated – if I recall, we were still struggling to get the textures to dynamically pack correctly, just a couple months before release. We ultimately got it working by the skin of our teeth, but I wonder if we would've embarked on such an ambitious plan if we'd known how difficult it was going to be!
  Our second challenge, of course, was figuring out how to store two sets of data for the spectral and material realms, and how to implement the real-time morph between the two environments. Our initial plan was over-ambitious, involving texture-morphing as well as geometry-morphing, but we realized pretty early on that our texture memory (and time) was too limited to achieve this. We came up with the idea of leveraging the 3DS Max animation timeline to attach spectral values to the vertices in the geometry – i.e., frame 0 was the material world, and frame 1 was the spectral realm (or vice versa; I can't remember for sure). This way we could alter the x,y,z coordinates of each vertex, as well as its RGB lighting values, to create a twisted, more eerily lit version of the physical realm.
  Our ultimate challenge, though, was schedule and scope. Conceived as an open-world, Zelda-esque 3D adventure game, Soul Reaver was incredibly ambitious. Crystal Dynamics’ Gex engine gave us a leg-up on the 3D technology, but in essence we were writing a game engine from scratch, while developing a new IP. These days, a developer wouldn't think of attempting such a thing in less than three years (minimum), but Eidos wanted the game in less than two. In the end, we shipped Soul Reaver in under 2.5 years, but not without some unfortunate eleventh-hour cuts which still pain me today. The scope of the game was definitely too ambitious, but if we had shipped the game that Fall, instead of that Summer, I think we could have reduced the scope of the game more elegantly.
• To hit the August '99 release date, we had to cut the last few levels of the game, and end on a cliffhanger that set up Soul Reaver 2. Originally, Raziel was going to hunt down and destroy all of his former brothers as well as Kain – and then, using his newly-acquired abilities, he would've activated the long-dormant pipes of the Silenced Cathedral to wipe out the remaining vampires of Nosgoth with a sonic blast. Only then would he realize that he'd been the Elder God's pawn all along, that the purging of the vampires had devastating consequences, and that the only way to set things right would be to use Moebius’ time-streaming device to go back in time and alter history (in the sequel).
• I hope it's remembered as a well-constructed game with an original vision and an engaging story, and as groundbreaking in terms of what we were able to achieve on the PlayStation at the time. Our approach to voice acting and performance was also innovative for the time, the way we brought the actors in to record their dialogue together rather than in isolation. The performance capture process we use on Uncharted today – where we involve the actors as collaborators, and have them play the scenes together on the stage – owes its origins to the techniques we established for Soul Reaver fifteen years ago.

• Amy Hennig "Behind the Classics: Amy Hennig Talks Soul Reaver Secrets" by Sid Shuman. PlayStation.blog, (October 12, 2012).

• In today's video games, the open world is now commonplace - a single, continuous gameplay area that offers a vast canvas for developers to populate, to varying degrees of success. At the most fundamental level, what makes these sandbox games work is their ability to stream in world data on the fly as you play, with no loading whatsoever to disrupt the flow during traversal. What is now the norm was once the most ambitious of gaming concepts - one that initially came to fruition in the console space with the classic Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver for the original PlayStation.
• So how does it work? Essentially, the game is broken down into a series of units, with each unit representing a room, hallway or path to other rooms. Once the game is running, Soul Reaver stores three of these units in memory at any point - the room the player is standing in and the two adjacent units. As the main character moves into a new unit, the furthest one from the player that resides in memory is cleared and the next one loaded. Maps are designed so that loading a new unit into memory requires less time than it takes the player to cross the current unit. Clever, right?
• Further complicating level streaming, the design for Soul Reaver also called for dimensional shifting. During gameplay, players swap between the spectral and material planes - a key gameplay concept that ties in closely to both puzzle-solving and storytelling. Loading two different versions of the map would have placed too much strain on an already heavy system, but Crystal Dynamics' solution was elegant, innovative and efficient. The same basic map data is utilised, but geometry is mapped to different coordinates in each version of the level. Shifting between planes interpolates from one set of geometry to the other. Per-vertex colour data is also modified when shifting between planes, adding further to the illusion.

• John Linneman, "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver - the genesis of today's open world tech?". Eurogamer, (16/07/2017).

Voice Cast

• Michael Bell as Raziel
• Tony Jay as the Elder God
• Simon Templeman as Kain