PlayStation 2 Review
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2

Soul Reaver was the game responsible for perhaps one of the biggest cliffhangers of all time. After a climactic battle, Raziel watches as Kain hurls himself into Moebius’s time streaming device. Raziel, with only one choice ahead of him, jumps into the portal after Kain, tossing himself into oblivion. Raziel survives the time jump, and finds him face-to-face with the Time Guardian, Moebius, himself…

“Raziel… Redeemer, and destroyer... Pawn, and messiah... Welcome, time span’s soul… Welcome…to your destiny…”

… “To be Continued”

That’s right, the old “To be Continued” sign. I was saddened when I saw this…but a few years later, after Soul Reaver 2 was released, I had nothing to worry about. Soul Reaver 2 picks up exactly where Soul Reaver left off, pulling you back into the Legacy of Kain realm as if you never had left it.

Graphics: Soul Reaver 2’s graphics are excellent from the very first. I love how this game looks. Everything is so dark and smooth, though there is the occasional seam here and there. Raziel has been refined. He still retains his old gruesome appearance, with a few new improved textures on him.

Everything else looks pretty nice, too. The frame rate is excellent, and I’ve had little to zero slowdown in all of the time I’ve spent with it (I honestly can’t directly recall a time when the game has slowed in frame rate, but just to be safe, I threw in the “little”). The animation is amazingly fluid in everything that happens. I love to watch Raziel jump into the water… The slight blur effect of the camera and the ultra-slick frame rate just entrances me… It’s smooth, I tell you. Very, very smooth.

Faces also have expression now. Even Raziel’s face can show expression, though it’s mostly in the wideness of his eyes that show anger, skepticism, or anything else he’s presented with. All characters you see in any dialogue (except enemies) always show emotion, and their lips are synched almost perfectly with their voices, which is pretty good for a video game. With a story driven game like Soul Reaver 2 (and what a story it is), full facial animations are an excellent thing to have.

Environments are constantly changing, be it because you’ve entered an ancient ruin or because you’ve entered a different era in time, although that doesn’t happen too much in this game. They also aren’t too bland. There are some areas that look the same, as in walls and ground textures, but that’s nothing bad. Each ruin you explore has its own distinct look, and since those make up a lot of the game, that’s a good thing.

Enemies change from era to era, as well. The first look more like monks, with most, if not all, of them wearing brown robes. Only these monks are packing. They got swords, mini-cannons, and spears as their disposal, and they live to kill vampires, so Raziel is a main target. Human enemies differ from era to era, while other enemies, such as Thralls (mummy-like creatures) and a few others are in any era you explore.

The Spectral Realm is exactly like it was in the other game, aside from the addition of a new type of Sluagh. It’s like a Sluagh-dog, almost. It’s huge, bulky, and walks on all fours. Of course, it’s just food for the soul, if Raziel stops by, but I guess variation never hurt anyone.

The blue haze fills the Spectral Realm, and pillars twist and all that good stuff, just as in Soul Reaver 1. I really like the new look of the Planar Portals. Instead of just going blue rings with some “fizz” floating up, it’s not a glowing circle on the floor, with blurred hues of blue and green. The “fizz” is merely bubbling, but when you step on, it gets excited the Portal lights up.

As the Elder said, “These portals are your conduit between the spectral and material realms. With their aid, you may gather matter and will yourself to become manifest in the physical world.”

Using the Spectral Glyph, you now see the matter that Raziel gathers as he manifests his physical body. It’s comes in the form of little blue dots being attracted to Raziel and mimicking his Spectral self. You can also see the reverse of this effect when you “abandon your physical body”, by the blue dots fleeing away from Raziel as he exits the Material Plane. It’s not much, but hey, it’s the little things that make a great game.

Sound: Soul Reaver 2’s sound is excellent. Raziel’s footsteps sound excellent, always matching the place he’s in. If he’s crossing a bridge, his footsteps give a hollow echo over the wood, while on dirt, they make a crunch as he passes the terrain.

Enemies all have their distinct sounds, also. Demons grunt, humans yell, Thralls, uh…cough, and the likes.

The music isn’t bad, but it’s nothing memorable. It sets the background, but you’ll most likely never get a Soul Reaver 2 track stuck in your head.

The Reaver and its different elemental properties also have different sounds, but the real cream-of-the-crop in Soul Reaver 2 is, like its predecessor, the voice acting.

In the Legacy of Kain series, to say the voice acting is anything less than spectacular is blasphemy. Michael Bell (Raziel) and Simon Templeman (Kain) have both returned, as did the actors for both Moebius and the Elder (don’t know their names, so sue me). The vocabulary is extensive, the story is rich, and the actors are top-quality. All-in-all, the voice acting it truly a treat. Emotion and expression are conveyed perfectly through the blend of facial expression and talented actors, combined with an excellent script. You’ll never find a bit of text anywhere in the game, aside from menus.

Story: Like Soul Reaver before it, Soul Reaver 2 is primarily story driven. To say it’s an interactive movie is more or less the truth. There is a great deal of conversation that takes place, but also a lot of traveling to be done and puzzles to be solved.

For those of you who skipped directly to Soul Reaver 2 or need a review, here’s the story of the original Soul Reaver, without spoiling too much:

After Kain chose immortality and damned the Pillars to decay, and became the last living vampire instead of sacrificing himself, he made 6 “lieutenants”. Raziel was the first born, followed by Turel, Dumah, Rahab, Zephon and finally Melchiah. Vampires grow by entering a stage of accelerated evolution, in which they enter cocoons and emerge with new gifts. Raziel evolved before Kain, and grew a pair of wings. In a fit of what seemed to be jealous rage, Kain tore the bones from Raziel’s wings and had him cast into the Lake of the Dead, in which he would burn forever.

Raziel was spared from oblivion by the Elder, a mysterious entity who wants Kain and the vampire race dead just as much as Raziel does. Raziel leaves the Elder’s abode at the bottom of the Lake of the Dead, and goes off to seek revenge.

One by one, he slaughters his vampire brothers (all except Turel, who was cut from the game), until only Kain is left. He finds Kain deep in the Oracle Caves, biding his time in Moebius’ time streaming device.

Soul Reaver 2 picks up right here.

“At last…” Kain says. “I must say I’m disappointed with your progress, I imagined you’d be here sooner. Tell me; did it trouble you, to murder your brothers?”

“Did it trouble you when your hurled me into the abyss?” Raziel retorts.

It goes on from there, but I won’t repeat the entire introduction (which I DO have memorized, sadly enough). Kain then enters the time portal, and Raziel follows. He meets with Moebius inside the time streaming chamber, but Kain is no where to be found.

After a five-minute or so talk with Moebius, Raziel finds Kain’s whereabouts and immediately heads to them. Apparently, Raziel has been taken back to Nosgoth’s distant past; a past where the Pillars still stand, and a soon-to-be-born Kain is still in his mother’s womb. From here, the story takes twist after twist after twist, leaving you thinking something differently after every cutscene. The story is not predictable in any sense, and it is very original, I assure you.

Also, don’t worry about missing anything important, because just incase you missed something, the game records the dialogue of each major cutscene you go through in what’s called The Dark Chronicle, which can be viewed at any time during gameplay. It holds the script of the game as you progress, so it won’t spoil anything for you. It’s very useful.

Gameplay: The controls are very easy to get the hang of, and require almost no time to get used to at all:

X = Jump
Square = Attack
Triangle = Heavy Attack
Circle = Devour Souls
R1 = Target Lock
R2 = Look Around Mode
L1 = Block
L2 = Crouch
You can fire projectiles by holding R2 and pressing Triangle, perform a high jump by holding L2 and pressing X, glide by pressing X again after your first jump, and drop objects by holding L2 and pressing Square. By locking onto an enemy and pressing X, you can perform dodge jumps. It’s a very simplistic, but very efficient, set up.

First of all, fighting has been changed. Soul Reaver’s fighting engine made it to where you couldn’t kill an enemy without the means. That’s because they were vampiric, of course you couldn’t kill them with your hands. Thus, the Grapple button (Triangle) has been changed to the Heavy Attack button. Since you’re fighting humans now (you won’t find a live vampire in SR2), it doesn’t take as much effort to dispose of them.

By tapping Square twice, you do a simple three-swipe combo with your claws. By pressing Triangle, you do a claw swoop and a powerful kick that will send most enemies flying. By ducking, you can do a low-claw swipe or a sliding kick, although you don’t slide far. This helps for blocking enemies.

The addition of blocking makes the combat system slightly deeper, but not by much. Ducking attacks can be used to overcome a block, but enemies can also jump to avoid ducking moves. This means you can either dodge or block enemy attacks to get around them, then strike and an opening. However, like yourself, enemies, too, have powerful blows as well as weak ones. The weak ones can be blocked, but the power strikes (indicated by a brief “charge” period and a white slash line) cannot be, and those must be dodged, lest you take a bit of damage.

Finishing attacks, now performed with either Square or Triangle, differ for every weapon you use. Granted, many weapons conform to the same class, with the same moves and the same finishing maneuver; it’s just a mere skin change. Raziel can kill with his claws now, using them to stab stunned human enemies. Spears have also returned, as have torches. There are two new weapons that I can think of, one of which is a sword, and the other is a very large type of halberd. There may be more that I’ve missed, but don’t count on it.

The Soul Reaver takes charge in Soul Reaver 2, awakening shortly after the game begins. Once the Reaver awakens, it becomes very different from the benevolent Reaver you were familiar with in SR1. Instead of being a weapon that comes only at full health and helps you sustain that health, while being a very powerful weapon, it now becomes something of a parasite, competing for control. That doesn’t make it any less useful, however.

To fully explain how the Soul Reaver now is, it can be turned on or off by double-tapping Circle. When using the Reaver, it becomes your weapon, which is more powerful than any other weapon, and is incapable of being blocked, which is very helpful for those annoying enemies. But for each enemy you kill, the Soul Reaver becomes more aroused.

See, you have your health coil, and around that, you have a circular bar, which fills as the Reaver becomes more aroused. By killing an enemy, the soul is immediately pulled toward the Reaver as IT takes the soul, not Raziel. When you swing the Reaver, fire projectiles, or devour souls, the Reaver becomes more aroused, and the bar fills. The more the bar fills, the more powerful the Reaver becomes. But should the circular bar complete and the ends meet, the Reaver will become fully aroused, and to contain is ravenous hunger for souls, it will turn itself on Raziel and begin to devour HIS soul a bit, until it calms down. Fighting with the Reaver in a fully aroused state isn’t all that dangerous, since the Reaver only takes a small amount of health, and this makes the Reaver an extremely powerful weapon, capable of killing just about anyone or anything with a single swing. Of course, the more you kill, the longer the Reaver will stay aroused, meaning the more health you lose. And now, you’ve got nothing to sustain your health, as it’s constantly dwindling without the way the Soul Reaver used to work, so you’ve got to balance the use of the Reaver and your soul intake, or you’ll be shunted back to the Spectral Realm. And for the bigger enemies, you might need to run around in circles swinging the Reaver just to charge it up to a substantial level, then move in and kick butt with it. It’s also particularly helpful for large groups of cluttered human enemies, which you can just run through and mow down. Good times.

Unlike the first Soul Reaver, SR2 is sadly devoid of any boss fight, aside from the occasional bigger bad guy. All of Raziel’s power-ups from the first game (the ability to faze through gates, climb certain walls, etc.) all made it into Soul Reaver 2, so don’t worry about that.

However, like the first Soul Reaver, SR2 had immense portions cut from it. In Soul Reaver, the story was supposed to be much different. You were supposed to fight and kill Turel, find some Sorceress lady, kill Kain and use the Silenced Cathedral to destroy any last vampire from Nosgoth (I think). Soul Reaver 2 has no glyphs, which were supposed to be added. There were living vampires, areas that still were going to lead somewhere else, other things to be explored, and all that good stuff, but a lot was cut. I’m glad a lot of Soul Reaver was cut, because without it, there’d be no Soul Reaver 2, but it also would’ve been nice to have that stuff. Maybe they’ll remake SR the way it was supposed to be someday, who knows.

Soul Reaver 2 is about the most linear game there is. The entire game is one path, with very few different paths to take, if any at all. It’s strictly from one point to another, and after time traveling, there’s a lot of running to be done to get hither and thither, which can be time consuming. You’ll never be guessing where to go next, because after every power-up, Raziel has a short monologue and tells you where you should go next. The only real power-ups in this game are Reaver elements, which can be changed at elemental fonts you see scattered throughout the world.

Speaking of linearity, having no Glyphs in the game means no Eldrich energy power-ups to be found, no life extensions to be found (those come with Reaver upgrades), nothing. The game is very straightforward, which is both good and bad. Good, because it propels the story right along, but bad because there’s not exploring to be done.

Block puzzles are gone, and are replaced by some interesting and challenging puzzles using different Reaver elements, artifacts, both Planes and other things. All-in-all, it’s a very fun game.

Replay Value: I’d rate it middle-to-high on the replay scale. I think Soul Reaver 2 has quite a bit, actually. It’s all about the story. It took me two or three times through the game to understand it, and even now it confuses me in areas. You really need to think in order to iron out the wrinkles or you’ll be lost. It’s a very fun game to play, too. Granted, the game is rather short, but hey, the shortest games are always the games with the most replay, aren’t they? I’ve gone through SR2 3 or 4 times out of the whole time I’ve had it, and that’s not bad.

Rent or Buy?: Give it a rent first. Depending on your tastes, you’ll either love it or hate it. …Or you could be in-between and think it’s okay, I guess. If you’re a fan of the first Soul Reaver and the Legacy of Kain series in general, chances are you’ll like this game, if not only for the story. I can easily be beaten in a rental period, though, so I’d say give it a rent unless you really love the game, you’re positive you’ll love the game, or you need it to top off your collection of LoK games thus far.

As said before, you could call SR2 an interactive movie. All dialogue is done through the impeccable voice acting. There is still a lot of game to be played, but the story is the dominating factor of Soul Reaver 2. Some people like it, some people don’t. If you want a game that’s about pure fun, play Super Mario Sunshine, because SR2 has a long story that will really make you think, and if you don’t want to hear a lot of talking, this isn’t the game for you.

Soul Reaver 2 is an enjoyable experience, and I really appreciated the game. It could’ve been a lot better, because of all the things that were cut, but I’ll live if I don’t die, right?

Overall: 8/10

By: Cory McGray