The Game Art HQ Playstation Anniversary Tribute: Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver
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Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is the sequel to the game which was often called “Legend of Zelda for Adults” at the time, Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen.
It was released in August 1999 by Eidos Interactive, the developers this time were Crystal Dynamics and not Silicon Knights.
While the birth /top down perspective was used for Blood Omen, Soul Reaver used a 3D engine which set new standards on the PSX, not only did it provide very detailed graphics on the aged system, it also had almost no loading times and made real time switching between the two different dimensions in the game possible.
Soul Reaver got mostly very high reviews and got ported to the PC and Sega Dreamcast later, both versions had crispier graphics but the differences were not too big. Soul Reaver 2 was developed for the Playstation 2 later and Raziel, the main protagonist of the game returned also in Legacy of Kain: Defiance.
Two artists from our community wanted to illustrate this great game and Raziel:
“Kain Refused the Sacrifice” by Melissa Gabric
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Raziel the Soul Reaver by AemiliusLive
“Soul Reaver” and Raziel were love at first sight for me. I felt strangely identified with this character who was once a mortal, then turned into the vampiric lieutenant of an evil overlord, who jealously cast him into certain death, from which he was rescued in agony by an Elder God, who threw him back into a new existence in the world above to seek revenge.Only for him to discover that an age had passed and his mad old master, his clan, his brethren and their offspring had become even more hideous, corrupted and decadent than they already were, still ravaging the world of mankind. Nowadays most games are about experience and upgrades, but back then it was sort of new to me to go acquiring new abilities that allowed Raziel to access and explore new areas in this vast fantasy world. The convoluted storyline was also most appealing to me, and it remained to be a key component in other installments of the Nosgoth saga. My first gaming console was a Sega Genesis, and I did some computer gaming since the late ’80s, really; but I look back on the Playstation days as my Golden Age of gaming. It was a whole new experience, there was suddenly a plethora of immediately accessible PSX games. While in olden days a whole year or more could pass between the original release of a cartridge and the local release or import here, same with old diskette and cassette based games. And many of the games themselves were truly groundbreaking. Of course I speak like a child of those times, but I feel like only the graphic capabilities have improved dramatically over the years, but the true gaming innovations and revolutions… all happened back there and then. |
