The Promise of Kain Broken

November 9, 2009 in Industry Insider Comments off

Replaying Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain on PSP honestly makes me a little angry. The Legacy of Kain series allowed players to undertake the quest of Kain and Raziel, two vampires tasked by fate with saving their world via time travel. The story took place in a magical land called Nosgoth which was protected and just as easily corrupted by the magic of nine pillars. Blood Omen was followed by four sequels. But the ending of the last game, Defiance, left so many plot strings untied that at least one more game was in order. Yet we never got that game, and hence my subsequent and justified frustration.

While there was never an official announcement that the Kain series was to be abandoned, its demise was heralded by three major events:

• Amy Hennig mysteriously and inexplicably left Kain studio Crystal Dynamics to join Naughty Dog, where she immediately began work on Jak 3 from the Jak and Daxter series.
• Perhaps in explanation of the above event, Eidos Interactive took the flagging Tomb Raider franchise away from Core Design–the studio that created Tomb Raider–and gave it over to Crystal Dynamics. The company put all its efforts and resources into developing Tomb Raider: Legend, which used some very Kain-like storytelling to revamp the series. (The Kain-famous Soul Reaver also makes an appearance in Legend as a secret item.)
• Tony Jay, the actor who provided the voice of the Elder God, died in 2006 around the time Tomb Raider: Legend was finished. His character would have proved pivotal in a final Kain game.

For all these reasons, the Kain series was abandoned just one game shy of completion. I say “just one game” because after the ending of Defiance, there wasn’t much left to explore. Still, the holes remaining were big enough for Raziel to glide through. These famous plot holes include:

• Vorador, the vampire executed in Blood Omen, mysteriously appears alive and well in Blood Omen 2. Yet he’s still absent from the future, when Nosgoth was on the verge of collapse. While the ending of Soul Reaver 2 triggered a time paradox that allowed the Hylden to re-enter and overtake Nosgoth, the part of the paradox that allowed Vorador to survive his own execution remains unexplained.
• After receiving the true Soul Reaver and learning that the Elder God has orchestrated much of his fate, Kain defeats but does not kill the Elder God at the end of Defiance. The Elder God retreats into the ground, claiming immortality and promising to return. Kain muses that he can finally see the puppet master and the strings he pulls. If that’s not an endorsement for a sequel, I don’t know what is.

So… not a lot left to cover, right? I’ve read some rather unfounded (cited without source) reports that the game was originally intended to be longer, but was cut due to production constraints. To my mind the only way Kain and his trusty Soul Reaver were going to set things right was by returning to the Oracle Caves and time-traveling back to the source of it all: the Elder God emerging to the Ancients, its demand that they start a war with the Hylden, and their subsequent cursing with vampirism as a result. As Kain and Raziel traveled further back in time the Elder God seemed to be smaller in size and more solid, more scaly, more animal-like. If Kain went far enough back in time with the Soul Reaver, which allowed him to see the Elder God’s true form, then it’s possible he could find the Elder God in its original form and kill it, thus averting Nosgoth’s entire history.

So yeah, there’s quite obviously a whole game missing from the Legacy of Kain series, one that would allow Kain and Raziel (as the spirit of the Soul Reaver) to finally sort the bad hand Kain had been dealt at birth. Plus there’s that whole Vorador surviving thing, which could be explained along the way. But Crystal Dynamics has left the series in limbo since late 2003, instead content to develop Tomb Raider games seemingly ad nauseum. Amy Hennig moved on to direct the Uncharted series currently garnering so much acclaim on the PlayStation3, though it’s doubtful she retains any rights to continue the Kain series at any point.

No, Kain is just… over. And we fans who followed him ever since the series was called Blood Omen and the words “Legacy of Kain” were explanatory have been left perpetually hanging. Replaying the original game is still a fun trip down memory lane, but with a bitter under taste of all that should have been, but was denied.

PSP, Vampires, video games