Legacy of Kain/YMMV

• Awesome Music: The series is not really known for its soundtrack but Ozar Midrashim remains memorable as its one iconic theme.
• Disappointing Last Level - Blood Omen 2 - The game starts promising, and most stages are true to the "gothic", pseudo-medieval flavour of the games in the series, with some steampunk technology introduced to show that centuries had passed in the plot - an enjoyable and credible fantasy setting. Then, the last few stages are set in a pseudo-sci-fi alien facility that would look more at home in a futuristic FPS than in a Legacy of Kain game. A game where its fun-factor was playing as a vampire, exploring atmospheric gothic/baroque architecture, attacking human guards and knights, was turned into a messing of genres where you have to find the switch to progress in bland similar corridors with little lights on the walls. The Hylden themselves, previously alluded to in Soul Reaver 2, are something of a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere, but Defiance brings them more in-line with the feel of the setting.
• Dork Age: Blood Omen 2, which starts out with the traditional pseudo-medieval setting the series is known for and later descends into a Steampunk setting rife with Magitek and extra-dimensional demons trying to invade Nosgoth. Defiance explains some of it, but keep in mind Defiance originally came out after Blood Omen 2...
  • Granted, there was always a bit of Steampunk and magitek in the original Blood Omen as well as Soul Reaver, it just wasn't as promeniently focused as it was in Blood Omen 2.
    • Considering that Blood Omen 2 took place about 400 years after the first game there had to be some technological advancements.
      • And the first game had some really weird magitek of its own - how about a machine that makes animated armor soldiers in Malek's bastion?
• Fan Nickname - "Blood Reaver," referring to the Soul Reaver before it became a soul-consuming weapon and instead drained the blood of its victims. The term is Fanon and the term Blood Reaver never appears in the games, but prior to becoming a soul-consuming weapon it was just called "The Reaver," which is obviously just going to get confusing.
• Game Breaker: In Blood Omen, Repel spell + Chaos Armor = WIN.
• Ho Yay: It doesn't matter whether or not you're wearing your slash goggles, some of the dialogue sounds... questionable.
  • To point out some of the in-game examples, Raziel describes Janos as, "darkly beautiful" and Zephon says that Raziel is no longer "handsome" as a wraith.
  • The last few bits of dialogue between Raziel and Kain in Defiance are blatantly slash-tastic.
• Magnificent Bastard: Kain and Moebius, arguably. Their ability to time travel and see the effects of predestination give them advantages that most Magnificent Bastards don't have, but nonetheless, their manipulations are pretty impressive. Kain is probably superior to Moebius, because while Moebius is working with the Elder God and the predestined timeline, Kain is working against them and nonetheless manages to manipulate on a fairly even footing. Also, Kain most definitely has the Badassery, and the Large Ham style and flair that Magnificent Bastards usually posses, while Moebius is inferior in that regard.
• Memetic Mutation - "This edifice was clearly significant, but I did not yet have the means to reach it."
  • You pissed off Raziel? You bastard.
• Mondegreen: So who's this "Victor" Kain keeps yelling about?
• Most Annoying Sound - Kain's catch phrase, "Vae Victis" turns into this in the first game for his tendency to shout it at the top of his lungs every three or four swings of a sword.
  • And in Soul Reaver, the sharp noise that Raziel's claws make when he digs into scaleable walls or moveable blocks.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: Most of the series is considered inferior to Blood Omen, since its designers -- Silicon Knights -- were cut out of the loop, the trademark essentially stolen by the publisher.
• Selfish Good, Selfish Evil: Kain is Selfish Good with shades of Neutral Selfish. He really is doing what's best for the world, but he does so because it just so happens the best thing for the world is for him to reign over it as The Emperor of a Vampire army. However, his actions clearly indicate he isn't adverse to gambling on the world's fate in his quest to restore it, and given his personality, if it was Kain vs the World he'd probably just shrug and charge in swinging. He's definitely not adverse to commiting evil acts to benefit himself either, so he's Selfish Good in the sense he looks out for number one but his selfish goals coincide with what is good for the world.
• Sequelitis - With sparse dialogue, uninteresting villains and a plethora of block puzzles, Soul Reaver seemed to fall victim to this at first, but showed the depth of its morality and hints of a far-reaching plot - at the very end of the game, leading into Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance, which pulled the whole thing together into a far more interesting, many-sided and complex plot than even Silicon Knights could have foreseen despite the series' troubled development history. On the other hand, pretty much everyone agreed that Blood Omen 2, which was handled by a different team entirely and conflicted in many ways with the established plot, was pretty bad.
  • Blood Omen 2 is a complicated case; it's contradictions exist because the events of the game don't exist in the original timeline; the entire sequence of events portrayed in the game is how history re-shuffled itself when Kain delayed Raziel's imprisonment in the Reaver. Raziel himself noted that he could tell Kain was remembering things that didn't originally happen as history was re-written, and those new memories are Blood Omen 2. The biggest loose end is Vorador being inexplicably alive, which was explained in Defiance...in a scene that had to be deleted due to time constraints.
  • Soul Reaver 2 does deserve a note, though, despite its contribution to the series plot: It cut out the exploration and much of the character advancement (with the Elemental Reavers being the only new skill, and those only really applying in the dungeons they are found in) from the first game, leaving only the story strung together by sequences of bland combat and a few interesting puzzles. The worst comes in the final stretch of the game, in which the player is subjected to a long corridor of unavoidable fights against highly frustrating demons, followed by another sequence of tedious fights that the players couldn't lose even if they tried.
    • Fridge Brillance comes to mind if you see it trough Raziel's eyes. For him, this unavoidable fights means that he is getting closer to his true destiny and everyone is trying to stop him at all cost from succeding. So every time he dies it only servers to reinforce that he must get to his destiny a soon as possible, without thinking for a second that this may be a trap and bites him in the ass. It works for Soul Reaver 2 but not for Defiance, where he already learned from this mistake so the unavoidable fights here are meaningless and repetitive even with the new combat system
• The Woobie - Raziel goes through a lot. He gets destroyed and abused and manipulated so many times in so many humiliating ways that you can't help but feel sorry for him.
  • Averted with Kain. Even though he's back from the dead three times, was condemned to death by his fate, was corrupted since he was born, felt weight of the world on his shoulders for some thousand years (which alone without training, which he didn't have, could drive one mad) and got manipulated to kill his kindred before being told to kill himself, he always manages to stay strong and confident, really rarely letting his feelings show themselves.