Retro Review- Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain
Lisvender’s Retro Review: Blood Omen Legacy of Kain
I often criticize games for having immature stories, but here’s one whose tale is quite impressive. Brought to you by the heel-draggers at Silicon Knights and their leader, “Mr. Reciprocity” himself, Denis Dyack, Legacy of Kain is a competent Zelda-like from the Playstation 1 era. Few games feature this level of atmosphere, with moody music, punchy sound effects, phenomenal voice acting, and a grim but engrossing tale. Unfortunately, few games also contain this much loading time. The story makes the game worth playing, but the technical flaws simply can’t be overlooked, even by the standards of its day.
The dark fantasy world of Nosgoth is in sorry shape. The Circle of Nine, the keepers of order in the land, are succumbing to a slow insanity. Vampires and bandits scour the countryside. The armies of a neighboring kingdom are planning an invasion, and Kain, a nobleman who was just out for a drink, is accosted and murdered by thugs for no apparent reason. Seems like everything’s going wrong, but then Kain is granted a boon in the afterlife: an offer to escape death and take revenge on his killers by becoming a vampire. He leaps at this chance, but he soon regrets it, and he begins a quest to cure himself and the world by restoring the Nine Pillars of Nosgoth.
I know what you’re thinking: more vampires, huh? Don’t worry, the toothy ones in Blood Omen aren’t the whiny, beautiful, effeminate things you’d see in a Stephenie Meier novel; they are angry, monstrous hedonists who see human beings as little more than livestock. A major thread of the game’s story involves Kain’s slow acceptance, and eventual appreciation, of his undead powers.
Kain is just an intensely likable character. He will encounter mad magicians, plague-ridden lepers, and armies of hellspawn, but his attitude is all a smooth and cynical charm that actually fits, and doesn’t come off as inappropriate or awkward. Kain will comment on every item he receives, every landmark he sees, and every boss he faces, but it never gets annoying: each bit of speech is a poetic, perfectly-delivered delight. Simon Templeman, who voices Kain, puts just the right spin on his lines, and he turns out quite the droll demon.
Kain will travel all across Nosgoth, dueling with soldiers and town guards, feeding on people to restore his health, collecting weapons and armor, learning magic spells, and exploring towns and caves. The game is played from a 2D, overhead view, and it feels very much like Zelda, but with an emphasis on combat. Most of the items and spells in the game function as offensive projectiles.
The sword-swinging action is fast and fun, and it features a difference from most action-adventure games: when an enemy is one hit away from death, it enters a “waver state.” In other words, it gets dizzy. Press Circle while the enemy’s wavering, and Kain will feed on it, causing its blood to fly straight out of its body and into Kain’s mouth. This is one of the few ways that Kain can heal himself, so you mustn’t attack too wildly, or you’ll kill your foes before you can feed on them. Some of the weapons and armor you’ll find have unique qualities that will affect your feeding strategy: the Spiked Mace doesn’t damage enemies much but it dizzies them quickly, the Flame Sword is a mighty weapon but it burns enemies up and leaves nothing to feed on, and the Flesh Armor draws blood into Kain’s body automatically as you fight, so you don’t have to feed manually. The downside of the Flesh Armor is that some enemies have green or black blood, which is poisonous and deadly to Kain, so you’ll want to change clothes while fighting these guys so you won’t ingest any of that junk.
Kain can also change forms, as most vampires do, to solve puzzles or to facilitate travel. He can turn into a cloud of bats and zip to major landmarks scattered across the world. He can change into a wolf, a speedy form that can leap pits. He can melt into a mist form, which protects him from physical damage and allows him to walk on water. He can also take on the appearance of a living person, which helps him to blend into society and chat with the townsfolk. The numbnuts of Nosgoth rarely have anything helpful or even intelligent to say, though, so the real purpose of the living guise is to avoid the attention of town guards, who attack vampires on sight.
As a game released in 1996, Blood Omen has a curiously cheap look. It was that interesting time when pre-rendered sprites were considered cutting-edge, and motion-capture technology wasn’t yet common. The in-game action doesn’t look so bad, as it’s viewed from a considerable distance, but the CGI videos are nigh laughable, with stiff, doll-like characters reciting deep and dark dialogue. It’s good to remember, though, that Blood Omen’s only real competitor at the time was the 16-bit Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. A visual comparison between the two is completely unfair.
On the other hand, it must be said that Zelda has the upper hand in the technical department. Blood Omen may have a terrific story, fun action, and a big world to explore, but its flaws hang continuously over all these good qualities. They cast a shadow over the entire experience.
The loading times in Blood Omen are completely out of control. Moving from one area to another, which is a breeze in any given Zelda game, requires several painful seconds of loading in Blood Omen. The music cuts out, a big red “LOADING” box appears in the center of the screen, and that delicate atmosphere the game has worked so hard to wrap you in just evaporates. It’s worse than the surprise load times in the Half-Life games. The poor designs of some of the levels don’t help matters. Sometimes Kain will enter a new area and be greeted by an enemy projectile. If you don’t react immediately, the attack will shove Kain backward into the previous screen, forcing you to endure two more load times just to get back to where you were.
That’s not the worst part of it, either. The worst part, the truly, completely, all-encompassingly worst part is that the game loads every time you pause and resume it. Given that pausing is the only way to change Kain’s equipment and set up which items and spells he can use, these load times are absolutely exasperating. In my recent playthrough, I often encountered monsters whom I knew were resistant to the weapon I was equipped with, but I refused to switch up because I knew how long the loading would take. The game’s load times actually pushed me into a strategic malaise! Fighting the monsters with a weak weapon was more convenient than equipping a better one!
Remember the Water Temple in The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time? Remember how irritating it was to have to go to the Equipment Screen to change boots every few seconds? Well, imagine what traversing that temple would be like if you added five seconds of waiting to every press of the Start button. It’s not a pretty picture, but that’s exactly what playing Blood Omen Legacy of Kain is like.
Blood Omen is now available through the Playstation Store. You download the entire game to your Playstation 3 hard drive. I downloaded it because I enjoyed the game when it first came out, and I expected that playing it from a hard drive would mean that the loading would be reduced. Well, here it is, free from the sluggish form of the CD, and yet its load times are no shorter than they were fourteen years ago. Now, I’ve always thought that installing games from an optical disc to a hard drive was done to reduce load times during play. Have I been lied to for all these years? Was I just wrong about that? Or is the PS3’s emulator just deliberately including all those excruciating seconds of waiting because Sony thought it would complete the nostalgic picture?
If you can stomach the ubiquitous loading, you’ll find a great game in Blood Omen Legacy of Kain. That’s probably the most tragic thing about it: that few people will have the patience to see its excellent scenario through to the end. If the game had reached more people, maybe Silicon Knights wouldn’t have sold the rights to the IP to Eidos, who then turned the series into a buffet of blandness. If the game had reached more people, maybe Mr. Dyack would have spent more time conceiving good action-adventure games, and not wasting it on the ridiculous Too Human.
The opportunity, now, is gone. Thanks to the efforts of today’s largest game companies, the world may never know what will happen if the great and serious story of Blood Omen was married to decent technology. If there’s anyone who can do it now, it’s Goichi Suda, a.k.a. SUDA51, the guy who made No More Heroes and Killer7. That’s material for another review, though…maybe my next one!
Controller1.com rating: 1/3 (2/3 for the very patient)
