Part 28

Ahh, we made it!

Kain walks cautiously into the Citadel...

Watch it here:

Video - Kain enters the Citadel

Kain:
"And so I arrived at the citadel of my Vampire ancestors, long abandoned since their extinction eons ago."

Kain:
"Perhaps it still held the wisdom of its creators."

Kain:
"Here Moebius said I would find proof that Raziel was not what I thought he was -- or hoped he would be."

Kain:
"But in sending me here Moebius had done me an unexpected -- or perhaps an unwitting -- service."

Kain:
"For it was my destiny, not Raziel's - my role as Scion of Balance - whose secrets I was here to discover."

In the end of the video, you can hear a sort of swooshing sound as Kain walks across the room - that's the sound of Shadows springing into being. We kill those, first thing, and...

Oh look! Kain now has the ability to perform a pretty sick combo, wherein he smashes an opponent into the ground, lets them bounce, Lift Attacks them into the air, jumps up and smashes them into the ground, lets them bounce up again (all the way up to his height), slashes them repeatedly in the air, then smashes them into the ground once more (where they stay). This will kill any opponent in the game on which Lift Attack works (which excludes some of the endgame things - we'll get there). Not only that, it's quite impressive visually. I'll see if I can get a video of it with a good angle before we finish the game.

We proceed down the stairs to the citadel proper.

Immediately outside, we come to this door, which we can't open - I bet there's some kind of disc or relic around here somewhere that'll fit in here and open it, though!

Oh! Can't forget these. I don't know what the 'actual' name of these are, but they always struck me as some kind of primitive tribal bitch. These things are the new stock enemy - they're all over the place. They're interesting in that when they're just standing around, they kind of hunch down and envelope themselves in their hair - they look like some kind of fucked up bush.

Ahh, the center of the Citadel. No doubt the answers Kain seeks are in here - which no doubt means we can't get in yet!

Kain confirms this:
"This door was clearly significant; the answers I sought surely lay within."

Kain:
"But to unlock the chamber, the Balance Emblem had to be fully restored."

Moving on...

Kain:
"Here, no doubt, was the evidence Moebius wished me to have... For the Vampires had prophesied not one, but two champions - one destined to be Nosgoth's redeemer, the other, its destroyer. The Vampires' hero wielded the Reaver, forged for this very purpose. His opponent was clearly the hero of their adversaries - the Hylden - and brandished a flaming sword. The foretold outcome was unambiguous: the Vampire hero would fall."

This is interesting - Raziel's murals hadn't been this... conclusive. The question that remains is this: is Raziel the Vampire hero, or the Hylden hero? And, which is Kain?

In the words of Raziel, "Clearly this was significant in some way I had yet to discover!"

Kain:
"The Reaver required some additional enhancement before this door could be opened."

Moving on... another locked door, this one requiring the next piece of the Balance Emblem to bypass. We clearly can't get through this, either, so let's see what other options there are...

Oh, well, here we go. Progress.

We head back to the door we couldn't pass before, and use the disc.

The way thusly lies open before us!

We come to this interesting site - a portal, much like the ones we've seen Raziel make use of.

We jump the gap, and...

...step through.

Ahh, now this is familiar. It seems we've made our way unwittingly into one of Raziel's spirit forges.

Kain:
"These statues were singularly inanimate. I knew better than to assume they would always remain so."

Good call, Kain!

Well, I'm not going to include screenshots of this whole area, mainly because it's boring as shit. But to summarize, Kain makes his way through not one, but three spirit forges that Raziel has already visited (or... will visit, in 500 years) and destroy statues along the way until we come to...

...the next section of the Balance Emblem, conveniently hidden away here.

Kain:
"The third fragment of the Balance Emblem endowed the Reaver with the elemental power of Lightning."

Also here, we earn Kain's final combat ability. This one is fairly unuseful, but allows Kain to hold an opponent telekinetically while murdering them.

It's unuseful because it doesn't work on the majority of opponents for whom something like this would be really helpful, and using the same amount of telekinetic energy, Kain can (usually) just throw an opponent into some environmental hazard or another and kill them outright.

More statue killing, the last of which are these monstrous flaming ones. These are difficult in that they hurl homing fireballs, and put up a fire shield every so often that damages Kain when he attacks them.

And there's two. We kill them anyway.

Finally escaping that ass of a level, we run back to...

...the door we couldn't open.

Kain:
"A new area of the Vampire citadel lay open to me. I still had much to discover."

Next time: Raziel, at Vorador's Mansion

Once again, sorry for the short update, but... there's really nothing to show in this level, besides a bunch of shots of Kain in the same areas Raziel's already been. Fun?

This'll be concluded in 3 more updates. "But Joudas, there's 7 more levels!" Yes, there are. But, the last 4 are a fairly awesome string of building momentum for the finale, and I'm putting them all in one epic climactic multiple-hundred-screenshot update. We'll finish this off this weekend - so hold onto your hats, because the monotonous boring levels are now officially over. (Well, ok, Vorador's Mansion is fairly irritating, but there's at least some interesting stuff to show in it!)