Introduction

Now that the Blood Omen LP has been completed, the time has come to get into Soul Reaver.



What is Soul Reaver?

The second installment in the Legacy of Kain series, released in 1999 by Crystal Dynamics as a continuation of the story of Blood Omen. Initially a different IP called Shifter, it was merged with the Legacy of Kain story during development, Shifter became the wraith under the symbolic (as in Byblical symbolism) name of Raziel, and the Soul Reaver games ended up contributing no less, if not more, to the overall Legacy of Kain story than the Blood Omen games. They are also superior to BO games in terms of gameplay (barring, in my opinion, early BO2 combat). While Blood Omen is an isometric top-down game, Soul Reaver is an [allegedly Tomb Raider-esque] 3D platformer with a few neat mechanics.

Shifting between planes of existence didn't go away.

It also managed to not age as badly as the other PSOne games.

Is it still meh gameplay with amazing voice acting and atmosphere, like Blood Omen?

Yes. This game is where Michael Bell joins the cast.

Where can I get it?

Unlike Blood Omen, which you have to scrounge for on eBay or Amazon, Soul Reaver is easy to obtain (at least on PC) due to being available on both Steam and GOG. I will personally be playing the GOG version because that is the one I managed to record. Whether it is any different from the Steam version I do not know, but I highly doubt that it's even possible to make them any different. Note that I can't give you any idea on whether and how these versions support controllers, as Alexey is incapable of using a controller to play anything more fast-paced than Pokemon due to never having touched a controller in 21 years of his life, so keyboard is the way to go for me.

I highly recommend you purchase the game if you haven't yet. In fact, I highly recommend that you purchase and play both Soul Reaver games and Defiance if you haven't already (if you're reading this thread, you probably have, it's just Blood Omen that was never widely played, but the keyword is "probably").

Is this a 100% run?

I am going to collect all health and Eldritch energy powerups and obtain all the Glyphs (spells). So, yes. Thankfully (for me), unlike Blood Omen, Soul Reaver doesn't have a hundred secrets, of which 90 are identical item pickups that require extensive backtracking. Soul Reaver has only about 20 secrets that require extensive backtracking.
Post-LP edit: I realized that I forgot one Eldritch energy power-up in Rahab's territory. Everything else was collected.

How heavily is this going to be edited?

Editing of the gameplay footage itself will be minimal. If you followed my BO LP, you noticed that I prefer to make use of annotations on Youtube, and only resort to cutting when I show too much of my own ineptitude (the way I understand it, when the game intentionally makes the player suffer, some people do want to see me suffer and some like that out of their LP, so I prefer to give the viewer the choice), and tedious block puzzles as well as sequences of backtracking, getting lost, and platforming failures will be left in as an integral part of the OG Soul Reaver experience, but you will usually be able to skip them. Besides, platforming failures will rarely be my fault anyways, as the controls and camera in Soul Reaver are, sadly, quite wonky.
I will, however, make some bonus content akin to the Oracle's museum video. The focus of these extras will be the cut content, which is plenty.

Spoilers?

At the moment of writing the Blood Omen thread OP it seemed like a good idea to forbid spoilers. Over some time it became clear that it's almost impossible to talk about the game and not talk about the overall story. At the same time, I know for a fact that there are people who are unfamiliar with the LoK lore and would prefer to see the story unravel before them through the games (given that they are honestly more fun to watch than to play), so what I ask for is that spoilers are avoided whenever possible, and tagged otherwise. I personally will not be spoiling anything during the videos: while I will cover things about the development and the connections between Soul Reaver and Blood Omen, a lot of the LoK storyline is concentrated in SR2 and Defiance, plus SR doesn't have an incoherent clusterf*** of confusing cutscenes for an introduction (and then for the endgame reveals) like Blood Omen does, so SR requires a lot less explaining.

I stopped following the BO LP mid-way because I couldn't stand you talking in a very loud voice as if you were talking to a large hall full of people, did you get any better at that?

Yes, yes I did.

Also:
1) Shoutout to The Orchard/IODA for being nice and removing copyright claims for Ozar Midrashim in literally one day after I asked them. Ozar Midrashim can be bought on iTunes, which I think is cool and good.
2) A special mention to Tristitia and Believe Digital Records for being fucking piece of shit frauds and Content ID trolls.
3) The thread is up because, as it turned out, the "copyright" monetization is off when a claim is disputed, so I figured "whatever, most of the goons who watch it won't see ads anyway"
4) The Soul Reaver font can be found here
5) I am terribly sorry for the "skip" button being half-covered by the timing bar all the time, the annotations editing screen was misleading in making me think that only about 1/6 of the button is covered. It didn't come to my attention until after the LP was completed. It will be rectiifed in the future LPs, LoK and otherwise.

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