Now, onto the review. Also sorry if it's kind of long and there are no screenshots, I couldn't really find any good sized ones, but I'll make up for it at the end of the review with a couple of things.
What if I was to tell you that there was a game just like any kind of Zelda game, and was just as good, except that the game’s narrative had actual weight to it. (Please, don’t burn me at the stake Zelda Fans!) This game combining very Zelda like gameplay along with a very dark storyline and anti hero character is known as Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. Blood Omen was one of the first batch of great Playstation games that came out shortly after the console had launched, and in my opinion it is one of the overall best games on the console.
Presentation
You play as a former nobleman turned vampire named Kain. Kain was never a nice fellow before becoming undead and changing to a vampire hasn’t done much to help his temperament and that’s part of the game’s charm. You play as a dark, bitter, disenfranchised vampire who doesn’t really care about anyone but himself and his quest for vengeance. It was a breath of fresh air back in 96, and it still is today, there simply aren’t really any games where you play from this kind of perspective, the main character is practically evil…and it’s awesome. Like I said before, the way this game looks and plays is very similar to the old Zelda games.
You are basically playing from a 2-D Top Down view and all the enemies and other objects on screen are 2-D Sprites, but all the spells are rendered in 3-D which is a nice touchup that makes the spells look unnatural. The HUD is on the right of the screen and it displays Kain’s Life or “Blood”, his currently equipped Armor, Weapon, and Magic, a little sundial telling you what time of day it is (Sometimes it matters), and Kain’s Magic bar. It’s a nice clean, easy to understand interface, and the menu systems are the same way nearly. The menu to access Kain’s equipment and spells is very self explanatory and if you don’t quite understand what an object is or it’s purpose, or maybe if you forget it’s purpose, Kain will remind you with a simple push of the Circle button. Equipping weapons and armor is simple enough, you just select it and hit X, Magic and Items are nearly the same way but there is a design flaw in the selection of these on the game field that, intentional or not.
When you pull up your magic or items menu in game for use, it’s a little five squared graphic showing the magic and items you’ve picked, but the thing is, you can never pick what will be in the middle square, it’s always filled by the last Spell you’ve learned or Item that you picked up. It’s annoying from a tactical and convenience standpoint because if you need to switch items and spells around for situations you’ll have to do more menu hopping than you could’ve ended up avoiding if they had only made it to where you can put something in the middle square. That’s really the only beef I have with the presentation side of the game other than interface lag, which isn’t really a design flaw but a result of the technology then.
Score: 9 - Awesome
Gameplay
Your basic 2-D top down hack and slash gameplay is what is mainly featured in this department. Sometimes you have to run back from an enemy attacking you because his swing is too fast and wait for an opening to strike him, you know, that kind of stuff is usually what’s going on in the melee fighting front, and you can only have one spell/item selected for use. Among Kain’s other abilities he also has access to a few different forms, that of a bat, to fly around the world and do quick travel at checkpoints, a werewolf to leap over obstacles or just run faster, Mist Form to walk over water with no problem at all and walk through certain locked doors, and the under the guise of a normal person so Kain can avoid fighting town guards and interact with people. Each of these forms except for Bat form will drain Kain’s magic as he uses it however, but like in any other Action/Adventure game you can upgrade your maximum Magic and Health by finding Blood Vials and Magic Glyphs scattered about the world either in the open, or in hidden areas. It sounds like Kain has all of his bases covered with all the abilities and other things he can do that I’ve listed, but Kain is not without his weaknesses.
Kain is susceptible to quite a few things throughout the world because he’s a vampire, and that’s another part of the game that makes it and the level structure interesting. You have to take precautions and measures to deal with Kain’s weaknesses as you go about the game which consist of, water which will burn Kain to death in no time, daylight, which just makes Kain slightly weaker overall, rain (about the same effect as water but slower), snow (same as rain only the effect is faster!), and poisoned blood which just does damage to Kain over time until the poison wears off or until you cleanse it. You also however need to feed on people to keep your strength up because even when not taking damage, Kain will slowly lose health. Now some of these vulnerabilities you can overcome through the game, like rain’s negative effect through things in the world called Blood Fountains. Blood Fountains are basically a feeding point for Kain and they’ll enhance him in someway, usually it’ll increase his ability to push objects or increase his magic regeneration rate, but you’ll find a couple that increase his resistance to rain.
Beyond the combat oriented and upgrading/power mongering gameplay which is done very well, there are a few problems some of them really just design issues. The boss fights in this game are few and far between and usually they are very simple due to certain abilities Kain has (a reflect spell that nullifies all damage for a about a minute that you can cast multiple times later in the game) and just how easy it can be to beat most bosses anyway, usually the fights will go down in this pattern all the time. The boss will taunt you and summon something, either a bunch of random spells or minions to try and overwhelm you and you have to try and ignore them, or break through them to hit the boss. This is a tride and true boss battle design that’s found in nearly every game but it gets kinda dull when a majority of the bosses in this game use this tactic. There aren’t really any bosses that require you to figure out how to beat them, or you have to solve a puzzle to hit them, it’s usually just a matter of you beating them down, to be honest most normal enemies and traps are more dangerous than bosses are!
Only two boss fights really offer any kind of trouble at all, one is just a straight up brawl that’s difficult mainly because the boss can take more punishment than you have magic, and the other is tough because you’re fighting two guys at once, and one of them keeps creating puddles of water on the ground while the other is on a small island on a lake shooting lighting bolts at you. The only other disappointment is the puzzles in this game are very, very simplistic which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but the thing is, with a game like this usually you’d think there would be a couple of stumpers in it where you could eventually figure out how to do it, but nearly all of the puzzles are just switch puzzles that open doors, again there are only two instances where I got stuck on these puzzles and that was just because both solutions made no sense at all, you basically had to just try random patterns. Other than those two issues, the gameplay is exceptionally tight, there are just the right amount of save and checkpoints, nothing is glitchy, it’s an overall solid package.
Score: 9 – Great
Graphics
The graphics were pretty good for their time but there were certainly games that did look better, this game did have it’s moments though. The main problem with this game’s graphics is just sometimes an overall lack of detail on certain things or odd design choices. Some character designs aren’t very up to snuff and some are just bizarre, one of them is this jester looking guy who looks like he’s playing a flute, and he summons undead to attack…that’s just random. Sometimes you’ll walk into a house that just has one room and a bed in it, that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. At least a lot of the animations are very fluid, and the spells look pretty good too, except for the gumballs of doom casted on you by a boss.
One thing the devs were able to accomplish was to give areas an atmosphere, and they could do it with ease. Each town seemed to have a distinct feel to it and most of them did look different, either by design or simply by size. There were certain places that would feel hellish, or creepy as well due to simple things like lighting or just where the area is in general. The game also had FMV scenes for critical points in the story, and for when you’re flying in Bat form. The FMVs were very basic and primitive in look but some of them are fun to watch and they get the job done, it is sort of better than just watching Kain and some other guy just stand there and talk in game, or you walking in circles or swinging at things because you’re bored.
Score: 8 – Great
Sound
The game’s sound production value seemed not too great when it came to sound effects and voice overs. I don’t know if it was due to compression or something but the various sounds and voices sound muffled, it could also just be an early CD thing with the technology but I’m not sure. The voice overs are still excellent despite this problem, I would actually go as far to say that Simon Templeman as Kain was almost as good as David Hayter’s Solid Snake, and this game was two years Metal Gear Solid’s senior. They even have Tony Jay (Guy who played Megabyte in Reboot) who also became a Legacy of Kain series regular in it, and his voice along with Templeman’s is all over the place.
The game’s other strong point in the sound department is it’s music. The music in this game is often very moody and ominous, I would suggest taking a listen sometime if you’re not familiar with any of the game’s soundtrack, there are some pretty impressive pieces on there. My only problem is it doesn’t seem like there is enough music in the game. There seems to be only nine tracks in the entire game and they’re recycled throughout it.
Score: 8 – Great
Replay Value
This would be the game’s weakest point, as it is with so many others. There are multiple endings but you can save at the point to where you can choose them (They are not long either), there are also 100 secrets in the game you could gun for finding if you’re a completionist and it isn’t unrewarding. By doing so you can find large caches of items, more Blood and Magic upgrades, and even a spell or two you would not have found if you weren’t secret hunting. The only other reason you would have for playing through it again, is to simply re-experience the story.
Score: 5 – Banal
Overview
Despite a few of it’s misgivings, Blood Omen is certainly one of the best games available on the Playstation. It does have fun core gameplay, the story is very interesting, and the game has pretty decent length to it. I would say it would average in at about 20 or 25 hours minimum and maximum it would be about 35, giving it a nice shelf life. It was also the start of a great and underappreciated series, but if you’re looking to expand your Playstation collection and you’ve never played this and like these types of games, you should give it a try.
Overall Score: 8.3 - Great
To make up for the massive wall of text I produced I have a link to a pretty good gameplay video at about the middle part of the game. It drops in framerate for some reason but it's still a good video.
I also have a few screenshots of the ill fated Saturn version of the game. A port was planned and worked on for the Sega Saturn but it was scrapped as this game came out in 96 and the port was due in 97, by that time the writing was pretty much on the wall that the game wouldn't have fared too well on the system, so they scrapped it. It's too bad as I would've liked to have seen if the Saturn version performed any better, but the only real difference I can make out of these scans from a magazine ad is that they put a little veil over the skulls on the top of Kain's HUD, oh well.
Lastly, I have a link to a pretty neat site for the Legacy of Kain series called The Lost Worlds. It's a site that's dedicated to primarily the cut material from all of these games but also has a few other nice features, such as being able to download all the game's soundtracks.
http://www.thelostworlds.net/index.html
Thanks for taking the time to read if you did
