“Spirits surround us at every side; they have driven me from hearth and home, from wife and child.” From The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)Early in his journey, in a mind-bending yet symbolic moment, Raziel, the protagonist of the second game in the Legacy of Kain series of games, titled Soul Reaver, shifts between the worlds of the living back to his native world of spirits: and the geographic features around him also morph and becomes distorted, dark, slanted and confusing. This visual cue visually reinforces the theme of murk and horror that the story is imbued with and from early on starts to establish the double layers upon which the narrative is built. This new world is a weird, twisted and stilted version of the material world, a crazy reflection of the world of the living, where water becomes as thin as air, and corporeal objects lose their physicality, becoming only shadows of their real selves. This fusion between story and gameplay mechanics serves as a thematic symbol which runs throughout the whole of Raziel’s story arc as it moves into exploring the tensions between reality and lies, between what is apparent and what is hidden underneath, between true divinity and false gods.
As the web of conspiracies and dark character motivations begin to slowly emerge, the nature of the spectral realm - a spiritual purgatory in a waste land - seems relevant also from a thematic perspective, visually constructing the atmosphere of the narrative and giving it validity. The craziness of the spectral plane was inspired by the need to make it appear surreal and haunting, and much inspiration was drawn from German Expressionist cinema. The sunken, twisted look of Nosgoth as a Wasteland was inspired by the sets of a 1920’s silent movie by the name of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The producers aimed to create a similar aesthetic between the warped and slanted sets in Caligari and the dizzily twisted aspects of Soul Reaver. The dimensions of existence which Raziel inhabits are twisted reflections of each other. Once he becomes a soul-vampire, he traverses a mirror image of the blasted Wasteland which his father-master, Kain, rules, travelling in a limbo of lost souls and scavenging upon them in order to feed his own existence. It is almost a literal reading of the themes which T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land” deals in. If one were to take that poem and distill it, Raziel’s lost wanderings would be a perfect visual allusion. In the world of the dead, time stands still, Raziel’s hunger for devouring the souls of the damned is ravenous, as he is forced to consume the essence of his victims in order to sustain his physical projection and continue his quest of revenge against Kain.
Revenge becomes another dominant literary theme in Legacy of Kain, a theme which is repeated multiple times in the story as it deals with several multilayered character stories of revenge upon a larger background of war and intrigue. Awaking in the Underworld some two millennia before Soul Reaver, Kain suffers from something which he calls “not anything as pedestrian as physical pain, but rather the jab of impotent anger, the hunger for revenge.” Referring to his assassins, their “sneering faces forever etched upon my memory” Kain hungers to “send them back whence I came” and foolishly accepts the curse of vampirism in order to rise from the grave. Once his thirst for revenge is sated, however, he realises how much “the world had changed to my eyes” in that sunlight “provided no comfort, only malice.” His quest to claim the land and enslave humanity under his rule is also partly fuelled by his need to be revenged against mankind. On the other hand, Raziel’s “self-righteous indignation” against the master he had faithfully served but who “had wiped him away like excrement from a boot” plays out on the backdrop of a landscape of a long dead land. The age of the world Raziel finds himself resurrected in is one of decadent apathy: “in the instant between my execution and resurrection, centuries had apparently passed.” Nosgoth, as Kain’s empire is known, is now “wrecked with cataclysms,” natural disasters abound and the “centre cannot hold.” The whole journey is shrouded in apocalyptic imagery: huge furnaces belch smoke into the sky, to shield the ruling vampire masters against the “poison of the sun,” while large water bodies, acidic to the vampiric touch, are drained. The land is parched. By the time in which the events of Soul Reaver take place, the unravelling Kain had initiated a thousand years prior has nearly played out. The future is bleak, and as Raziel repeatedly claims, he cares not for the fate of this world: “my own vengeance is motivation enough.” Revenge is highly regarded by the protagonists as their main driving factor and as a noble intention. In a world of treachery and deceit, revenge remains, at least, as a form of honesty. “Hate me,” Kain tells Raziel, “but do it honestly.”
Legacy of Kain, however, is not a book or movie; it is a videogame franchise of five distinct chapters, and one needs to do justice to this fact before continuing with an analysis of its story. The franchise is made up of two distinct branches. The Blood Omen branch are two games which follow the anti hero Kain and charts his descent into vampirism, his conquest of Nosgoth, and his eventual quest to restore balance to the world. The two Soul Reaver games chart the attempts of Kain’s symbolic son to thwart his destiny and obtain revenge upon his “father.” A fifth chapter unites both storylines into one conclusion. In choosing to examine the content of these videogames mainly in terms of narrative and outlining their symbolic and literary devices, we immediately communicate certain basic assumptions. First, that electronic and interactive media are viable tools for telling a story; secondly, that games do not have to simply act as vehicles to a story but can also tell it in an artistic, uniquely innovative way, and thirdly, that the interactive content of games can be divorced from narrative content without diluting either factor’s validity. Within the current climate in the industry these statements are far from universally accepted. However, they need to be if we are to eliminate the stumbling block in the form of the question of gameplay versus story and consequentially be able to derive further the traditional narrative techniques as applied in games as separate and yet intrinsic to the form. These assumptions will need to be made and considered in order to determine whether or not the story or plot within a Kain videogame can hold or support themes prevalent in literature.
One of Legacy of Kain’s narrative achievements is its ability to frustrate traditional genre expectations, subverting and turning upon its own axis to overthrow the player’s assumptions. Consequentially, when observing Legacy of Kain as a series, one is struck with its decade-long mindset of the franchise in placing the story at the foreground of the experience, using the gameplay as a tool to slowly unravel the plot. Against prevailing logic, it attempts to work as a novel or a play would work: if one were to remove the fact that this is actually a videogame, the story would solidly stand as a piece of genre fiction or theatre, albeit squatting on all the realms of fantasy, science fiction, horror and tragedy. The five games can also be seen as separate “acts” in the order they were published, as if this were a drama, plot-wise, they offer the same functions as the five act division does in Shakespearian tragedy. The player becomes an audience, the game simply a means to provide context to the tale, and the non-interactive story sequences become the dominant factor of the franchise. The multitude of expository background information is revealed to the audience either via character conversation or with Kain and Raziel’s reading in one civilisation’s abandoned libraries, or their interpretations of ancient prophetic murals discovered in the ruins of long gone civilisations.
The recurrent symbolism of restoration and myth in the story has to do with the cultural context of Nosgoth as a setting, and the nature and role of the characters as major players in its history. The loss of humanity and what humanity means is a further theme which is developed within the plot of both branches of the franchise. While in the first act, Kain’s urge to claim vengeance on his assassins directly leads to his choice of forfeiting his humanity to transform into a vampire, hundreds of years later; his symbolic son mourns his lost humanity only after discovering that, before being resurrected as a vampire by Kain, he had been human. The discovery casts his vampirism into a whole new light and he claims that:
“It tortured me to see how noble and pure I had been, and what a vile phantasm I had become: and a profound sense of injury, of loss, and betrayal welled up in me, so overwhelming, I could barely contain it. All I wanted at that moment was to find Kain and destroy him.”This reaction to the loss of humanity is in striking contrast to Kain’s reasoning that he had to accept the cost which came with coming back from the dead since “nothing is free. Not even revenge.” Kain, in relation to the biblical figure who shares his phonetic name, forfeits Heaven for a life of murder. “I didn’t care if I was in heaven or hell,” he tells us. His later power-hunger turns him into a dictator-figure, reminiscent of Macbeth, possessive of his throne, and paranoid, ready to execute even his first born son as soon as he poses a threat. Raziel, on the other hand, as his name implies, is the “angel of death”, and yearns for a life where had gets to choose his own destiny. His anger at Kain at his unjust execution is still mingled with a sense of respect, but he follows the path of revenge as the only path he thinks available.
It becomes clear that while the tale’s protagonists are indeed vampires, this is not their defining characteristic, but rather complimentary to their inherent nature and capacity for introspection and change. While in popular culture, vampires are often portrayed simply as objects of erotic desire by virtue of their sensuous embrace while draining the blood of their victims, the vampires of Nosgoth are sterile and telekinetically feed on blood merely because they need to survive on it. Nosgoth’s vampires are a completely different breed to what the word usually communicates in popular fiction. They are also physically beyond humanity, with rigid scales for skin and talons instead of fingers. Prior to Kain’s Empire, in every age in Nosgoth, vampires are cruelly hunted and oppressed. They lose their allure with which popular culture and literature has endowed them with, and become characters in their own right, rather than by virtue of their nature. They are not simply hunters preying on humanity; they are individuals: deluded, persecuted, self-searching figures, their journey of discovery cast in a new light by the symbolic corruption of death and the subsequent loss of humanity and the complications which ensue. While the young Kain, recently cursed, eagerly accepts his role of purifier of humanity in the hope of reclaiming his lost mortality, his eventual mentor, the century old Vorador, counsels him not to meddle in the affairs of man. Kain, ever arrogant in his ignorance, privately scoffs at this counsel. While Vorador has long embraced his nature, the fledgling Kain often contemplates his damned nature. This initial meeting with the older vampire, however, plants the seeds of doubt in Kain’s mind and can be seen as the turning point where he starts considering accepting his nature. Throughout the entire first act of the story Kain struggles to “indulge his gift,” as instructed by his mentor, all the while attempting to find a cure for his curse. This leads to the eventual climax of the story’s first act, which the character Mortanius, seemingly referencing the dramatic nature of this fiction, refers to as the “stage” which is “set for the grande finale.” Blood Omen ends with Kain opting to damn the world, rather than to sacrifice himself for the humanity which had cruelly manipulated him. The ironic ending is the human Kain’s dissolution; he bitterly realises that there is no cure for death- only release, and that deep down he had known this all along, and resonates with typical dilemmas characters face in Tragedy. Kain, as the flawed anti-hero, is faced with a crucial decision: to be or not to be. Since all the vampires are dead, with Kain the sole survivor, contemplating suicide due to external forces is not an option. On the throne of a ruined world, he contemplates that “once I embraced my powers I realised that Vorador was correct. We are gods- dark gods- and it is our duty to thin the herd.” This final, powerfully symbolic scene marks the end of Kain’s descent into Hell, and his rejection of humanity. The ending places Kain, as the last surviving vampire in Nosgoth, on the cusp of a realisation, embracing his own nature rather then revering whatever shred of humanity he had managed to preserve until that point.
The idea of what makes humanity so “weak and vulnerable to manipulation” becomes a subjective motif throughout the whole series, humans are portrayed as either being naively self-righteous, ignorant of the greater scheme of things, or conniving, manipulative, inhuman characters. Indeed, in traditional terms, the vampire protagonists are more human then humanity itself. “Men,” the Ancient, Janos Audron sadly observes in Soul Reaver 2, “fear what they don’t understand, and despise what they fear.” They systematically and ruthlessly massacre thousands of vampires in fanatical Holy Crusades, only due to their inherent predatory nature. In the third act, Raziel, observing the fields of slaughter of the Sarafan, (of which he had formed part in a previous life) with hundreds of impaled vampires, observes that “this was simply ruthless persecution” and is shocked by the scale of mass death he observes. While he had seen his fair share of slaughter, “for all the butchery of our crusade, this massacre was somehow more chilling: the cold blooded righteousness of the true believer.” Raziel, like Dante and the unknown T.S Eliot’s poetic voice, had not thought ‘death had undone so many,’ and is repulsed by the human’s inability to be human. Vampires, in most of Legacy of Kain, are not uncontested predators, but “hunted mercilessly and oppressed as a plague that had to be wiped out” by the zealous military-religious Sarafan order. While most observers have drawn a parallel to this element in the story to the historical Christian crusades upon Jerusalem, it seems more apparent that the story’s concern here is not with commenting upon real world history but with highlighting the consequences of prejudice, racism and hatred within its own workings. It is another of those rare moments of gameplay and story interaction where context is given, and the events of the plot are validated by the visual cues on screen. As the player is drawn into these fields of slaughter, the theme of tragedy is reinforced by its necessity for the plot to move forward.
Nosgoth’s vampires are not cursed because they have to drink the blood of the living but because of their immortality, their “imprisoned soul within the flesh, expelling [us] from the purifying cycle of birth, death and rebirth.” This whole process, known as the Wheel of Fate, is subsequently revealed to be the work of a parasitic being, a metaphysical squid, who gorging upon death, literally, self-styles itself as a God. Nevertheless, this does not reduce the psychological torment of the vampires who are cut off from what they perceive to be the essence of all life, but rather casts it into a whole new light, and the corporeal physicality of the world is questioned. This false God feeds upon the souls of the dead and grows as a “spooling parasite, buried deep in the heart of the world,” and its hatred of Vampires stems from their very nature: it cannot consume their souls. This “Demiurge” is invisible to the main protagonists of the drama until the final scene in the fifth act. The whole process which leads to the accumulation of the knowledge which reveals the ultimate falsity of an established belief has been described as the story’s Gnostic thread; the reward of which is true enlightenment. Upon acquiring this knowledge, Kain muses that since the “masks had fallen away. The strings of the puppets had become visible, and the hands of the prime mover exposed,” he is now equipped with the deadliest weapon of all: hope. This metaphysical theme about the enslaved nature of the human soul, and its doomed and cyclical nature, is the main subtly altered religious motifs within the story. Having defeated armies and physical monstrosities, defied prophecy and destiny, Kain’s final retribution is not a corporeal but a spiritual one.
This immediately moves the story away from what, until now, has been referred to as a ‘vampire drama’ and into the realms of historic and epic tragedy, with Raziel’s final sacrifice and Kain’s ability to see his “true enemy” being the catharsis. At the end of the final act, Nosgoth is still corrupted and only a phyrric victory is achieved. In its broader scope the story of the franchise tells of the woes, trials and falls of entire races, which, in their prejudice and hatred of each other and their lack of foresight plunges the very nature of the land for which they fight for in danger. Soul Reaver opens up with the closing image of Blood Omen's "bad" ending albeit a millennium later; with Nosgoth being reduced to a Waste Land, and Kain still its “maimed king.” Kain’s metaphysical corruption – the psychological taint he inherits upon his birth and the curse upon his soul, have become physically apparent. He still clings to his throne of power, having reduced humanity to slaves, nutrition, fodder and cattle in revenge to what had been done to him. He and his vampire sons, the six lieutenants, are in the opening scene symbolically aligned in a circle, the imagery subtly inverting the heroic notion of Arthurian myth and the Round Table to a parody upon the futility of order in such a diseased land. This allusion becomes all the more apparent with the revelation that Kain’s taste in ironic humour had extended so far as to turn “those whose passion transcends notions of good and evil,” the Sarafan anti-vampire crusades, into his six vampire sons. That these “holy knights and paladins” were transformed by Kain to serve as undead watchmen of his own personal waste land highlights his descent into madness which the audience is told is inevitable in Act 1 and witnesses in the development of the story. In these nuances the audience is exposed to a new Kain, one which has lot in common with Machiavellian Prince, who is cold, ruthless, and ready to sacrifice an entire section of his empire for political reasons. When questioned about the genocide of a whole tribe of vampires, his answer is typical of his growing madness: “what I have made, I can also destroy.” He begins to believe himself a God, and attempts to justify these actions by calling upon his divine right to “sacrifice my children to the void.” The final game would then serve as a build up to Kain’s eventual spiritual freedom and purification in his rejection of the Demiurge and its minions in Act 5, Legacy of Kain: Defiance.
The whole fulcrum of the plot revolves on the fatal moment when Kain damns the world in his decision to preserve his own life. He becomes the corrupted king who must die in order for balance to be restored. In J. Weston’s “From Ritual to Romance” the idea is explored that Western religion and culture are based on the fertility rite and actually superimposed on it. Legacy of Kain, in its most basic mythology, seems to assert a similar pattern. The audience is repeatedly told that “Kain must die for balance to be restored: there is no other way.” The story itself supports this idea as Kain seemingly cruelly and out of jealousy, throws his oldest son down to a death by water. Raziel’s sole crime was to have achieved the physical progeny of the Ancients, the original Vampires, who were endowed with the gift of flight. By ripping Raziel’s wings out of his spine and condemning him to “burn forever in the bowels of the Lake of the Dead,” Kain symbolically seems to reflect the Waste Land which his empire had become. As Raziel himself describes Kain’s empire, it was a “lifeless husk, bled dry of life and colour,” in contrast to the world before Kain’s vampires had taken over, which was “a land overflowed with abundant life and vitality.” The future Waste Land is “nothing more than the corpse of Nosgoth, a lifeless husk bled dry by the corruption of Kain's parasitic empire. This was the fragile world Kain sacrificed to preserve his own petty life and ambition, heedless of the profound cost.” One also has to draw parallels with TS Eliot’s same concern with the idea of a wounded king who has to die in order to give life back into the land in his poem “The Waste Land.” This poem has been described as exploring the corruption and descent of the human soul and the thirst for the spiritual. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver visually reinterprets and reinforces this theme with a literal Waste Land which its soulless and deluded protagonists – the voices which narrate the poem - traverse in search of answers. Raziel returns, after being drowned, resurrected as a wraith with glowing eyes. His “Death by Water” had destroyed him, “and yet I lived.” He becomes T.S Eliot’s “drowned Phoenician sailor,” he who “those were pearls that were his eyes.” The implication here is not that the two works are the same; rather, they are distinct in style and motive. What the poem shares with the game is a sense of dissolution in their thematic developments and atmosphere of spiritual decay. Raziel’s new reincarnation preys upon the wayward souls of vampires, as he is told to do by the Demiurge, whose nature “traps the essence of life.”
Raziel’s hunger for souls seems to be a literal transmutation of Eliot’s concern with the basic human concern for the emptiness within, the search for an essence and a soul. This allusion is further drawn out by the fact that both The Waste Land and Legacy of Kain share thematic and symbolic links with the Arthurian myths. In order to explain this correlation, a basic rehash of the mythical properties of the Nosgoth setting must be relayed. In 2003, writer and producer Amy Hennig, in her online diary, described Kain as an Oedipus figure in that:
“He struggles against the shackles of a dark fate that was predetermined long before his birth: although the unseen hands of gods and demons manipulate his path along this destiny, he refuses to surrender to it. Kain also has strong symbolic ties to the "maimed king" of Arthurian legends, perhaps better known as the legends surrounding Parsifal and the "Fisher King". Like the king of legend, Kain is inextricably entwined with the state and condition of his empire. As long as he remains corrupted as a Guardian, the Pillars cannot be restored, and, therefore, Nosgoth will remain blighted and poisoned…”in other words, a Waste Land. The Pillars which Hennig mentions are the crucial centre of the tale’s narrative, and have been deliberately avoided in this analysis up to this point due to their highly symbolic nature and the literary reverberations they present. These nine enigmatic structures tower into the clouds and are visual representations of the various elements which govern the health of the land. Each Pillar called for a Guardian upon birth, who becomes symbiotically bound to the element which that Pillar represents. These nine beings become so attuned to the nature of the Pillar and the element it holds that they are endowed with supernatural abilities. As explained in a book the young Kain reads in Willendorf’s library: “The Circle of Nine served the Pillars, protectorates to the strange power that gives life to our land. At the unlikely death of a member, the Circle remains broken for a time until the Pillars can cull a worthy successor.” The whole drama is set in motion by the breaking of this Circle. Ariel, the previous Balance Guardian, was murdered in an attempt to break the Pillars, leading to Kain’s succession to her position as a child. When Nupraptor, Ariel’s lover, finds her corpse, “he plunges into a madness which instantly overflows and infects” the surviving Circle members, who are mentally linked. This madness taints Kain even in the safety of the womb, and thus the new Balance Guardian, in a sense the King of Nosgoth, is born already “maimed” psychologically. As Kain recalls, “the repercussions of Ariel’s assassination were expertly calculated…the entire Circle descends into madness and I am tainted at the moment of my birth, instantly rendered incapable of fulfilling the role…” Thirty years later, Kain, as a vampire, unaware of his destiny to rule Nosgoth, systematically hunts down the mad Circle members in a desperate bid to halt the decline of the land and in hope of finding the cure for his vampirism. He is promised that by the death of the Circle, the Pillars would be healed, and he would be freed. His choice not to sacrifice himself in this cause leaves him as the sole surviving corrupted Guardian. In a “careful act of calculated blasphemy” he sets his throne in the corrupted and broken Pillar of Balance, his “holy grail”: and for the majority of Soul Reaver, the audience is led to believe that Kain’s death at the altar of sacrifice would be tantamount to the parabolic and pagan fertility rite of ancient cultures, returning the Wasteland to its former glory.
Legacy of Kain boasts a tale which is epic in nature and scope, with characters which manage to be both unique and archetypal at once. Kain and Raziel’s relationship with their world can be paralleled to many a classical Greek myth, with the writers referencing many of these timeless tales of tragedy in their online musings as sources of inspiration. Undoubtedly, careful theoretical analysis of the narrative and characters will be able to draw further literary and cultural parallels then those made evident in these observations, with the stories being so universally applicable in their themes and motifs, and the characters themselves being of a mythic proportion such that it may be possible to project their natures, ambitions and motivations upon historical or mythical figures, creating further allusions which would enrich and flavour an already rich lore.
