The Legacy of Kain Series: Blood Omen 2

Moby ID: 6083
PlayStation 2 Specs
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Description official descriptions

Following the events of Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen, the vampire Kain has assembled an army of vampires to take over the world of the humans. Fighting across Nosgoth, his goal is to make his way to the great city of Meridian and take control of this stronghold. However, upon reaching the gates of the city, the army is challenged by the Serafan Order, an organized force of vampire hunters and its leader, the magical Serafan lord. Kain engages the Serafan lord in single combat, is struck down and defeated. Kain's sword, the Soul Reaver, is claimed by his enemy. Unconscious for 200 years, Kain awakes under the care of the vampire Umah to a world he barely recognizes. Following the defeat of Kain's army, the vampires have been hunted down by the Serafan and only a few remain. The city of Meridian is ruled under martial law by the Serafan Order, which is very oppressive towards its citizens. Strange glyph magic is used to power machines and fuel industry and at the same time is deadly to vampires and used as wards throughout the city. Kain swears revenge on the one who defeated him and seeks to reclaim his place as the ruler of the vampires.

The Legacy of Kain Series: Blood Omen 2 is a third person action game with adventure elements, more similar in perspective to Soul Reaver than the first Blood Omen game. The player views the environment from behind Kain's shoulder, moving him in different directions, attacking, jumping, using dark gifts, and grabbing on to ledges. Kain's life energy steadily depletes and must be replenished constantly by drinking blood. Blood is found by consuming any living creature nearby, often requiring defeating an enemy through combat first. As Kain consumes blood, his meter is filled up. Once full, Kain gains additional health. Kain also learns new dark gifts throughout the game by defeating boss creatures. Some gifts include: the ability to blend into mist, fire projectiles, use projectile telekinesis or make a great horizontal leap. Many of these abilities can be used to perform stealth kills which will instantly defeat a foe. Kain will fight using his bare hands or by picking up daggers, swords, axes, and other weapons. These weapons all attack differently, eventually breaking, and may also be thrown at enemies from afar.

The Serafan Order uses glyph magic, partially because it is deadly to vampires. Kain will often encounter areas where he is barred from progressing because of glyph barriers and must find a way around them. Additionally, glyphs function similar to electricity in that they power machines and switches. Many of the puzzles featured in Blood Omen 2 involve needing to create a glyph circuit in order to deliver power to a specific point. Glyph energy glows as it travels down its path, allowing the player to see exactly where the energy spark is.

Spellings

  • Наследие Каина. Blood Omen 2 - Russian spelling

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Credits (PlayStation 2 version)

145 People (136 developers, 9 thanks) · View all

Voice actors
Additional Voices
Recording Director
Crystal Dynamics Director
Crystal Dynamics Producer
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 73% (based on 45 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 61 ratings with 6 reviews)

Blood Omen 1 and Soul Reaver - Difficulty: Nightmare. Blood Omen 2 - Difficulty: Mother Goose. Get the picture?

The Good
Well, if you like adventure games that don't require maximizing the use of your creative and intuitive side of the brain, this should be perfect for you. This also is a must for Legacy of Kain fans (like myself) just for historical sake purposes only.

Not much different than Soul Reaver, strangely much less complicated than Soul Reaver. Strange because usually the later the game, the more difficult is gets because there usually are more players familiar with its game style. This game is much more easier. MUCH more easier.

Nice to know that these type of games (vampire) still have the utmost disrespect for humanity. Though I must complain, I was expecting much more blood....

The Bad
Well, not liking this game would be an overstatement. It's still a good and fun game, with a lot killing, fighting, killing, bloodsucking, did I mention killing?

Basically my concerns are that it is disappointing in comparison to Blood Omen 1 and Soul Reaver. Blood Omen and Soul Reaver to my opinion are excellent puzzle solving games that give you migraines, but worth it when you solve the puzzle. In Blood Omen 2, a baby with half a brain could solve the puzzles, sorry for the sarcasm but its true.

It saddens me that there is little education offered in this game, in comparison to Blood Omen 1. In Blood Omen 1, you've got spells, and you can read description about them, different weapons with different uses. Blood Omen 2 doesn't offer many options. The story line is too linear, no secret rooms or such. Even bonuses are usually within sight and not to hard to find. Controls are irritating since you can't side step for some stupid reason. You can't cancel animations which is irritating if you've just loaded your game and have to watch it all over again. Sigh.

Boy, I really hate these 3-D games. Too much graphics, not enough brain.

I was wondering do people actually like these type of games which to my opinion is degrading one's intelligence. Seriously, gamer's like myself would like a challenge. This game is easier than a walk in the park....

The Bottom Line
If it weren't for Kain, I wouldn't go near this game.

Windows · by Indra was here (20756) · 2004

You're a blood-sucking vampire, what more could you want? Well, better frame rates.

The Good
Blood Omen 2, like its previous edition, has you in control of the vampire Kain. Two hundred years after his defeat on the walls of Meridian, Kain once again, rises to take his place as the ruler of Nosgoth. The characters in this game, from Kain to the Serafan Lord, were all expertly drawn and rendered. Environments, on the other hand, just didn’t seem to have the right mood set to them. Buildings and walls did not look as textured as they should have for a game of this caliber.

The Bad
After all is said and done, there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of good to say about this game. For instance, the fighting involves about 30% timing, 10% skill, and 60% luck. I can’t count the number of times that I got handled like a cheap tool, died, restart and not do anything to vary my tactics, and come out on top. In addition to the repetitive fighting, some of the puzzles in the game just seem overly pointless. There is almost no sense of accomplishment after figuring out a puzzle, in fact, you could almost want a swift, sharp kick to the head, for not figuring it out sooner. Another bad mark for this game, has got to be the frame rate. At times, the game can slow down to a pathetic 10 fps or less, and every once in a while, I noticed the word “loading” appear on screen. Even worse, I even had the game completely freeze on me. While these marks don’t do much good for the overall rating of the game, at least the voiceover sucks. No, I take that back, the voice acting was done quite well. Fans of the series will notice that the actors for as Kain and Vorador have returned for this latest installment, but the mixing seems as though it was rushed along without much quality control. As the game progresses, players will note that the dialogue gets more and more ‘off’ with the scenes on the screen, until it seems as though you are watching a bad Godzilla movie.

The Bottom Line
Overall, I would describe this game as Soul Reaver on pot. It just dosn’t live up to the hype that the Soul Reaver games has set up for it. If you’re curious about the beginnings of Kain, and possibly a peek into the origins of Raziel, then by all means, play this game. If, however, you are just looking for a good game to play, may I suggest that you look elsewhere. There just won’t be much interest for you here.

PlayStation 2 · by Jon_Talbain (20) · 2002

Who cares if it's not the classic Legacy of Kain stuff?

The Good
Honestly, when I started playing Blood Omen 2, I thought "OMG, who the hell made the key map for this game?". It was impossible to play on the keyboard, and I was lazy about reallocating the keys. So I decided to use a joypad... what a difference!

Blood Omen 2 made my day with its combats! It is the only game in the whole series in which blocking attacks is an important thing! There are those who say that the attacks are repetitive. For Christ sake, in Soul Reaver 1 and 2 all you had to do is punch, punch, punch, all the time, to get the enemies killed! At least in Defiance you have other options, like playing "badminton" with your enemies, what makes its combats slightly better than in Blood Omen 2. But in trade, Defiance has that annoying camera that forces you to take giant turns only because the direction of this or that platform changed during your jump!

There's something cool introduced in Blood Omen 2 that became worse in Defiance: Kain's leap. In Blood Omen 2 you can choose the distance and direction of your leap, and that was a feature underexploited in game, although excellent. In Defiance, they had fixed those absolutely arbitrary red circles! I think that it was a challenge to the possible realism of the game. I imagine Kain think to himself "man, if I only had one of those red circles around here, I could be in the other side in no time! I really miss the time when I was self-sufficient, like in Blood Omen 2"!

More about the combats: the dark gifts Fury, Berserk and Immolate gave me part of the most stress-relief moments ever granted by a game (much like the head-shots in Counter Strike). You're there, taking all the pain you can get from your enemy, and suddenly, a la Rocky Balboa, you just finish him with a bunch of really hard blasts! Immolate made it less funny, once the enemy get to suffer less, >:) .

Of course it was a two-edged sword, once you could just keep blocking until your bar was full, and then kill the guy with just one strike. But it depends on the player...

The thing of having many ways of killing is something really fun. You can punch them to death, burn them away once and for all, get silently close to them and kill them in several ways, etc. Defiance is also good in this aspect, no doubt about it.

The Bad
As mentioned before, whoever made key map for this game must be fired! The game is quite unplayable with the keyboard. Everyone knows that console ports usually suck, but hey, what about a little effort of making it easier for us keyboard users, eh? Good thing I had a joypad around...

The story is kind of apocrypha, but it fits in the whole series plot. And don't even start with the "WTF is Vorador doing there?" crap, there are reasonable explanations. It is the same that happens to Phantasy Star III: the story is apocrypha and the graphics are different from the rest of the series, so hardcore fans hate it. In both cases, blame it on the development team (which is not the same from the rest of the series), but I still respect their work.

The puzzles are too weak (actually, none of the series' games is better than Soul Reaver in this aspect), and some Kain's dark gifts are underexploited (like the domination thing: what's the point of dominating one's mind if all you can do is to make him pull levers?). In fact, the puzzles doesn't even qualify for it, once you don't need to think to solve them.

The Bottom Line
In the end, what saves Blood Omen 2 is the fun I had with it. It doesn't matter if the story is torn, if Kain looks like he'd just left a beauty contest, if the game is easier than dying by a head shot. The game is as fun as hell (at least for me), and even if it had not the "Legacy of Kain" trademark, I would like it (some would say that if it wasn't a LoK game, it would be good, but not me).

Windows · by chirinea (47504) · 2007

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Discussion

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Girl With a Pearl Earring DJP Mom (11333) Sep 20, 2007

Trivia

Development

Many of the art and characters, and the main storyline has been recycled from an unfinished Dreamcast sequel of Chakan, a Sega Genesis title. The main reason for the similarity is that both the cancelled Chakan game and Blood Omen 2 share their lead artist, Steve Ross. He also co-wrote the Blood Omen 2 story. In addition to the general similarity of themes, Chakan himself differs from the Blood Omen 2-era Kain only in that his body and face are harder-worn and he wears a hat, a worm-riding character is clearly the predecessor to Umah, several enemies bear the "broken ankh" symbol of the Sarafan in Blood Omen 2, enemy designs range from very similar to virtually identical, and the depiction of the streets of the city is essentially a futuristic version of Meridian.

Here's part of the planned storyline:

The City has existed since the beginning of time. Once it was a place of transcendent beauty and purity governed by five beings known as the Aeris. Then, many centuries ago, a catastrophic plague ripped through The City. This scourge cleaved each Aeris into two separate entities: A Siren, a being of light and song, and a Daemon, a dark, vile creature.

The Daemons soon overwhelmed the Sirens beginning a long reign of brutality and horror. They stripped away the Sirens' souls turning them into pitiful empty creatures who wander aimlessly through The City. The Daemons imprisoned the Siren souls in Soul Worlds; strange domains existing beyond space and time.

With no one left to challenge their power the Daemons began to feed on The City's population. They did not feed on the flesh of their victims, but on their souls, their life force. Through centuries of dark rule The City was transformed from a place of peace and serenity into a cruel, hard, twisted place. A place of horror, death and decay.

The striking similarities between these projects and Blood Omen 2 led many Kain fans to believe that Blood Omen 2 was some sort of re-branded Chakan. Some concept artwork was available http://www.andnow.net/chakan/artwork.html

There are also some connections to a cancelled game called Siren. More information on the topic is available on the fansite The Lost Worlds.

Hylden

The Hylden are those yellow creatures that were depicted fighting the blue winged vampires in the ancient murals that Raziel kept finding all the time in Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2.

Soul Reaver

Despite the depiction of Kain holding the sword known as Soul Reaver on both the game's cover art and it's title screen, in fact Kain is lacking the Soul Reaver, having it taken from him before the game even begins.

Voice Acting

A sample of Kain's famous "Vae Victus!" battlecry (used extensively in Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain) was recorded for the name but not used.

Vorador

There has been quite a lot of discussion about whether the appearance of Vorador in Blood Omen 2 has a real explanation or it's just a pulled-out-of-the-nose item, like to give the voice actor something to do. Near the ending, Kain and Vorador engage in a discussion from which it raises a challenge for a future confrontation between them. In this discussion, Kain already says something about Vorador being 'reborn a second time'. This not only begins to explain that there is an explanation behind Vorador's presence in this game, but also might hint the possibility of more installments of the series.

Information also contributed by bächtÍrmän, Mark Ennis and WildKard

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Jon_Talbain.

GameCube added by Corn Popper. Xbox, Windows added by Kartanym.

Additional contributors: Corn Popper, Shoddyan, Slug Camargo, Klaster_1, Patrick Bregger.

Game added March 31, 2002. Last modified March 3, 2024.