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So about... early on in 2023, I started getting into the Legacy of Kain series. They're quite interesting games for the record, all flawed but still very worth getting into. Well, as might be obvious, later in that year I started getting an idea to revise its currently kind of lacking profiles- somewhat of a daunting task- there's six games and plenty of word of god to sit through, but, well, here we are. I've been very burnt out on VSBW lately, but I did have fun working on this.
This is the sandbox where the P&A for all other characters is listed. Not as elegant, but it is final, as I do need to get it approved. Also, here are the blogs that store the new calculations of the verse. List of Feats 1 (I stored a few spare calc-less feats at the bottom of this page, which I will remove when the respective characters get page overhauls), List of Feats 2, Raziel Destroys Ice. All approved, of course. Some older calcs are also used.
A few things
Before showing the results, this is a verse that makes very liberal use of time travel, so it should come as no surprise that Legacy of Kain scaling is an ouroboros of fuckiness. This is mainly because of Blood Omen 2, which was written by a different team from the one that made Soul Reaver 1/2/Defiance and while the latter tried to make it fit in, it kind of clearly doesn't at times. So, here's two things I wanna lay out explicitly rather than just leaving people to look at the profiles. Something you should know beforehand is that the series' chronological order goes Blood Omen 1 - Blood Omen 2 - Soul Reaver - Soul Reaver 2 - Defiance. Well sort of, again time travel is involved, but as far as the two main characters' story goes, that holds up. There is (was- it was a multiplayer game that got taken down cause it didn't make enough money) a sixth game called Nosgoth, but it didn't feature them.The Soul Reaver
- The semi-titular, very very important, soul-sucking, self-cannibalizing, paradox-inducing, actually-Raziel-in-a-trenchcoat sword is kind of a mess. Consistently considered THE strongest weapon in the setting, it pairs its ability to devour souls (or just blood before fusing with Raziel) with great Attack Potency, which is part of what makes this such a threat as both the Guardians of the Circle and vampires (As well as characters like the Hylden Lord and the Elder God) are canonically capable of resisting its hax (Nothing in LoK is immune to it, but a lot of people take more than one hit for it to hurt them to a lethal degree). So, that AP causes a bit of a problem as all across the series, people are capable of tanking the Reaver's AP, but still threatened by it (The Guardians are capable of tanking it in BO1, Vorador and Janos survive a blast from it in BO2, and so on). This causes issues. Dumah in SR1 can straight-up laugh it off while much stronger people like Kain is destined to be killed by it. So, given that in Blood Omen 1 the Reaver's power depends on your MP reserves, and that in SR2 upgrades to the Wraith Reaver also enhance Raziel's health, I'm just going to conclude that the Reaver's AP depends on that of its wielder (this does not mean they scale to it, it's still way stronger), therefore putting it in a nice comfy "Varies" bubble where it is no longer capable of causing me a mild headache.
The Hylden Lord
- He sucks. He's a boss in BO1, BO2 and Defiance, which means he literally scales to every single instance of Kain, fighting the earliest version of him and Defiance Kain, who is equal to the latest version, which obviously makes no sense given that vampires get stronger over time (and that the LoK dev team considered Elder Kain to be far stronger than his BO2 version, capable of dispatching foes that the latter could not). So what we're gonna do here is use the Defiance strategy guide's statements that beings possessed by the Hylden are stronger than they were before and that Hylden can draw power from vampiric bodies, making it so that the HL can be weaker when possessing Mortanius (BO1) and stronger when possessing Janos Audron (Defiance) compared to his real body (Fought in BO2).
The Actual Profiles
As there is a massive amount of pages I plan to revise, I am only bringing three that are 100% done here. Kain and Raziel, the two protagonists, and a power page for Vampire Physiology, which is necessary for the majority of the verse's pages. Here is the sandbox. Most of it is very straightforward I think, though with some unfortunately clunky tabbers in P&A born of the... well, clunky timeline of the series. Still, I am a bit proud of my work. I added a "Quotes" section to Kain's profile which I realize may be a bit controversial, but I figure that if a Gallery is an accepted method for showcasing a series' visual style, it should be fine to have a section for showcasing a series' writing style, and as an extremely elaborately and elegantly written character, Kain deserves that, in my opinion. Also, his profile should be unlocked (seriously, why is it even locked??) and renamed to Kain (Legacy of Kain)This is the sandbox where the P&A for all other characters is listed. Not as elegant, but it is final, as I do need to get it approved. Also, here are the blogs that store the new calculations of the verse. List of Feats 1 (I stored a few spare calc-less feats at the bottom of this page, which I will remove when the respective characters get page overhauls), List of Feats 2, Raziel Destroys Ice. All approved, of course. Some older calcs are also used.
Sources
Unlike most verses I scale, Legacy of Kain has a large amount of Word of God and other possibly questionable material to draw from, so I wanna go through it real quick.- Nosgoth: The 2013 to 2016 cancelled multiplayer soft reboot of the series never actually hit 1.0, it only managed to be available as an open beta. I don't think there's gonna be much controversy about this being viable given it was publicly available to be played for years, and several official lore blogs were posted on its (now defunct, but thankfully archived) official website. The game itself is basically lost media by now (official trailers are still up nearly a decade later, and that's what I used for it), but the lore stuff is all thankfully saved.
- Strategy Guides: I view these as support-only material - most times I use pictures of them it's just because they're the easiest way to showcase a gameplay mechanic that isn't explicitly tutorialized. The biggest notable thing in them is the Lightning Demons' statements of attacking at lightning speed, which come from Defiance's Strategy Guide. This is ultimately subjective but with little backing in the games proper (they're vaguely compared to lightning in the SR2 website, and that's about it), I'd rather err on the safe side and not use it, given the series barely breaks into Supersonic without.
- Daniel Cabuco's forum: Daniel Cabuco was LoK's main art director (With the exceptions of the Blood Omen games), and in the early 2010s ran a forum where people asked him all sorts of stuff. There may be some skepticism in treating an art director's WoG as gospel, but I think it absolutely should be. He's clearly extremely knowledgeable on the lore and while he may not have been the one to think of most of these things, he was clearly in the writer's room when they were set in stone, given that he's very clearly aware of the writing process that went on behind the scenes, and typically what he describes is not his own headcanon, but what was accepted to be canon by the writers (and is generally not adding new things but just explaining ambiguities in the original material). When something is just his own opinion, he says as much, and I did not list those things. Another issue is that the blog itself is down (it was breaking down but still up by the time I began work on the series, but seems to have given up the ghost by now), but luckily there is a transcript of all relevant stuff that I link to. Would be quite tragic if it was completely lost.
- Other Word of God: Comes from writers of the series in interviews and the like- simple enough.
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