Vampires have always fascinated me. Whether in films or games, their gothic allure and unquenchable thirst for blood have captivated my imagination. Beyond Castlevania, I didn’t encounter many vampire-centric games during my youth—at least not until I stumbled upon gems like Vampire: The Masquerade and BloodRayne in the early 2000s. However, it was Soul Reaver that truly ensnared me, drawing me into the compelling world of the Legacy of Kain series. From there, I ventured back to experience the original Blood Omen and eagerly consumed its sequels, including Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance.
Then, silence.
For nearly two decades, the series lay dormant until remasters for Soul Reaver 1 and 2 were announced earlier this year. To sweeten the deal, Sony added Blood Omen to the PlayStation Classics Collection, and to my surprise, Blood Omen 2 followed suit, both complete with Platinum trophy support. Naturally, I couldn’t resist diving back into Nosgoth.
How well do these games hold up against the test of time, and what does it take to achieve their Platinum trophies? Let’s delve into the shadowy world of Nosgoth to find out.
To start, I think it is essential to note that Blood Omen 1 and 2 on the PS5 are not remasters or remakes in any way. They are, for better or worse, emulations of the originals and the only new features are added by the emulator. These features are small but helpful, such as the ability to create a save state whenever you want, some display settings, and the ability to rewind the game by a few minutes if you want to. The save states in particular can be pretty helpful, especially for a game like Blood Omen 1, which only has manual saving as an option at save points.
This does mean that the actual games have not been touched at all, and there have been no graphical updates apart from the emulator’s upscaling of the resolution. I have no issues with this however, I am more than happy to play older games regardless of how they look, but I think it important to point out that these are old games, with old graphics and even older control schemes and if that is something that can put you off a game then you should be aware of it going in.
The Legacy of Kain Blood Omen is a PS1 game, where you play as Kain, a young nobleman who is ambushed by brigands and killed within the opening 5 minutes of the game. Resurrected as a Vampire he embarks on a quest for vengeance. After achieving this bloody task though he begins to look for a cure for his ailment and is told that to achieve peace, he must cleanse the Pillars of Nosgoth. These are 9 magical stone structures that are linked to the health of the world, and they have been corrupted by grief and madness in the wake of the death of one of the Pillars’s guardians, a woman named Ariel. This, naturally, involves murdering all of the remaining corrupt guardians to cleanse the pillars.
I love this story, and although it might sound like your typical Dark Fantasy tale, it sticks with me because of its characters. The Legacy of Kain series has an amazing cast, and Kain in particular is so well written, with his internal monologues throughout Blood Omen being brilliantly performed. I don’t know if I will ever tire of the cruel laugh Kain does when you get the combo timing right or his victorious shout of Vae Victis! The journey Kain goes on, and his gradual shift in his view of his condition is still one of my favourite game tales.
It’s a shame that such good voice acting is drowned out by a myriad of sound-related issues the game has. Poor mixing means that often the dialogue is quieter than the background music so it’s hard to tell what is being said, and repetitive use of the same sound effects, often repeating straight after one another can be jarring at best but annoying at worst.
The gameplay for Blood Omen is reminiscent of the older Zelda titles, with a top-down perspective of Kain as you explore Nosgoths many caves and dungeon areas. There are a ton of secrets to be found, however, solving them is often a matter of just finding the hidden switch. Combat isn’t particularly inventive either, with you and your enemies standing next to each other swinging your swords, and moving backwards slowly to avoid getting hit. As you progress you do unlock more options but they never mix up the gameplay too much. There are multiple weapon types Kain can unlock that do slightly different things, like the Mace that lets you stun enemies briefly so you can drain their blood, healing you and killing them, or the twin Axes called Havoc and Malice that give you access to a spinning whirlwind attack if you get the attack combo timing down, but stops you using any magic or items while equipped. These are fun diversions but 9 times out of 10, the basic sword or upgraded one you get later in the game are the best options.
You do gain access to other spells and items as you explore too, like spells to charm and take control of enemy minds, or to drain all of the blood from everyone in a localised area. You can transform into a wolf, to let you move faster, or turn into a regular human man, to let you sneak through towns unbothered by guards. The items you have are fun little things too, throwables that implode enemies or dissolve them into acid, and these are usually the quickest, and honestly, most fun way to deal with enemies, but these powerful items are limited-use consumables you can pick up by exploring.
Like the Zelda games it seems to take inspiration from, exploration is well rewarded though, with some spells being hidden away, completely unneeded for progression, or health and magic bar upgrades to make your journey easier. Different abilities or weapons let you unlock new areas too, the Axes letting you cut down trees to reach hidden paths, or the Mist Form transformation letting you walk across water or through fences. There are 100 different secrets to find in the game, including some that are hidden behind the phases of the moon in the game’s day and night cycle that will lead to whole hidden dungeons. Unfortunately as cool as it is to find these areas, they can be quite repetitive, and although the main story dungeons are all quite different thematically, and visually, they are very similar in actual content.
I love Blood Omen, even now, but especially after replaying it, I can see that it is despite of its gameplay, not because of it. I found, towards the end of the game, that I wanted to try and skip most of the combat encounters unless I was starting to lose too much health and needed a top-up of blood, because unless I had a full mana bar, or an excess of items, fighting enemies just was not fun, trying to stand slightly off centre from an enemy, or just far enough away that I could hit them without eating hits myself. I’m sure this is just a side effect of the age of the game, but even the boss fights often boiled down to chasing someone from one end of a room to another, getting some hits in and then repeating that, and as someone who loves old school Zelda games like Link to the Past, I do wish they had been more inventive in the boss fights.
My biggest issue with Blood Omen 1 though is loading screens. If I was playing the game, on my PlayStation 1, with it reading from a CD, I could have understood and been more patient with them, but on a digital emulation of a game that came out in 1996. Why are there loading screens? More frustrating than the loading screens between areas, is the loading screen to go into your menu. You need to switch weapons fairly often to get around Nosgoth, which means sitting between two, multiple-second-long loading screens before you get back to the game itself. I hated this so much and I still don’t understand why the emulation needed to keep this.
Blood Omen 2 is by many fans, considered to be the lowest point of the series. Set 400 years after Blood Omen, it explores a historical timeline created by the events at the end of Soul Reaver 2. 200 years after Kain’s choice at the end of Blood Omen 1, he is defeated by the Sarafan, an order of Vampire hunters that has been a major force in the world of Nosgoth. Thought to be dead, he awakens 200 years later in the city of Meridian and joins a vampire resistance against the ruling Sarafan armies, and much as before, must hunt and kill his way through the city to have his revenge.
Between Blood Omen 1 and 2, both Soul Reaver games were released, with a focus on tight writing and narrative. However, Blood Omen 2 was created by a different team at Crystal Dynamics, being made simultaneously with Soul Reaver 2. This goes some way in explaining the broad differences between the two Blood Omen titles. Blood Omen 2 focuses a lot more on action gameplay and combat than narrative and puzzles.
Combat in Blood Omen 2 is still a little bit janky, it is an early PS2 game after all, but when compared to its predecessor it is a huge improvement. Kain feels stronger now, and combat feels so much more fun and fluid than before. It is a small dance of blocking, dodging and striking. Hitting the L1 button in time with the enemy’s attacks will block them, with the exception of red glowing unblockables which need to be dodged. Blocking attacks fills up a bar that can be used for specific Vampiric Abilities Kain can unlock. Your melee attacks start with just Kain’s claws, but when you kill an enemy they will drop their weapon, which you can pick up and use. Although the weapons themselves don’t differ much in the way they are used, they do have slightly different damage values and offer an improvement over your base claws. Frustratingly, however, these weapons break after repeated use.
Weapon durability where you lose the weapon completely is not a mechanic I am particularly fond of, but the weapons in Blood Omen 2 are so basic and so plentiful that it isn’t actually too much of an issue.
Boss fights are where the combat really shows off though with each boss fight not just being a drawn-out slog of blocking and attacking like in Blood Omen 1. Each of the game’s bosses has multiple phases, which usually involve some sort of puzzle to figure out, before beating them down. They aren’t ever super complex, like using your Mist Form to sneak underneath where a boss is standing to turn on a furnace and set him on fire but they are fun and they do mix things up. As improved as combat is, there are so many enemies to fight that it does become repetitive, especially towards the end of the game where enemies block so often the best way to kill them is to block until you can use one of your unblockable attacks to hit them.
Puzzles now also rely a lot more on the Dark Gifts that Kain earns, with there being areas for stealth, switches to activate telepathically, or innocents to mind control to do your bidding which would be great, if they weren’t often pretty simple too though, pushing a box somewhere or flipping a switch to open a door. Much like combat, it is nice at first, coming straight from the first game, but by the end of it, the puzzles felt too repetitive, and too simple to keep my interest for long.
Being a whole 6 years and a console generation later, Blood Omen 2 is the better looking of the games and it actually still holds up pretty well. There are a few instances of graphics clipping on character models, and I love that Kain always looks like a pissed-off cat whenever he sees an enemy because it looks a bit ridiculous. The art direction is good, the steampunk-inspired Meridian has a variety of locales to travel through with each having a distinct theme, but the actual moment-to-moment exploration is often filled with repetitive rooms or alleyways that can leave you feeling a bit bored.
Where Blood Omen 2 truly fails though, is its narrative. Kain is still excellent and is still the same arrogant lordling he was in the original but even with Simon Templeman’s excellent voice work, the story just doesn’t hit. It feels so shallow and the world feels out of place with the rest of the series, even if there are recurring characters. I never really felt dragged along by the story’s twists as I did in the other games and it is a shame. The dialogue feels weaker too, less flowery and dramatic, with characters feeling flat and dull. Overall Blood Omen 2 doesn’t even add much to the overarching story either in my opinion. I think it might have been planned to explore the overarching villains of the story that were revealed in Soul Reaver 2, but it doesn’t do a good job of that at all.
The game is also very buggy. I suffered from multiple crashes and audio bugs throughout the time I spent with the game. Sometimes the sound effects for combat would just not play, so blocking gave no audio feedback at all. Certain cutscenes had their audio completely desync from the scene by enough that I did not hear the end of certain conversations because gameplay would restart and the audio would just end. The last chapter, and more specifically the last boss, crashed on me 8 times before I was finally able to beat the game. The crash always happening in the transition to the last phase. This was so frustrating to play through and soured what was already an experience I felt overstayed its welcome.
The trophies for both games are relatively short lists, and they are relatively short games.
Blood Omen 1 took me around 10 hours to get the Platinum Trophy, and Blood Omen 2 took me 12.
Blood Omen 1 is probably the more annoying of the two lists, however, as it has more missables and things to look out for. As I mentioned earlier, there are 100 in-game secrets hidden throughout Nosgoth, hidden behind secret switches or hidden paths, and you have to find at least 50 of these for the trophy “Nothing Escapes My Notice”. This will help you a lot of the way to some of the other trophies too, like “A Deadly Arsenal” for finding all of the weapons, armour, spells and objects. Most of these are needed for story progression, but not all of them are, so you will need to search them out, often having to backtrack once you have unlocked new abilities. It will help to unlock “The Sky is Mine to Command”, for finding all of the bat beacons, which are fast travel points so you don’t have to walk everywhere.
You will need to kill 1000 people, feed on 500 and mutilate 250 with items for the trophy “Vae Victis” also.
The main thing to pay attention to with these secrets though, are the moon phases. Blood Omen has a day and night cycle and each night has a different moon phase. It takes around 15 minutes for a day to pass, and there are 8 moon phases. There are specific areas that will not open unless it is a full Moon. The first of these is near the end of the game after you have beaten the bosses of Dark Eden. There is a gate that is locked right next to a bat beacon, and when the full moon opens the gate, it will give you access to the cave where you can earn the Lightning Spell. This was actually the last spell I needed for the trophy, and when I got to the end of the game and realised I had forgotten to go into the cave, I had to wait almost the whole 2 hours between full moons to enter. It sucked.
The other place you need to full moon to enter is the lost city. Just north of Vorador’s mansion, you will need to walk across a large lake in Mist form to another area. In this area is an island with a teleporter. The teleporter will take you to a temple that will open on the full moon and contains about 20 of the 50 secrets you need, and like 30 of each of the items in the game. It is very worth doing even if it wasn’t for the trophy you will get, called “Ancient Secrets”.
Blood Omen came out in 1996, but it wasn’t until 2010 that a secret area called HMCS Bitter was discovered in the game’s files, and the legitimate way to get there in the game, wasn’t figured out until 2020. This is such a cool secret in the game, and naturally, there is a trophy for visiting the secret location. To earn “She’s a Fine Vessel” you must find four hidden switches around the world and hit them with the Energy Bolt spell. The first of these is in the first village you enter called Ziegstuhl, another is outside the entrance to Malek’s Bastion, the third is southeast of the city Willendorf and the last one is just outside the castle in the Land of the Nemesis. I would definitely use a guide to find these as they are incredibly well hidden. Once you have done this there will be a secret entrance at the back of a house in Vasserbunde that will take you to the ship.
The last trophy to watch out for, which I initially thought was bugged, is the first trophy you can earn in the game, “But Alas, it Was for Naught”. The trophy says to cheat death and survive the ambush, so I thought this was for just completing the introduction and becoming a vampire. It’s a bit more than that though, what you need to do is defeat all of the bandits outside the tavern, then go into the only house you can enter and die there. Then the trophy will unlock. Defeating the bandits can be quite hard, so I would recommend waiting for Nightfall first when Kain is much stronger. Once you have all of these you will earn the Platinum trophy, “Ruler of Nosgoth”
Blood Omen 2’s list is so much less involved than the first one with only a few trophies I would consider missable.
The first of these is to defeat 15 enemies with stealth. The game gives you plenty of opportunities to use your mist form to sneak up on enemies but it is worth knowing you need to do it for the trophy “Mist Assassin”.
You also need to finish two chapters using only your claws or abilities. I don’t know if picking up a weapon voids the trophy but I did not risk it and got this in the first two chapters when they were easier. You will unlock “When all else fails” when you finish the second chapter. Another missable trophy is to pick up 10 unique weapons. This is only missable as some enemies and the weapons they drop stop appearing later in the game, and obviously, this counteracts the trophy for not using weapons. Also, bear in mind there are 2 types of longsword that look similar, so just pick up and break as many weapons as you can to be sure.
Throughout the game, there are hidden caches called Lore boxes that when you open them will fill a purple bar next to Kains Health. This bar is also filled when you feed on enemies, when the bar is filled up, Kain gets a health increase and the bar resets. Fill this bar 9 times for the “The Lore of Kain” trophy. Finding 30 of these boxes, or the boxes that give you a weapon buff will also earn you ”Ancestral Gifts”. I earned this by around chapter 6, so maybe halfway through the game.
Lastly, there is a trophy called “Hah! Got One!” which is for killing a rat. There are tons of rats in Nosgoth but helpfully there is one in pretty much the first room you start in, so you can get this really early. Getting all of these will earn you Blood Omen 2’s platinum “At Last, Nosgoth will be mine”
I am glad that I went back and played Blood Omen 1 and 2, it was a nice trip back to my youth and it’s always fun to revisit a series that you hold dear. Despite my issues with Blood Omen 1 feeling repetitive and having bad combat, I still like the game a lot, the good of its narrative far outweighs its bad. That probably speaks to my taste in media, where a good narrative can cover a multitude of sins for me. Blood Omen 2 however is actually a fair bit worse than my memory, and as much as I do like the Legacy of Kain series, Blood Omen 2 is a game I can quite easily recommend skipping unless you really want to play it or experience everything the series has to offer. It just doesn’t hold a candle to Blood Omen 1, or the Soul Reaver titles. If you can handle some of the more dated aspects of Blood Omen 1 though, I would still recommend it, for the story alone, or at least watch a YouTube synopsis if you would struggle with the gameplay.
If you are interested though now is a great time to play both games as there are remasters of Soul Reaver 1 and 2 coming in January, and maybe, if I pray hard enough, Defiance will get a remaster too.
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