Originally released in 2003, Legacy of Kain: Defiance has been remastered to complete the modernization of the series, beginning with Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered. It also serves as the conclusion to the story that has been built up by the prior games. If you haven’t yet played Soul Reaver 1 & 2, I would recommend doing so as Defiance assumes you know the background context and won’t provide much of a recap if you’re unfamiliar.
This story begins with the separation of Kain and Raziel, two of the main characters, after the events of Soul Reaver 2 that caused a time paradox to split them apart. Kain begins his journey in castle on the search for Moebius to seek answers as to the whereabouts of Raziel. Meanwhile, Raziel is trapped in the Spectral Realm by the Elder God and needs to figure out his situation. As the story moves, the perspective flips back and forth between Kain and Raziel and follows their journey to eventually confront each other.
Defiance’s gameplay can be described as character action combat: you have two attack buttons, light and heavy. Light attacks have a three-hit combo while heavy attacks are just one. After dealing a certain amount of damage, the enemy will slump over, allowing you to consume it for HP. As you progress through the game, you’ll come to unlock new moves to use mid-combo by way of directional input. While this sounds fine on paper, when it comes to its implementation, it’s a bit rough around the edges. The game’s camera can be swapped between two modes: normal and combat. When toggling into combat mode, you lock onto the nearest enemy and your attacks will go to them. However, the way you change targets is by your movement stick so when trying to execute the new moves, you end up committing a regular attack to an enemy behind you. It’s happened to me enough times that I elected to just using a simple combo. Another problem is that heavy attacks either send your enemies up when grounded and slams them down when airborne and effectively ends the combo with no follow up which leads to combat getting stale. There is an additional “attack” in a telekinesis ability that lets you throw enemies off ledges or spikes but it gets old quick.
The game’s remastering doesn’t try to rework any significant portion of the game and its systems. Besides additions like better graphics, unlockables, and performance fixes, the only significant change I could identify is the camera during normal mode. In the original version of Defiance, the developers chose to make use of a fixed camera perspective, contrasting their previous work in Soul Reaver which was over-the-shoulder. For the remaster, they brought back the over-the-shoulder camera while leaving the fixed camera mode assigned to a button to be freely swapped to. In addition to this, pressing the right analog stick will change the graphics near instantly from the original to the remastered version and vice versa, allowing you to quickly compare and contrast at any point in gameplay. While the graphics remain mostly consistent between versions, there are some areas where the remastered graphics lose clarity. This is most apparent in areas with darker lighting as the old graphics would have brighter colours for important objects while the remastered version tries to keep it consistent, sacrificing readability.
All that aside, the narrative really holds up after all these years and it’s this quality that has me really enjoying my time with it in spite of its shortcomings. Raziel and Kain are both deeply fleshed out characters with personal goals and obstacles that it makes playing through both of them an engaging affair that the eventual confrontation was a deeply exciting moment. It also helps that there is a good amount of contrast in the environments and the type of enemy encounters that keeps any player from getting bored. For a series from the 90s and 00s, it contains some surprisingly compelling voice performances, where no moment feels awkward or breaks immersion. Cutscenes are abundant and each one is fully voice acted. It rounds out the qualities of a character’s design to leave them memorable and iconic even long after playing.
Legacy of Kain: Defiance Remastered’s release bookends the modern porting of these beloved classics to be enjoyed by a new generation. For a storied game studio like Crystal Dynamics, it’s nice to have some of their classic works become more accessible. While the gameplay still leaves a bit to be desired, the content surrounding it in the narrative and presentation holds up to this day and I’d recommend anyone interested in retro games to give this a look. Just make sure to play Soul Reaver 1 & 2 prior to this for the necessary context.
Score: 7 out of 10
Reviewed on Nintendo Switch