The Final Turn of the Wheel. Let's Play Legacy of Kain: Defiance

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nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Latest update:

Thread title courtesy of Rigged Death Trap.
Alternative titles:
1) What in the hell... Let's Play Legacy of Kain: Defiance (SorataYuy)
2) I AM THE ORIGIN OF LIFE (Legacy of Kain: Defiance) (Me)
3) Legacy of Kain: Defiance, Where Impaling People is Fun (Me)
4) Legacy of Kain: Defiance (me)

It's time.

Other LoK LPs:
Blood Omen: playlist/thread/archive (note: low quality compared to the other three, I had no clue what I was doing for the first 2/3 of the LP)
Soul Reaver: playlist/thread/archive
Soul Reaver 2: playlist/thread/archive
Blood Omen 2: playlist/thread/archive

Legacy of Kain: Defiance is the fifth and the last Legacy of Kain. We are Kain and we are Raziel.
1) Raziel is looking for a way to not get trapped inside the Reaver and to escape from THE ORIGIN OF LIFE THE HUB OF THE WHEEL THE DEVOURER OF DEATH;
2) Kain is looking for a way for Raziel to not get trapped inside the Reaver and to prevent Blood Omen 2 from happening;
3) Moebius and THE ORIGIN OF LIFE THE HUB OF THE WHEEL THE DEVOURER OF DEATH are performing an evil, as usual.
4) New combat;
5) Linear progression;
6) Amy Hennig fixed most of the trash that BO2 unleashed upon us. Not all of it, but most of it.

Spoilers
Use tags.

The LP
It's a 100% LP where I collect everything there is to collect, sometimes against my better judgment.

Videos

nutri_void fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Jul 16, 2016

# ¿ Apr 17, 2016 23:41

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 15:44

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Alexey's note: beware the spoilers!

KieranWalker posted:

Ah, Defiance. Definitely the best game in the series, all around. They really managed to work out most of the flaws this time around; combat can still get fairly tedious, but you've got more variety and some nifty abilities to make up for it (impaling dudes on wall-mounted hooks or throwing them over cliffs is always entertaining). The more hacky-slashy combat may be hit or miss for some, but I find it more engaging than SR/SR2's if only because it's faster and more active. The camera angles do suck, but they're not horrible. I tend to find them mostly inoffensive. I have played around with a mod in the Steam version to give free camera control, but it has the unfortunate side effect of breaking cutscenes. In a game with as many cutscenes as Defiance has, it's basically unusable.

Controller support is finicky in the PC version. I think I went into this in the SR2 thread, but none of the PC versions recognize analog triggers (L/R2 and L/RT on a PS3/4 and 360/dogbox controller, respectively). The workaround I found for that is to map what you want on those buttons in-game to a keyboard input, then use a program like JoyToKey to map the keyboard inputs to your L/R triggers. It works surprisingly well. To use a PS4 controller, I think you'd need an XInput wrapper like X360ce, or to have specific DS4 controller drivers--there is a good set out there, but I don't presently have it installed and I'm not sure the name of it.

On the subject of the game, I find it interesting how differently Moebius comes across in this one compared to SR/SR2. Granted, you only see him through Raziel's eyes in those games, and this time when you meet him you're playing as Kain. I imagine he drops the smarmy nice guy pretense entirely when dealing with Kain because A) why bother at this point, and B) Kain sees through it and responds better to relative honesty. But beyond that, he's less... antagonistic than you'd expect this time around, and it's really quite difficult to tell whether he's working against you or not.

I also love that most of Kain's animations, voice clips, and what have you are directly calling back to Blood Omen. I started playing Defiance right after watching the BO LP and began to really pick up on that for the first time. The development team really didn't forget ANYTHING from the first game, and I find it endearing.

And they don't just do it for Blood Omen either; how many times did you go through that central courtyard in the Sarafan Stronghold in SR2? It looks a bit different due to fancier graphics in Defiance, but here we are again, now visiting it as Kain rather than Raziel. So good.

anilEhilated posted:

To mend my reputation (yeah, right) with the thread, I mentioned an LoK-themed power metal song in the last thread. Well, I found it. It's, uh, enthusiastic.
Uploaded it to tindeck because I can't find any mentions of the band still being around.

inscrutable horse posted:

I felt... inspired by that fight against those three statues.

No, I'm not proud.

anilEhilated posted:

I think it's safe to post this, just beware of spoilers in related videos: Turel's VA really gets into the role and it's great. First time I saw this and he did the "I must have BLOOD! YOURS!" bit, I veritably jumped in the chair.

e: You can definitely TK the gongs, that's how I beat him and I never had a controller.

Vicissitude posted:

And there we have it. The ONE time in the whole game that Kain smiles out of sheer joy, even if it's tinged with a bit of malice. All the times before now have been mostly malice or intimidation. This time, he's just happy

EDIT: I can only imagine Raziel would have the same satisfied smile in the spectral realm, were he capable of smiling at all

Zain posted:

nobody could see the squid. The corruption is basically twisting people. Kain wasn't really a good human to begin with, but was supposed to be. All the pillar guardians were supposed to be more or less good people that stood up for what their pillar represented.

Positive side I saw this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWM_Vqh8qAg

Raygereio posted:

Here's a neat detail that I can't believe I never noticed this before: Check out the Scion of Balance's pose in his mural and compare it to Kain's symbol.

nutri_void fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Jul 17, 2016

# ¿ Apr 17, 2016 23:42

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Of course I would forget to put a tag when none of the mods are online.
drat.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2016 23:43

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

anilEhilated posted:

Can't run and keep his dignity. He's walking around his future domain's city...canyons... sewers.

I'm gonna play along with this one, Defiance hasn't aged too badly.

...switches...

# ¿ Apr 18, 2016 13:14

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Crigit posted:

Pretty much my sentiments exactly.

Yeah, same he~ oh, wait....

# ¿ Apr 18, 2016 16:40

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

anilEhilated posted:

I forgot how amazing this game's version of Ariel's Lament is.
e: Speaking of Cadaverous Laceration, you gotta show off the move list help menu at some point: the names of the combos are voice-acted and it's magical.

I will, but probably once I have more of these combos.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2016 12:55

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Tuxedo Ted posted:

Ok, so I watched the Blood Omen 2 thread and from the first video I was thinking "man this is way worse than I remember it being" and it took me way too drat long to realize I was thinking of this game instead. I never really played any of the Blood Soul Omen Reaver games, just half remembered watching a friend play them.

To be fair, you may have as well played BO2 itselt, too. "I don't remember this being as bad" is a very common sentiment because of the astonishing forgettableness of the game :v:

# ¿ Apr 21, 2016 21:49

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

By the way, I'm ramping up the game audio during cutscenes so that the overall audio balance remains the same throughout the entire video. Tell me if it's okay or I should ramp it up more/less.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2016 21:49

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Pesky Splinter posted:

I believe it's been like that the entire series.
It reminds me actually, on the topic of narration - it's quite sparce in BO2; Raziel and Kain pretty much provide a running commentary through their games...while in BO2 Kain only really does such a thing during the vampire encounters - the rest is in explict dialogue.

The narration in the non-BO2 games is one of the best parts about the game.
I don't even have to explain anything in this LP, Kain and Raziel do everything for me :v:

Speaking of BO2, I recorded more BO2 and I hate myself. I'm sick of this to the point where I'm on the verge of not bothering to clean up the audio.

nutri_void fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Apr 22, 2016

# ¿ Apr 22, 2016 19:21

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

# ¿ Apr 24, 2016 21:55

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Delta Green posted:

Defiance was made by the original team and they knew it was likely going to be the last Legacy Of Kain game.

Thus, they pulled out all the stops and made it AMAZING. The dialogue in particular is great, and the voice actors had genuine fun doing their takes, which they usually did with everyone involved in each dialogue in the same studio.

Which doesn't sound special, until you realize that the inverse is still far more common. Seriously, go look up the Outtakes for Defiance, they're great.

Oh, and they tied up all the loose ends in the story. I think only one or two plot points are left unresolved and its for good reasons.

I believe that one of the games introduced itself as being excerpts of something referred to as "The Dark Chronicle" in-universe. Meaning that we're effectively going through a written account by Kain (and Raziel) of the events, presumably long after they are gone.

Otherwise, why the "Legacy" of Kain?

I always thought that the "Legacy" part is about the sequence of decisions that Kain makes in Blood Omen. Everything after that is the fallout of these decisions (and the actions of those who pushed him to make these decisions), and are thus Kain's legacy.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2016 14:03

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

I just picked up my controller and I don't think that I have any games that would work with it, so I can't even rant about how alien and foreign it feels :v:

# ¿ Apr 27, 2016 09:07

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

The next update will be a bit delayed, I accidentally saved after a cutscene and it didn't play it again upon reloading the game, so I have to replay the entirety of the first three chapters again :v:

# ¿ Apr 30, 2016 16:00

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

# ¿ May 1, 2016 10:49

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

PSWII60 posted:

Kain travels 50 years back into the past, so 20 years or so before he was born (Kain seems like he's about 30 as a guess), to fight William the Just. SR2 takes place at the start around when Kain was born, then the end takes place before that by an undetermined amount of time, since the Sarafan lords were still alive then, but seemed to be dead at the start of the game. It would stand to reason that it takes place before William the Just's era since the stained glass mural of William fighting Kain is not present in the areas and the only then took the reaver back to the stronghold where it was at in the beginning of SR2 already imbued with Raziel's self. In that era Raziel was supposed to die by the reaver's blade and surrender himself to it creating the Soul Reaver. Then it would have been given to William the Just later on down the line.

Alternatively Mobius has a time machine and can take the Soul Reaver to whenever he feels like and give it William at whatever time.

EDIT: Found this which was a timeline included with the Playstation 2 Soul Reaver 2. I didn't see any spoilers, which makes sense since this game didn't exist yet when Soul Reaver 2 came out.

That's actually clarified in Defiance. Raziel emerges in the BO1 era and says that he lost 500 years, meaning that the last third of SR2 and Kain's section of Defiance happens around 500 years before BO1.

# ¿ May 2, 2016 16:19

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

While the update is processing, I want to raise a couple of irrelevant points.

1) Leicester are the EPL champions.
2) Controllers loving suck. Darksiders is a supposedly easy game which I'm playing on easy difficulty. Goddamn crossblade and goodamn third person on-rails shooter sections.

# ¿ May 2, 2016 22:32

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

# ¿ May 2, 2016 23:11

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

I just took a look through the last video as I was procrastinating with my thesis (which is why there aren't any updates, and won't be until Sunday), and I found out that I forgot to cut out a lot of my coughing. This happened literally for the first time ever.

drat.

# ¿ May 6, 2016 19:47

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

# ¿ May 8, 2016 18:20

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

I think that young Kain is just mad :v:

# ¿ May 8, 2016 20:37

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

More Pillars, this time in brown instead of white! :v:

# ¿ May 10, 2016 06:39

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

# ¿ May 11, 2016 13:02

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

And I'm the OP. And have been for over a year.
That said, I really like the trippy discussion, keep it on!

I apologize for the lack of updates, studies and stuff. Well, just studies, actually. The next one should be coming tomorrow.

# ¿ May 15, 2016 22:41

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Remember how I used to do lore?
Well, I realized that "used to" is actually the operative part now, I completely lost the habit during BO2.
So now I do lore again.

Also, this is where we meet the second most annoying enemy in the game.

# ¿ May 17, 2016 00:59

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Yeah, I just thought that it meant "remarkably" and went full sarcastic about it.

# ¿ May 17, 2016 15:04

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Okay then, I'll do what I did in SR1 and add the annotation to skip these irritating parts (note: only when I don't have anything interesting to say, which may or may not happen, as I have no backlog).

anilEhilated posted:

To mend my reputation (yeah, right) with the thread, I mentioned an LoK-themed power metal song in the last thread. Well, I found it. It's, uh, enthusiastic.
Uploaded it to tindeck because I can't find any mentions of the band still being around.

Well, that's... a song.

nutri_void fucked around with this message at 22:20 on May 18, 2016

# ¿ May 18, 2016 22:10

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

fullTimeLurker posted:

wow I learned something new from watching this LP. I've played through the series at least half a dozen times, and everytime I've gotten to this part in Defiance I've always wondered what the hell a bunch of humans were doing in the vampire citadel yelling "vampire" at you and attacking you. Now I know. Did I just miss where they are referenced all these times?

Either way I'm loving watching your playthroughs. I was tempted a few times to pick them back up and play alongside you, but then I'd watch you suffer through the terrible combat and fight the cameras and I realized I was happier just watching you replay. Although Defiance is the one game that I actually play now and then, since it's actually fun to replay.

Actually, it's never addressed in the games. IIRC, the stuff about the feral humans is from a Prima guide.

# ¿ May 21, 2016 22:12

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

We'll be here for a while.

# ¿ May 21, 2016 22:12

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Holy poo poo, what is it with people forgetting about huge chunks of LoK games :v:

Xoidanor posted:

And now we've officially reached where I dropped this game, twice... Younger me just got through this to a certain point and then ran around confused, fighting the same encounters over and over, until the game was simply put down.

Yes, you essentially have to run through the same two routes three times each, with an elemental temple shoved between the second and third runs. It's confusing as all hell if you're not being very careful to where and why you're going. Which you aren't during your run of Defiance, because the rest of Defiance is a lot more linear than that.

# ¿ May 22, 2016 00:41

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

[CONTROLLERS RANT]

Okay, so, I now know why the controller is so loving hard to adjust to after 20 years of keyboard and mouse. It's not just the precision and confusing thumbsticks because your brain is used to camera and movement being different hand movements, not just different hands. It's worse than that.

Camera control and 90% of actions are done by the same extremity - right thumb. Meaning that you can't press an XYAB button and move the camera/crosshair at the same time. You can with a mouse.

# ¿ May 22, 2016 01:16

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

KieranWalker posted:

This is the section of the game I mentioned that gets really tedious with its backtracking. I think it's the worst section of the game--by which I mean, of course, if you can get through Vorador's mansion, the rest of the game will be better.

I don't know how (if at all) this is related to the lore thing you were referring to, Alexey, but I find the naming scheme of vampire weapons here interesting/amusing, or at least the consistency of it. They all follow the same convention--Heart Seeker, Blood Drinker, Soul Stealer... Blood/Soul Reaver. It's not really anything special in and of itself, but it strikes me as a good world-building detail for some reason.

Raziel: first Heart Seeker (as Sarafan), then Blood Drinker (as a vampire) and then Soul Stealer (as a wraith and later as the "Soul" in "Soul Reaver")

# ¿ May 22, 2016 14:19

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

ganonso posted:

Proof that Legacy of Kain is best vampire series: I managed to put 9k words on it in my Mastery Thesis and it's not finished by half. It's nearly as much ink I spent on Vampire the Masquerade/Requiem.,

But yes Vorador's mansion is the most unfun part of the game AFAIR. The next Raziel level is much nicer.

That's a lot of thesis :stare:

Mine's 10k words and it's almost complete. That said, my topic, understandably, has nothing to do with vampires.

# ¿ May 22, 2016 21:34

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Xoidanor posted:

I'm writing my first thesis right now. 10 000 words and the analysis and conclusion is pretty much done according to our adviser. Now if only the limit wasn't 7500...

Strangely not vampire related either. We must have picked the wrong fields.

Indeed.

Also, why on earth would anyone impose a strict word limit on a goddamn thesis? We have a guideline of "stay somewhere around 30 pages with this particular type of formatting".

# ¿ May 22, 2016 21:46

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Xoidanor posted:

Apparently it's up under the provision of some mysterious non-student union council at my Uni. It makes no sense. Additionally, everything gets counted into the world limit and I do mean everything. Including the abstract, table of contents and even the goddamn reference list.

And footnotes, I assume. Holy hell. How do you even find a topic narrow enough to fit into what is basically a short high school essay?

In Russia I had an upper limit of 70 pages for my master's thesis (without the table of contents and list of references). I submitted a thesis that was 45 pages long, because my topic was narrow as all hell. I then cut it down to 10 pages with barely any content in order to publish it as an article. The article is utter poo poo as an article and I never recommend anyone read it or use it in any way for anything ever, but it's a solid line in my CV.
Here in Sweden my topic is even narrower, so it's 28 pages/10k words, without a strict upper limit.

# ¿ May 22, 2016 22:42

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Cathode Raymond posted:

This is a grave mistake

Get it? Cause vampires are undead and...

...I'll see myself out.

# ¿ May 22, 2016 22:56

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

Tomorrow's update would be dull as duck if it weren't for me, so I'll be doing a thread giveaway with it.
More info coming later.

# ¿ May 22, 2016 22:58

nutri_void: Apr 18, 2015; I shall devour your soul.; Grimey Drawer

THREAD GIVEAWAY

Here's the giveaway: I'm giving a copy of Overfall to whoever is the first to guess the song in the update and post it in the thread.
I streamed the game once, will likely stream again later today.
I have absolutely no way of knowing whether the winner will use Google, so it's an incentive to work fast.

THREAD GIVEAWAY OVER

nutri_void fucked around with this message at 16:50 on May 23, 2016

# ¿ May 23, 2016 15:00