Being the Legacy of Kain fan that I am, as I’ve covered in my review of Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1&2 Remastered last year, I was extremely excited about Defiance. Ever since Soul Reaver 2 still didn’t finish the story started in Soul Reaver 1, people expected the inevitable Soul Reaver 3 (and Defiance was actually known by that name internally at the start). So when the Blood Omen 2 (which hasn’t been remastered yet) was released first, I was slightly confused, but also intrigued. After all, the events of the game contradicted the known timeline, and even the developers vaguely mentioned that something in Defiance would lead to Blood Omen 2 events existing. Then the early PS2 trailer for Defiance (as it was officially unveiled) hit with some cool nu-metal-ish song playing and I downloaded and rewatched that trailer a lot (the track is called “In the Crossfire”, by the way, as I’ve learnt years ago from the best LoK fan site). Playing as both Kain and Raziel in an epic conclusion to the storyline of Raziel (as it would probably be), was such an exciting prospect.
And then the game came out and… I liked it. But it was also weird. It did conclude Raziel’s story in a mostly satisfying way in broad strokes, it left a lot of questions unanswered. But far more importantly – the game felt even more unfinished than Soul Reaver 1, and that game ended with a “To be continued” screen. This feeling is not something that Legacy of Kain: Defiance Remastered can fix, but where it could, the remaster made the game a lot better.
