What Ever Happened to? Part 4 : Legacy Of Kain Soul Reaver 2

When looking back to casualties of Sega’s software only approach of 2001, you’d be hard pushed to remember a dormant series like Legacy of Kain, this was a series of titles released originally starting with Blood Omen on PlayStation and eventually concentrating on Raziel in Soul Reaver which found it’s way on to the PlayStation, PC and Dreamcast – it was this game that kicked started the popularity of the Legacy of Kain series which would spawn a few more games on Xbox and PlayStation 2 before being mostly put to bed in 2003.

Legacy of Kain : Soul Reaver 2 is perhaps the most interesting prospect in this universe of games because it was the first entry solely developed with 128 bit consoles in mind, the Dreamcast version was in development first with the PlayStation 2 version in development slightly after when PS One support was shifted, this was an exciting franchise that was a killer app for the Dreamcast back in 2001, it’s often debated how much work went into this particular version before development shifted again to just the PS2, some images across the Internet show the game with what looks like Dreamcast control schemes but sadly we won’t properly know. Is there a beta sat in someone’s collection? Probably. Will it ever get leaked? Not likely.

It’s a massive shame that this game didn’t make it’s release, the Dreamcast was crying out for these sort of story-driven titles to bolster out Sega’s arcade output, and we think that this game would have sold well on the console and perhaps would have exceeded the PS2 version in terms of visual output as many early dual releases did.

You can play Soul Reaver 2 today on the PlayStation 2 and PC these versions released between September – October 2001 with a Steam version released in 2012.