The Games That Inspire My Writing (Part 2)

As an author myself, books will always be my first and truest love. However, video games have been a constant companion, a wonderful form of social interaction, and a port of harbor in this our blighted world. Games have provided a place to rest, certainly, but it ain’t all escapism. Games have always been a key part of my curriculum for story, character, and narrative, and deserve every bit of thanks I can spare.

Last week, I poured a couple pints of e-ink out for my boys, the DARK SOULS games, sharing how they taught me the value of perseverance and the joys of sad dignity. They also directly inspired the newest manuscript I’m working on, gently titled “The Stone Marches.”

This week, we’re dropping DARK SOULS and going a bit lighter: the soul-crushing gothic vampire existentialist masterpiece that is the LEGACY OF KAIN series.

The Legacy of Kain Series

The LEGACY OF KAIN series is a five-game (six, but, we don’t talk about NOSGOTH) dark fantasy series about vampires, pride, time travel, destiny, dark magic, gods, destructive unquestioned cycles of power, and ambition.

My introduction to the series came when I finally got that original PlayStation I’d been craving. The one spinning discs and weaving dreams at Michael, Dan, and Allan’s houses, those bastards.

FINAL FANTASY VII filled my memory card–and my heart–first of course, for hours uncountable. But one day I was at my buddy Allan’s house, and he was playing this weird vampire game about an emo skeleton man rotating giant blocks. Seemed interesting. But then he showed me how the run-of-the-mill enemies, vampires, couldn’t just be beat up or Goomba-stomped out of existence. You had to ram a spear through their heart, light them on fire, or throw them in sunlight or water (all things the game gave you the tools to do). I was blown away.

He then started a new game on the spot just so I could see this rad opening cutscene. Which, at the time, had the most mind-blowing graphics I’d ever seen. And still has some of the best voice acting of all time:

Funny enough, SOUL REAVER is actually the second game in the series, and easily the most famous. The original was LEGACY OF KAIN, and instead of starring Raziel, it detailed the origin of a young vampire named Kain in a vaguely medieval setting.

SOUL REAVER is a gothic tale of a betrayed lieutenant seeking revenge against the vampire king Kain in a world Kain has (apparently) destroyed. SOUL REAVER 2 would go on to expand the story, dive deep into time travel, and make you question all the exposition you were given in the first game about the nature of the world and your place in it. LEGACY OF KAIN: DEFIANCE would meld the original game with its SOUL REAVER offshoot, making you switch between Kain and Raziel on the way to their inevitable climactic confrontation with each other, AND WITH DESTINY.

Anyway, these games were so shocking because, especially at the time, games didn’t have this level of writing and voice acting. All due respect to the otherwise amazing RESIDENT EVIL, game acting pretty much sounded like this:

Voice acting in games was in its infancy, and while there were certainly great stories, the LEGACY OF KAIN story felt mature. Challenging. The bad guy wasn’t the bad guy, the good guy wasn’t the good guy. It played with the meta concept of player agency in a linear world–and your unquestioning devotion to some random person giving you instructions–long before Bioshock would become famous for doing the same thing.

The dialogue was elevated, practically Shakespearean, and you could sit and listen to two ancient vampires argue about the nature of fate for twenty minutes and never get antsy. You felt like you were watching a world-class play. Full props to series writer Amy Hennig, by the way, who has remained an inspiration (and went on to create the UNCHARTED series).

Anyway, LEGACY OF KAIN is great. And there’s never been a better time to check it out, with the release of the remakes/remasters of SOUL REAVERs 1 and 2.

But I’m a writer talking about inspiration, so, what did I learn?

LEGACY OF KAIN Inspired Me to Stop Caring About the Market

On a wide level, the LEGACY OF KAIN series taught me to trust the audience. If your idea seems weird, or complicated, or there might be too many genres in the soup, or the words are too big…who cares. People love weird shit. In fact, they crave novelty. If your story doesn’t look like any other story out there, that’s a GOOD thing. I realize that may give marketing directors the world over a fit of the vapors, but its true.

LEGACY OF KAIN combines medieval and industrial settings, gothic concepts, vampires, evolution/mutation, time travel plots bordering on sci-fi, eldritch horror, demons, melodrama, and even high-fantasy tropes into a strange melange I’ve yet to see replicated. And people love it.

My novel RIVEN wouldn’t exist without LEGACY OF KAIN. I thought “wouldn’t it be cool to a do a modern post-apocalypse story with magic?” I threw superpowers in there, a dash of X-Men, mutation, magic, nuclear power, guns, dimensional rifts, monsters, whatever. Why? Because LEGACY OF KAIN gave me the courage to trust my audience. To believe in my heart that someone, somewhere, wanted to see some weird shit.

My DEADGIRL series owes a huge debt to SOUL REAVER, Raziel in particular. When I had the idea for a physical ghost-like high school kid to throw into Buffy-style supernatural adventures, I couldn’t help but introduce the idea that she could shift into another, more ghostly world, like Raziel’s spectral realm. The characters and concepts are totally different, as is the genre and vibes (FOR LEGAL PURPOSES OBVIOUSLY), but Lucy Day from DEADGIRL doesn’t exist in her current form without a dash of Raziel.

Come Back Next Wednesday for Part 3

Next week I’m gonna share more of my video game inspiration, and I haven’t decided if I’m finally ready to tackle the FINAL FANTASY of it all or if I want to go more obscure because I’m a natural and extremely annoying contrarian. Catch you on the flip flop!

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