YMMV / Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver

• Growing the Beard: Blood Omen was a relatively well-received game, if criticized somewhat for being a 2D game on the PlayStation. Soul Reaver marked the transition to 3D, the appointment of Amy Hennig as the main writer for the series, the introductions of hallmark characters for the series in the form of Raziel and the Elder God, adding in inspiration from Jewish mythicism and Gnosticism, and the start of a much more ambitious Story Arc for the series overall.
• Polished Port: The Dreamcast version runs at a mostly steady 60FPS (as opposed to the PS1 and PC version's 30), runs at a higher resolution, and has a few redone character models with more complex geometry, most noticeable with Raziel and Kain. The main downsides are the Dreamcast controller not fitting super well with the game (you need to press the d-pad to control the camera, which is awkward) and some slightly lower-resolution textures.
• Once Original, Now Common: The nearly seamless and expansive overworld, which could be traversed from one end to the next with basically no loading screens at all, was something that didn't really exist on CD-based consoles when the game initially came out. It was especially impressive when compared to its predecessor Blood Omen, which had both more primitive visuals and was plagued by frequent loading screens. Nowadays the techniques Soul Reaver uses to disguise loading such as strategically placed doors and narrow hallways are used liberally by many games, so it doesn't come across as impressive as it did back then, and often even falls victim to derision for such obvious tricks being used. To say nothing about increased performance of consoles and gaming hardware, making it all that easier to genuinely avoid loading for real.

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