Legacy of Kain: Ascendance Review – 23 Years in the Making

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance Review

The Legacy of Kain series began with Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain in 1996. It’s a top-down adventure game, where the player controls a vampire lord with questionable morals. Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is a third-person 3D sequel, released three years later. It stars a different protagonist and drives the series to new heights of popularity. Both games are thought of as PS1 classics. There were three more games in the series, which were less acclaimed. All five games have gotten remasters on modern consoles over the last couple of years. But twenty-three years after the last mainline Legacy of Kain game, we, at long last, have a sixth entry called Legacy of Kain: Ascendance.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance’s story is a prequel to Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. It begins from the point of view of Elaleth, who is Soul Reaver protagonist Raziel’s sister. She’s been turned into a vampire and hates Raziel for the death of her beloved. Raziel begins the game as a human. He’s unsure of why his sister hates him, and follows her through time to events that parallel the story of Soul Reaver. The narrative strikes a great blend of new story paths and fan service. The plot is presented in a non-linear way, where Elaleth’s motivations are slowly revealed.

2D Action Platformer

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is a 2D action platformer. There are multiple characters the player gets to use that sometimes take on different forms. The player begins the game as Elaleth. Square performs a sword melee attack. X is jump, and again for double jump. Holding X allows Elaleth to glide. Jumping into a wall sticks for a second, so a wall jump can be performed. Elaleth will automatically grab ledges if they are jumped into. Triangle sucks the blood of enemies, which restores health. Health is always draining, so it’s important for Elaleth to constantly be drinking blood. Circle performs a forward dash, which uses up a purple magic meter. Double jump also consumes the magic meter. R1 performs a parry, which can be followed with a melee attack to deal extra damage.

Pressing triangle above an enemy’s head when jumping performs a downward kick that stuns enemies. This attack ended up being the key for me figuring out combat with Elaleth. I was worried the combat felt clunky, but once I realized the dive was Elaleth’s main form of attack, the combat clicked and I entered a flow state with it. I never got the parry timing down though, and didn’t end up using it with any character very much.

Character Differences

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance’s other characters use the same basic control system, but they feel different. For example, Raziel’s sword is a bit longer. When he’s human, he doesn’t drink blood, so triangle throws a bomb that burns enemies. Lots of his opponents are undead, so he has to click triangle on a downed opponent to immolate it, and keep it down. His health doesn’t constantly drain either. He doesn’t have wings to glide or double jump, but Raziel can dash infinitely.

While I grew to really enjoy Legacy of Kain: Ascendance’s gameplay, there were still lots of aspects that frustrated me. There are annoying environmental damage items like fires placed in every area the player would logically jump to, or land on. I respect the attempt at NES difficulty, but this didn’t work for me. These obstacles didn’t strike the fine balance of challenge and annoyance that NES Castlevania knockback provides. It just made it so progress was tedious, because I had to be so careful. This would work better in a more arcade-y game, but so well in an adventure.

Some Polish Needed

The enemy AI isn’t smart enough to balance how careful the player has to be with combat. Sometimes enemies get stuck in corners, and sometimes they’ll stay in locations the player can’t safely battle in. This is exacerbated by the fact that some characters’ life is draining by the second. Elaleth falls through the sky too fast to be able to use her glide to stop a trip into a bottomless pit. Characters can’t look down, and there are enough secrets that I found myself taking leaps of faith that led to my death way too often.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance has too many little unpolished bits. Sometimes the game wouldn’t register when I pressed triangle to drink blood. There were times when an enemy’s attack would just go through me. Occasionally, I found myself locked onto drinking the blood of an enemy that was falling into a hole. Legacy of Kain: Ascendance was quite difficult on Normal. A game that demands this much precision from the player needs to be devoid of these issues.

Needs a Little More

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is a fairly straightforward action platformer. The game progression is linear. Levels have secrets to find. These are usually relics with Nosgoth lore flavor text attached, or upgrades to health and magic. There are other power ups that can be found, which do things like cause Elaleth’s health to drain slower. But Legacy of Kain: Ascendance doesn’t have a skill tree or equipable accessories. There aren’t any light RPG elements. The game has five difficulty options. Normal was quite hard, but there is a Story option, which allows the player to invincibly breeze through the game if they want to experience the story. This will be quite welcome as Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is fairly long for an action game, and has tons of interesting set pieces. I don’t want to spoil anything, but there were some game sequences that truly surprised me.

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is aesthetically fantastic. The 2D pixel graphics look great. They’re accented by 3D environmental effects in a tasteful way. The slightly animated character portraits look great. There are occasional animated cutscenes that look absolutely stunning. The music is epic and evokes feelings of 80s Conan films. The voice acting is okay, but it’s wonderful to see that the cast includes all the important original series voice actors. The one blemish against the sound design is there are a lot of repeated sound bites that can get really annoying upon repeated deaths.

Still So Happy

Legacy of Kain: Ascendance is a mixed bag. It was great to see a continuation of the world and characters from Nosgoth. The story is beautifully told and realized. The gameplay was really fun once I adapted to it. The different characters keep things feeling fresh. But the game is very linear, and there are no skill trees or RPG mechanics. There’s no way for the player to experiment with the game’s mechanics, and there’s not a lot of reason to keep playing once the story’s done. There are some of us who like nice, linear old-school action platform progression, though. The game also demands a lot of the player and has a lack of polish that works against those demands. I’m still so happy Legacy of Kain: Ascendance was made, though, and I really hope this leads to more games in the series.

***PS5 code provided by the publisher***