Listening to the voices of Michael Bell (as Raziel) and Simon Templeman (as Kain) after over 20 years of absence from the Legacy of Kain franchise, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the veteran actors.
The voice actors are, to my 90s-mind, among the greatest and most Shakespearean in the video game industry. To hear them now, sounding beautifully aged and wizened, speaking amateurish lines in a game as flat and insipid as Legacy of Kain: Ascendance makes me feel sorry for them, makes me ashamed at what a video game, supposedly (and in my eyes most definitely) the most exciting art form of our times, has done to these masters. It is a bit like seeing the great actor Jeremy Irons demeaning himself in the role of Alan Rikkin in the 2016 Assassin’s Creed movie flop.
Having said that Bell and Templeman nonetheless turn out stellar performances in this game. They perform like consummate professionals and their voice-acting is, arguably, the game’s sole saving grace.
All of this is to say that Ascendance is an unnecessary game that sullies the legacy (sorry for the pun) of its highly lauded and fondly remembered franchise. A 16-Bit, side-scrolling action game by Bit Bot Media is not what long-suffering Legacy of Kain fans have been waiting for.
In my previous review of the Legacy of Kain: Defiance remaster I wrote about the state of the franchise and the excitement generated by the recent remasters of the 1990s and 2000s classics. Maybe, just maybe, we dared hope, there could be something new on the horizon. There was. But not this, anything but this.
Mechanically, the game is poor. Elaleth, Raziel’s long lost, inexplicably absent sister, is the central character. She was conceived in the poorly-received The Dead Shall Rise graphic novel. She is, as it turns out, the main player behind the series’ central events. She is a demi-goddess hell-bent on righting the wrongs of history. Specifically, she is trying to avenge and revive her boyfriend Mathias.
Reviving her boyfriend. It turns out, then, that the entire Shakespearean grand guignol of the original series served only one purpose: avenging a dead boyfriend. This is fan-fiction level material. This is not art. This is like explaining that Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984 was actually a bullied teenager out for revenge on the world for leaving him out of parties and ghosting him.
In terms of gameplay, Elaleth is extremely powerful. Too powerful. Raziel (both human and vampire) and Kain are, by contrast, lightweights with unbearably difficult and frustrating levels. Elaleth is meant to be the star of the show but she has none of the gravitas or charisma of her vampiric predecessors.
Artistically, the pixel art is well done, although it is difficult to explain the later-game animations which make the game feel like a PlayStation 1 IP game like Jackie Chan Stuntmaster. Musically, it is unnecessarily, artlessly bombastic.
It may sound like I am being brutally harsh on the game. There may be some redeeming qualities to it. Parts of it are fun. But my harshness is borne from disappointment that borders on betrayal.
Video games are not primarily works of art – they are video games. That is, their primary priorities are entertainment, fun, strong gameplay mechanics, replayability, etc. But over the years several games have shown that you can have your cake and eat it too. Video games can be fun and works of art without making compromises. Look at God of War (2018), Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Ghost of Tsushima, and many others. I would very happily include games like Soul Reaver 1 and 2 as well as Defiance in that category. So the low quality, the laziness, the poor decision-making in Ascendance is hard to swallow; a game that both fails as a video game and anything remotely artistic. Add to this the fact that we have been waiting 23 years for a new game in the series and the wound cuts even deeper.
Why don’t Crystal Dynamics take longer, get their acts together, get Amy Henning back, and work on a full-blown, serious, lovingly made new entry to the series? Story-wise, why have they been so afraid to attempt a sequel to the ending of Defiance? And why did they think a pixelated afterthought like Ascendance would keep fans happy? If anything, its poor reception is more likely to further stall the release of a new, serious game in the franchise, and that is infuriating.
Was Crystal Dynamics trying to take a leaf out of Santa Monica Studios’ book when they released God of War Sons of Sparta? If so, that’s a tragic case of crossed wires, because if Crystal Dynamics wanted to seek inspiration from Santa Monica Studios it should have looked at how it revived Kratos for the modern age with the series’ reboot in 2018.
Whatever the decision-making process was, the end product is clear to see. Of course, everyone is allowed a misstep. Even great artists produced duds, just look at Edvard Munch’s Angry Dog or listen to Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait. The great artists always recover, however, and the real unspoken fear lurking behind Ascendance’s failure is how it will impact the series’ longevity going forward, and the way the previous entries are perceived in hindsight. At the end of Defiance Kain uttered these enigmatic words: ‘Most ironic of all was the last gift that Raziel had given me: More powerful than the sword that now held his soul, more acute even than the vision his sacrifice had accorded me. The first, bitter taste of that terrible illusion -Hope.’ Dare we still hope in Legacy of Kain’s redemption?
