OMGJeremy

Humpday Gaming: Soul Reaver

Soul Reaver. The name alone has to be one of the best names given to a game ever. It makes you want to put on a hood and run around saying it to random people in a menacing, gravely voice.

“Souuulll Reeeaaaver…”

God it’s just such a good name. And it wasn’t just the name that was awesome. It got even better when you realized you were playing as a green, zombified vampire that feeds on the souls of the very people that killed him centuries earlier. It’s an epic revenge-filled plot, stuck in a Zelda-like action adventure game with a name that makes you want to destroy everything in your path with your green zombie death. Could it get any better? For the time it was almost teen boy sensory overload. And remember, this was a time when vampires were actually considered cool, and not the laughing-stock of the non-Twilight fan world. It was a different time, and a game that made most of us sit up and take notice almost instantly.

The gist of the plot is that you’re a vampire guy that was about to surpass your master, so your master decides that’s not cool at all, and tosses you into a weird ghost abyss for centuries. During that time, you lose much of your pretty vampire looks, and come out looking more like something that… well just looked like you spent a century in a pit of eternal damnation. You don’t even have a jaw bone for Christ sake. You’re then chosen by the creepy tentacle ghost guy who tells you that it is now time to emerge from your unholy pit, and wreak havoc across the world until you can take vengeance on everyone that did this to you so you can finally have the eternal rest you were deprived of. And take vengeance you will. Many, many times.

You eventually get a spirit sword (the Soul Reaver), which just makes you even more awesome.

As you travel across the world and its dungeons in your quest to stick people through the abdomen with spears and suck their souls down your neck hole, you’ll fight all manner of terrible beasts, amazing bosses, and use a cool game mechanic that allows you to pull yourself into the spirit realm, effectively altering the world into a ghostly, twisted version of itself. Many of the game’s puzzles revolved around going back and forth into each realm, each one allowing you to access different areas depending on which you were in. It also looked pretty damn cool when you saw the world around you warp in real time. The first time I saw it happen, I almost lost my own jaw bone from how far across the room it went.

So I guess you can tell that I liked Soul Reaver a lot. It was one of my all time favorite PSX games. It’s just unfortunate that the game has aged so poorly. I recently sat down with it again to play a bit of it over to write this, and was immediately met with a game that is virtually unplayable by today’s standards. For instance, when I first got to control my character, I thought my controller was broken, as my character just sort of sat there when I tried to move him. I then terrifyingly realized that this was a game that came out before analogue sticks were the standard for 3D movement. A quick move over to the d-pad confirmed it, as Razeal slowly lurched forward with the push of a button. It only went downhill from there. An awful camera controlled by the damn shoulder buttons, sluggish controls, poopy combat that has you missing targets more than hitting, and worst of all, a frame rate that literally slows the game down to half its speed almost 70% of the time you’re playing. This effectively makes it seem like you’re running head first through syrup when anything other than your character appears on screen (to be fair, the PC version of Soul Reaver doesn’t suffer from this, but who cares about the PC version?). With all that, Soul Reaver is sadly almost unplayable now. And that is kind of depressing.

Finding these rooms is essentially how you saved your progress. Note I just said progress. When you start up the game, you never start where you saved. Just close to a portal room like this, where you can hopefully warp close to where you left off

I suppose I should be happy that technology and gameplay has progressed so far. But it’s sad that I can no longer sit down with a favorite game of mine and simply play and enjoy it like I once did. This doesn’t exist for games like Pac Man and Galaga. When you sit down to play those games now, you get a game that is just as playable now as it was thirty years ago. I’m finding the opposite with many PSX games that were considered the best of the best on the console at the time. Most have aged terribly, and games I remember with amazing fondness are considered completely broken now. Maybe I should just be happy with the time I was able to enjoy them, and leave the rest for nostalgia.

At least the name is still awesome.