That answers: what would you like in a remake? It does not answer: why would you want a larger audience? People are cancer. The chance of each new fan being shitty is much higher than them being good. You can argue that the material should only appeal to certain people and you'd be right but those that the material appealed to are already here. Making something that was niche appealing to the massive fundamentally means lifting the natural filter that the quality and obscurity of the content established by proxy. It means lowering standards - always. There's no point in which it does not mean this and as the population (or relevant broader demographic) grows so will the probability of newcomers being harmful to the future of the franchise and to the existing community.
Good writing, intense combat. Basically that monster fight from "Castlevania" but with better choreography (even feral primitive vampires should be able to fight).
5 months ago
Anonymous
Post-script: Ideally lot of blocking and dodging moves (see 1:56):
That answers: what would you like in a remake? It does not answer: why would you want a larger audience? People are cancer. The chance of each new fan being shitty is much higher than them being good. You can argue that the material should only appeal to certain people and you'd be right but those that the material appealed to are already here. Making something that was niche appealing to the massive fundamentally means lifting the natural filter that the quality and obscurity of the content established by proxy. It means lowering standards - always. There's no point in which it does not mean this and as the population (or relevant broader demographic) grows so will the probability of newcomers being harmful to the future of the franchise and to the existing community.
I think there's a difference between "wanting a larger audience to experience it", and "wanting it to appeal to a larger audience."
The first one is okay. Not everybody had a PS1 and was interested in 3D puzzle platformers. And even when all five games are available, not everybody is going to be interested. You could easily present the story well enough in an animated format, since shoving blocks around for 50 hours isn't really a meaningful part of the plot being told. And the few times that gameplay might be relevant, could easily be shown as part of the story.
The second is the awful version. It's a story about somebody being damned from their birth by people manipulating the scenes, who tortured everybody around him for hundreds of years and just seeks to antagonize somebody in the hopes that they'll get pissed off enough to frick the ones on top. This isn't something you could turn into a Saturday morning cartoon, and trying would just neuter half the point of the story.
The much larger problem is that part of the original VA cast has died in the years since the games came out. Tony Jay, the elder god in the series, died over seven years ago. And a large part of the grandiose of Legacy of Kain came from its casting; you can't just slap some random new VA in and expect the same experience.
>there's a difference between "wanting a larger audience to experience it", and "wanting it to appeal to a larger audience."
Actually, there isn't. One is predicated on the other. If it does not appeal to a large audience and large audience will not experience it. Indeed, even the desire for more people to experience(like) it implies you want it to appeal to them either by them 'coming to like it' or more realistically by it being altered, in this case into an animated series, in order to catch their attention.
>muh cast
As if the delivery of the narrative means nothing but the VA means everything. Lets be charitable. You love the VAs, and that's understandable, they are very good. That's largely because they came from more traditional backgrounds. Traditions like stage productions. What you are saying to me right now is that no one would ever wish to see Hamlet because the actors ol' Shakey used to first perform the play are dead and the material has no value beyond that first, extremely intentional and authorially regulated casting. Actors come and go. They are talking props. Will some be better than others? Absolutely. Do they comprise the essence of the media? Not in the slightest. They are non-essential.
You seem to imply that "liking" and "experiencing" are the same thing. They are not. There are simply people who won't be able (or willing) to experience it due to the medium, and putting it in another medium would be able to change that.
I find it amusing how you claim that the voice actors are "talking props" and "non-essential" and that the original VA are ultimately inconsequential... but you imply that Raziel hopping around on a blocky 3D pipe organ and dragging blocks around is somehow such an absolutely critical component that the whole experience will be ruined if it gets even slightly altered. What point does the sliding block puzzle in the organ room in the second game provide to the narrative? What point does ANY sliding block puzzle in ANY game of the series provide to the narrative?
I'll give that some game aspects have some relevance to the narrative - the wandering about of ruins upon leaving the pool in the 2nd game, the reactions of humans in most of the series - but I'd challenge that those could be presented without needing to stick a controller in somebody's hands in order to deliver the same experience. And at that point, how is the gameplay any less "non-essential" or any less of a "prop" than the VAs who you quickly dismiss as transitory? If all you have left are cutscenes and the few bits which could be replaced by appropriate cutscenes, why is the idea of interpreting this as an animated (media of appropriate length) considered to be such a disastrous idea?
You cannot put "it" in another medium. Changing mediums is inherently transformative. The story was written for games. The lines were written for cut-scenes. You can write an animated series adapting LoK but it's not LoK. Ignoring those who refuse to play with blocks for hours, as you put it, those who can't even look up a longplay or story edit of the series do not deserve to experience it and frankly never will, even if it's adapted. Your entire position is based around the idea that gameplay restricts people from entry and yet you've already got a non-interactive equivalent - one more inherently faithful than an adaption.
>ultimately inconsequential
That's your own poor reading comprehension. I should not be responsible for your idiocy. That you would equate value with essence speaks volumes. I will baby you:
An engine is essential to a automobile. If it does not have an engine it is not an automobile.
A specific engine is not essential to an automobile. So long as the engine can produce locomotion it is an automobile. The characteristics of an engine greatly reflect the value of an automobile despite this.
VAs are less important than engines. Non-voiced games have and will continue to be compelling narrative experiences however, the presence of a good VA is very impactful on the game's overall quality. Implying a single cast is the essence of a piece and without them it cannot or should not exist is moronic and greatly over estimates the value of talking props.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Alright, let's cover a few things.
First, anything outside playing a direct port in inherently transformative. Arguably anything but playing the original game on the original hardware, although for LoK I don't really see much different from the original game and current generation versions.
How relevant gameplay is in delivering a narrative depends on a lot of factors, specifically how much the gameplay supports or frames the narrative. I'd argue that just watching a series of cutscenes in succession with LoK is a lot more transformative (it loses a lot more) because there is a lot of context that gets lost when doing so. Much of LoK involves wandering around the ruins of the world, sometimes with VA remarks on the state of the world and with how other characters react to you. Blood Omen 2 may be narratively light for the series, but how much the guards are spaced out and how they react to you showing up has a relevance in the story and the atmosphere that you lose by just watching a youtube edit of all the scenes strung together.
Basically, there is a way to confer this information and give a similar experience that is MORE faithful by adapting it more. If the whole thing is animated, then you can use scenes which adequately convey these parts of the game to viewers. And this can end up as a more faithful adaption than just slapping cutscenes together.
You're also overvaluing the original game content, which is ironic given how much you undervalue the components of that content. You're treating the voice cast as some mere engine parts but treating the in-game cutscenes or even the game system itself as some core critical aspect that cannot be swapped out in the same manner... rather than just being more parts to the same engine. Heck, you stated that just removing the gameplay component entirely would be a more faithful adaption than swapping it with something similar which can convey the same thing.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Being a videogame is the scaffolding of the entire fricking story. There are narrative choices that literally would not have been made if the series were not a game. If the series were not a game it would have had every one of the other clan leaders dead by Raziel's hand in the SR, among many many many more changes. Hell, if someone were to write this as a novel like as not there wouldn't not be "roam location then kill your brother to get a powerup" boss fights. The story is itself inherently "gamey". There are good things that have come from this - specifically turning plot holes and missing content that resulted from poor development into wrinkles and call backs in future installments. That's not something a traditional author has to deal with. Their intent is law and their outline is solid. There is no moment where their editor will approach them and explain that they do not have the ink to write another fratricide so the writer needs to move things along to Kane. >watching cliff notes is also transformative
To an extent, granted. However changing the medium and adding content which did not exist or altering existing content (including visuals) is significantly transformative.
5 months ago
Anonymous
You are kidding yourself if you think that traditional authors do not need to deal with plot holes or contradictory writing, especially with long running franchises, and that they never need to pull content out of their ass in order to explain problems away.
One look at the Harry Potter franchise shows off a lot of a lot of inconsistencies and nonsense explanations, although most of the explaining happens outside the books.
Also, I'm not sure it's relevant what Legacy of Kain would've been like "if the series were not a game". We're talking about the series as it is now, and the possibility of making that story. It's not some alternate reality where somebody wrote a book of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and developed the whole thing as a book series. You might as well ask what would've happened if nobody wanted to attach a PS1 Zelda-knockoff onto the franchise after the first failed game, or what would've happened if Blood Omen was actually good. It might make for some fun thought experiments, but it's ultimately irrelevant to the point of if an animated LoK series would be good or fit the narrative well with the existing game series.
>changing the medium and adding content which did not exist or altering existing content (including visuals) is significantly transformative.
I don't think that trying to scale "how transformative" one thing will be compared to another is going to be very productive. Outside exceptionally broad strokes, it's probably not going to be reasonable to talk about how transformative one revision is to another, unless one of them has OBVIOUSLY made much larger changes than another.
5 months ago
Anonymous
You're kidding yourself if you equate shoddy world building to the central narrative. Especially when you start with Harry Potter which introduces Sirius in the first chapter only for him to become relevant 3-4 books in with no mention in between. The narrative itself is solid if poorly executed. If you want to complain about world building then sure you can make those criticism of any franchise, even the hyper autistic ones that do it well.
>we're talking about the series as it is now
We're talking about altering the series 'as it is now' into something else. Connective tissue supporting content ect. None of it will have the same methods or constraints. All of it will be foreign and therefore significantly transformative.
>I don't think discussion anything that lacks arbitrary cut offs is productive
Then there's no point discussing anything subjectively, especially artistic media - without some authoritative arbiter you respect. I feel I explained why the difference is more significant quite well. You can disagree but to pretend that discussion is moot until we can tell when an edge becomes a blade or stack becomes a pile is reductive. I don't feel either of us are so pedantic as to need a concrete indicator between to readily apparent states of being.
To offer a final word on what appears to be a dead end with you - the animated series would change the visuals, the sound, likely the music, the pacing (yes gameplay counts) and so on. Supposing hte VAs were alive that and the basic plot points and cutscene dialogue would be all that remained of the original experience.
I'm not even in opposition to an animated series, I'm just saying it wouldn't be the original LoK and you shouldn't seek attention from people who aren't interested in LoK. Wanting an animated series for its own merits is far better than wanting it as a vector to reach new demographics.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Nobody is seeking attention from anybody. That's the point. The discussion was to make an animated series, not to change everything about it to pander to a specific crowd. The crazy point is that you can see yourself the distinction there >Wanting an animated series for its own merits is far better than wanting it as a vector to reach new demographics.
Which was the whole point, until you started bringing up appeal to a larger audience.
Also, you're kidding yourself if you think everything that becomes relevant in later Harry Potter books was an intentional subtle plot hook placed there by the author. I'm certain that Sirius was intentional from the start, but it is highly unlikely that even such a big plot element as the Invisibility Cloak being one of the Deathly Hollows was intended from book 1. When they need to go on a huge rant in one of the last books describing how invisibility cloaks normally work and how Harry's cloak prevents all these detection spells we've never seen used and how all these other cloaks we've also never seen are just temporary, it's pretty clear that nobody was intending to hint that the cloak was special from the start.
Rather, it looks like somebody wanted some plot significance to Harry's cloak (and now wand) and so contrived the Deathly Hollows as these mythical artifacts which Harry just conveniently has two of them right now.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Rowling is a hack but that is not because of editorial mandate or anything outside her own incompetence. It is still a fundamentally different challenge to writing around a game which has harder deadlines, more overhead and an entire team upon which your story is reliant - and in many cases destroyed. The changes in SR1 and subsequent plot points in following games are evidence of that. LoK actually had good writers so it was used to their advantage to make a more organic less structured and considered story. Restriction always encourages artistic talent, in my opinion.
There's an image with an excerpt from an interview on how art is the pursuit of realism but dies the moment it actually gets there (cinema) that sums my position on it nicely but I can't find it.
weird that they would mention the abrahamic god in a game set in a gothic fantasy world where the only god ever mentioned is the wheel of fate
"Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver" needs to be an animated series.
I agree, if only to get the writing to a larger audience.
I do hope it has a more optimistic ending. I hate what happened to poor Raziel. He earned a happy ending.
Why would you want a larger audience. That's the worst possible thing to have happen.
t. Day-one Dragon's Dogma fan
Keep it true to its epic storytelling roots. Just improve the combat and AI.
That answers: what would you like in a remake? It does not answer: why would you want a larger audience? People are cancer. The chance of each new fan being shitty is much higher than them being good. You can argue that the material should only appeal to certain people and you'd be right but those that the material appealed to are already here. Making something that was niche appealing to the massive fundamentally means lifting the natural filter that the quality and obscurity of the content established by proxy. It means lowering standards - always. There's no point in which it does not mean this and as the population (or relevant broader demographic) grows so will the probability of newcomers being harmful to the future of the franchise and to the existing community.
Good writing, intense combat. Basically that monster fight from "Castlevania" but with better choreography (even feral primitive vampires should be able to fight).
Post-script: Ideally lot of blocking and dodging moves (see 1:56):
I think there's a difference between "wanting a larger audience to experience it", and "wanting it to appeal to a larger audience."
The first one is okay. Not everybody had a PS1 and was interested in 3D puzzle platformers. And even when all five games are available, not everybody is going to be interested. You could easily present the story well enough in an animated format, since shoving blocks around for 50 hours isn't really a meaningful part of the plot being told. And the few times that gameplay might be relevant, could easily be shown as part of the story.
The second is the awful version. It's a story about somebody being damned from their birth by people manipulating the scenes, who tortured everybody around him for hundreds of years and just seeks to antagonize somebody in the hopes that they'll get pissed off enough to frick the ones on top. This isn't something you could turn into a Saturday morning cartoon, and trying would just neuter half the point of the story.
The much larger problem is that part of the original VA cast has died in the years since the games came out. Tony Jay, the elder god in the series, died over seven years ago. And a large part of the grandiose of Legacy of Kain came from its casting; you can't just slap some random new VA in and expect the same experience.
>there's a difference between "wanting a larger audience to experience it", and "wanting it to appeal to a larger audience."
Actually, there isn't. One is predicated on the other. If it does not appeal to a large audience and large audience will not experience it. Indeed, even the desire for more people to experience(like) it implies you want it to appeal to them either by them 'coming to like it' or more realistically by it being altered, in this case into an animated series, in order to catch their attention.
>muh cast
As if the delivery of the narrative means nothing but the VA means everything. Lets be charitable. You love the VAs, and that's understandable, they are very good. That's largely because they came from more traditional backgrounds. Traditions like stage productions. What you are saying to me right now is that no one would ever wish to see Hamlet because the actors ol' Shakey used to first perform the play are dead and the material has no value beyond that first, extremely intentional and authorially regulated casting. Actors come and go. They are talking props. Will some be better than others? Absolutely. Do they comprise the essence of the media? Not in the slightest. They are non-essential.
You seem to imply that "liking" and "experiencing" are the same thing. They are not. There are simply people who won't be able (or willing) to experience it due to the medium, and putting it in another medium would be able to change that.
I find it amusing how you claim that the voice actors are "talking props" and "non-essential" and that the original VA are ultimately inconsequential... but you imply that Raziel hopping around on a blocky 3D pipe organ and dragging blocks around is somehow such an absolutely critical component that the whole experience will be ruined if it gets even slightly altered. What point does the sliding block puzzle in the organ room in the second game provide to the narrative? What point does ANY sliding block puzzle in ANY game of the series provide to the narrative?
I'll give that some game aspects have some relevance to the narrative - the wandering about of ruins upon leaving the pool in the 2nd game, the reactions of humans in most of the series - but I'd challenge that those could be presented without needing to stick a controller in somebody's hands in order to deliver the same experience. And at that point, how is the gameplay any less "non-essential" or any less of a "prop" than the VAs who you quickly dismiss as transitory? If all you have left are cutscenes and the few bits which could be replaced by appropriate cutscenes, why is the idea of interpreting this as an animated (media of appropriate length) considered to be such a disastrous idea?
You cannot put "it" in another medium. Changing mediums is inherently transformative. The story was written for games. The lines were written for cut-scenes. You can write an animated series adapting LoK but it's not LoK. Ignoring those who refuse to play with blocks for hours, as you put it, those who can't even look up a longplay or story edit of the series do not deserve to experience it and frankly never will, even if it's adapted. Your entire position is based around the idea that gameplay restricts people from entry and yet you've already got a non-interactive equivalent - one more inherently faithful than an adaption.
>ultimately inconsequential
That's your own poor reading comprehension. I should not be responsible for your idiocy. That you would equate value with essence speaks volumes. I will baby you:
An engine is essential to a automobile. If it does not have an engine it is not an automobile.
A specific engine is not essential to an automobile. So long as the engine can produce locomotion it is an automobile. The characteristics of an engine greatly reflect the value of an automobile despite this.
VAs are less important than engines. Non-voiced games have and will continue to be compelling narrative experiences however, the presence of a good VA is very impactful on the game's overall quality. Implying a single cast is the essence of a piece and without them it cannot or should not exist is moronic and greatly over estimates the value of talking props.
Alright, let's cover a few things.
First, anything outside playing a direct port in inherently transformative. Arguably anything but playing the original game on the original hardware, although for LoK I don't really see much different from the original game and current generation versions.
How relevant gameplay is in delivering a narrative depends on a lot of factors, specifically how much the gameplay supports or frames the narrative. I'd argue that just watching a series of cutscenes in succession with LoK is a lot more transformative (it loses a lot more) because there is a lot of context that gets lost when doing so. Much of LoK involves wandering around the ruins of the world, sometimes with VA remarks on the state of the world and with how other characters react to you. Blood Omen 2 may be narratively light for the series, but how much the guards are spaced out and how they react to you showing up has a relevance in the story and the atmosphere that you lose by just watching a youtube edit of all the scenes strung together.
Basically, there is a way to confer this information and give a similar experience that is MORE faithful by adapting it more. If the whole thing is animated, then you can use scenes which adequately convey these parts of the game to viewers. And this can end up as a more faithful adaption than just slapping cutscenes together.
You're also overvaluing the original game content, which is ironic given how much you undervalue the components of that content. You're treating the voice cast as some mere engine parts but treating the in-game cutscenes or even the game system itself as some core critical aspect that cannot be swapped out in the same manner... rather than just being more parts to the same engine. Heck, you stated that just removing the gameplay component entirely would be a more faithful adaption than swapping it with something similar which can convey the same thing.
Being a videogame is the scaffolding of the entire fricking story. There are narrative choices that literally would not have been made if the series were not a game. If the series were not a game it would have had every one of the other clan leaders dead by Raziel's hand in the SR, among many many many more changes. Hell, if someone were to write this as a novel like as not there wouldn't not be "roam location then kill your brother to get a powerup" boss fights. The story is itself inherently "gamey". There are good things that have come from this - specifically turning plot holes and missing content that resulted from poor development into wrinkles and call backs in future installments. That's not something a traditional author has to deal with. Their intent is law and their outline is solid. There is no moment where their editor will approach them and explain that they do not have the ink to write another fratricide so the writer needs to move things along to Kane.
>watching cliff notes is also transformative
To an extent, granted. However changing the medium and adding content which did not exist or altering existing content (including visuals) is significantly transformative.
You are kidding yourself if you think that traditional authors do not need to deal with plot holes or contradictory writing, especially with long running franchises, and that they never need to pull content out of their ass in order to explain problems away.
One look at the Harry Potter franchise shows off a lot of a lot of inconsistencies and nonsense explanations, although most of the explaining happens outside the books.
Also, I'm not sure it's relevant what Legacy of Kain would've been like "if the series were not a game". We're talking about the series as it is now, and the possibility of making that story. It's not some alternate reality where somebody wrote a book of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and developed the whole thing as a book series. You might as well ask what would've happened if nobody wanted to attach a PS1 Zelda-knockoff onto the franchise after the first failed game, or what would've happened if Blood Omen was actually good. It might make for some fun thought experiments, but it's ultimately irrelevant to the point of if an animated LoK series would be good or fit the narrative well with the existing game series.
>changing the medium and adding content which did not exist or altering existing content (including visuals) is significantly transformative.
I don't think that trying to scale "how transformative" one thing will be compared to another is going to be very productive. Outside exceptionally broad strokes, it's probably not going to be reasonable to talk about how transformative one revision is to another, unless one of them has OBVIOUSLY made much larger changes than another.
You're kidding yourself if you equate shoddy world building to the central narrative. Especially when you start with Harry Potter which introduces Sirius in the first chapter only for him to become relevant 3-4 books in with no mention in between. The narrative itself is solid if poorly executed. If you want to complain about world building then sure you can make those criticism of any franchise, even the hyper autistic ones that do it well.
>we're talking about the series as it is now
We're talking about altering the series 'as it is now' into something else. Connective tissue supporting content ect. None of it will have the same methods or constraints. All of it will be foreign and therefore significantly transformative.
>I don't think discussion anything that lacks arbitrary cut offs is productive
Then there's no point discussing anything subjectively, especially artistic media - without some authoritative arbiter you respect. I feel I explained why the difference is more significant quite well. You can disagree but to pretend that discussion is moot until we can tell when an edge becomes a blade or stack becomes a pile is reductive. I don't feel either of us are so pedantic as to need a concrete indicator between to readily apparent states of being.
To offer a final word on what appears to be a dead end with you - the animated series would change the visuals, the sound, likely the music, the pacing (yes gameplay counts) and so on. Supposing hte VAs were alive that and the basic plot points and cutscene dialogue would be all that remained of the original experience.
I'm not even in opposition to an animated series, I'm just saying it wouldn't be the original LoK and you shouldn't seek attention from people who aren't interested in LoK. Wanting an animated series for its own merits is far better than wanting it as a vector to reach new demographics.
Nobody is seeking attention from anybody. That's the point. The discussion was to make an animated series, not to change everything about it to pander to a specific crowd. The crazy point is that you can see yourself the distinction there
>Wanting an animated series for its own merits is far better than wanting it as a vector to reach new demographics.
Which was the whole point, until you started bringing up appeal to a larger audience.
Also, you're kidding yourself if you think everything that becomes relevant in later Harry Potter books was an intentional subtle plot hook placed there by the author. I'm certain that Sirius was intentional from the start, but it is highly unlikely that even such a big plot element as the Invisibility Cloak being one of the Deathly Hollows was intended from book 1. When they need to go on a huge rant in one of the last books describing how invisibility cloaks normally work and how Harry's cloak prevents all these detection spells we've never seen used and how all these other cloaks we've also never seen are just temporary, it's pretty clear that nobody was intending to hint that the cloak was special from the start.
Rather, it looks like somebody wanted some plot significance to Harry's cloak (and now wand) and so contrived the Deathly Hollows as these mythical artifacts which Harry just conveniently has two of them right now.
Rowling is a hack but that is not because of editorial mandate or anything outside her own incompetence. It is still a fundamentally different challenge to writing around a game which has harder deadlines, more overhead and an entire team upon which your story is reliant - and in many cases destroyed. The changes in SR1 and subsequent plot points in following games are evidence of that. LoK actually had good writers so it was used to their advantage to make a more organic less structured and considered story. Restriction always encourages artistic talent, in my opinion.
There's an image with an excerpt from an interview on how art is the pursuit of realism but dies the moment it actually gets there (cinema) that sums my position on it nicely but I can't find it.
>tfw Kain was transported from Nosgoth to Marvel and started LARPing as Dracula
>But I'm a close second
reminder that kain honestly did very little wrong, he was a massive dick but his actions were mostly alright
>THIS GENOCIDE IS UNCONSCIONABLE
Loved the vocabulary.
>Brethren
>Fratricide
>Transgression
>Kin
So is he b***h or is he God?
Fricker you beat me to it.
Okay so Caine must be God then, since that makes you my b***h
I love how you can take any cutscene audio and have it ready-made for an animatic.