Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (PlayStation)

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver is the second game in the Legacy of Kain series. Featuring a seamless open world and a morbid post-apocalyptic story, it helped innovate many conventions that are commonplace in action-adventure games today. Unfortunately, due to time constraints and over-ambition, the game had to be severely stripped down to meet its deadline, resulting in the entire last third being cut and an infamously abrupt ending. So it unfolds...

Prototype Info Prerelease Info Notes Unused AudioWords unspoken. Many.

Unused Maps#

City 10 and City 11 are two passageways that would have connected to the Undercity, a large area cut from the final release due to programming issues, via the Human Citadel. While these can be loaded in-game with hacking, they are not programmed to connect to City 9 or with each other.

City 10	City 11

Oddities#

• The Underworld is normally inaccessible in Material Realm due to it being closed off, and even using Shift-At-Will, which allows Raziel to shift without a portal, the game will still disable shifting when Raziel gets near. Despite this, if the game is hacked so Raziel can shift anyway the Underworld can be accessed in Material. The geometry is slightly different, but most notably the entrance tunnel is underwater, indicating that the entirety of the Underworld is intended to be underwater like later games.
• Under very rare circumstances, such as moving so fast via glitches the game can't keep up, a 'Streaming' message will display on-screen, indicating the game needs time to stream from the disc before continuing.

Debug Menu Remnants#

Despite the debug menu itself being removed from the final game, there's remnants of debug functionality still lurking in the final game.

Camera Unit Info#

Display this with the following code and press L1 + L2/R1 + R2:

D00CE5E4 FAFF
8002F554 0000
D00CE5E4 F9FF
8002F554 0006

This seems to display what the latest area the camera needs to be rendering is, using the internal file names for locations.

Along with this, several pieces of dialog still remain in SLUS_007.08 at the following hex offsets.

0xBE740:

-abs 
-rel
-center
unknown format control: %s
YES
NO
%d
FRTE %d 
INS  %d
/%d
FRTE %d
Focus XYZ(%d,%d,%d)
IDLE %d PCT
IDLE ZERO
DRAW %d
Far Plane =%d
Fog Near = %d Fog Far = %d
Military Time %04d
FMEM %d  FreeSaveMem %d
AREA DRM = %s
CAM TILT %d DIST %d
Loading From CD: In Queue(%d)
hub
Sound RAM usage...

Sfx ID %3d loaded  Ref count=%d  Using wave ID %3d  
Sfx ID %3d **LOAD ERROR**

%ld sfx loaded (%ld waves) using %ld bytes SRAM
Free Sram:%ld  Largest Free Sram Block:%ld

0xBED04:

eaggots
eaggot
healths
particle
force
soul
sreavr
glphicon
paths
raziel
Cameraunit: %s
Processing unit %s
Military Time %04d
%s%d

0xBEDF0:

raziel__
Spline %s%ld playto %d preveFram=%ld frame=%ld endOfSpline=%ld, maxFrames=%ld
Spline %s%d : clip(%d,%d) prevFrame=%d, frame=%d
Spline %s%d prevFrame=%d, frame=%d

Anti-Piracy#

The European version of the game is LibCrypt protected. If the protection is tripped, the game freezes upon encountering the very first enemy in the tutorial section. However, this does not occur if played on a PAL-region PlayStation 3 as the software emulation config stores an entry for the game.

References#