Soul Reaver: The Dead Shall Rise is a very expensive Mary Sue fanfic

All images taken from The Dead Shall Rise are credited to BitBot and covered by fair use.

MAJOR SPOILERS below (duh).

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“Hey, remember Raziel’s sister?”

“Who?”

“You know, his sister! Lady Elaleth! The one who’s got Ancient wings and a Hylden crown! Oh, and she’s got this magical raven amulet that gives Raziel his human memories back!”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Oh yeah, and the amulet is also the reason he evolves wings in the first place, like, he just cocoons up and then the wings pop out!”

“…”

“And don’t forget she can time-stream because Moebius cursed her, and she’s the one who actually convinces Kain to raise the Sarafan lieutenants in the first place. And then she gets stabbed in the head with the Soul Reaver, but she just comes back to life even stronger and goes on an adventure in the Hylden dimension.”

If you rolled your eyes, rest assured that The Dead Shall Rise, the long-awaited Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver graphic novel from BitBot Media, is far worse than that.

After a $1.5 million Kickstarter campaign and multiple reassurances that the novel will respect canon and source material rather than take a giant 💩 on it, what we ended up getting was a self-insert Sue fanfic trying its damnedest to make us care about a character who’s poorly drawn, poorly executed, and woefully underwhelming.

But far be it from me to bash this book just because the one and only female character BitBot decided to shoehorn into the canon is a unidimensional, unsympathetic Sue whose entire motivation revolves around the men in her unlife. Elaleth’s brother Raziel kills her lover Matthias before he can turn into a vampire. Unbeknownst to Raziel, who believes he killed her as well, Elaleth herself gets turned and immediately vows revenge. Shenanigans of the time-travel and Hylden magic variety ensue.

Out of over twenty years of canon and lore, including Amy Hennig’s series bible (allegedly), is “woman mad because brother kills boyfriend, wants revenge” really the best the writers could come up with? This is 2025, not 1985, Jesus Christ.

Joshua Viola and Angie Hodapp aren’t the first nor the only ones to to do this, of course. StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm decided to utterly annihilate Sarah Kerrigan’s character development in Wings of Liberty because I doubt Chris Metzen had any desire to explore her character beyond her role as Jim Raynor’s plot device. I do wonder how much overall input Angie Hodapp had. Everything about her work seems to indicate she can and does write compelling female characters that don’t rely on tired tropes and stereotypes.

BitBot’s marketing was, basically, bullshit

The Dead Shall Rise was heavily marketed as Raziel’s story, which is what convinced many long-time fans to open their wallets despite some healthy skepticism around the community.

The Kickstarter campaign opens up with:

Delve into untold chapters of Raziel’s life and undeath in The Dead Shall Rise, bridging the gaps between the Blood Omen and Soul Reaver games. Readers will discover Raziel’s origins as a human child, the events that led him to join the Sarafan, and the mysterious emergence of his wings.

Elaleth does come up in the same paragraph, but just as a by-the-way:

The graphic novel offers fresh insights into the lore, revisiting iconic moments and characters like Kain, Moebius, and Raziel’s brothers, while introducing new faces such as Elaleth, whose connections to Raziel, Kain, and the Hylden bring unexpected twists to the tale.

This is the one and only time Elaleth’s name comes up on the Kickstarter page. In comparison, Raziel’s name shows up 27 times. Kain is also mentioned 26 times.

The Dead Shall Rise, however, is Elaleth’s story:

• We do get to see Raziel as a child… so we can meet human Elaleth, too.
• Raziel joins the Sarafan after vampires led by Kain raze his village… because Elaleth messes with the timeline, which results in present-day Kain deciding to travel back to the past and raze said village.
• Sarafan Raziel decides to hunt and kill Janos Audron… because Elaleth mentions him.
• Raziel and his brothers are raised as vampires… because Elaleth tells Kain where to find the Tomb of the Sarafan.
• Raziel’s wings “mysteriously” emerge… because of the enchanted amulet Elaleth gives him.

We paid for a story about Raziel, and we got bamboozled.

Every major lore beat is tied back to Elaleth, a character who’s so ridiculous that 2000s fanfiction.net called saying it wants her back.

“Everything I am or was… brother, sarafan, vampire… derives form you.”
–Raziel to Elaleth in The Dead Shall Rise

This isn’t how you introduce a new presence to a franchise whose narrative is so layered and complex that fans are still talking about it twenty years after the last game came out. It’s like taking a sledgehammer to David’s Michelangelo to reshape it in your vision, then wondering why people got mad.

For a more in-depth analysis of BitBot’s deceptive marketing for The Dead Shall Rise, Reddit user KohShiki has a good write-up here.

BitBot doubled down, too

BitBot’s response to criticism so far has been, essentially, “deal with it”. In a Kickstarter update, BitBot said:

We stand firmly behind our work and couldn’t be prouder of what this talented, hardworking team has created. While we understand that we can’t please everyone, that’s simply the nature of creative storytelling. Crystal Dynamics collaborated with us at every stage of development. Not a single word or panel was finalized without their approval and guidance from the franchise’s canon masters.

While they’re not wrong and creative works will rarely please everyone (see: any 10/10 Game of the Year game ever), long-standing fans have plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike The Dead Shall Rise. It’s probably too much to expect an apology at this point, but hiding behind some “canon masters” who can’t possibly have any long-standing connection to the franchise, while also dumping on the fan base (see below), is just arguing in bad faith.

This update is doubling down from a previous comment which, in response to legitimate criticism, said:

The fandom has long read between the lines. The answers lie before you—subtle, but deliberate, just as in the original games. Our advice: study those scenes more carefully. (source)

Which reads like a condensed version of that infamous Rick and Morty copypasta that was making the rounds a few years back.

The Dead Shall Rise has no respect for Soul Reaver or Legacy of Kain lore…

…to the point where there are several threads discussing it, including things that no self-proclaimed “fan” of the series could ever get wrong (especially someone with a Raziel tattoo). There’s always the chance that there was some executive meddling at play, which means everybody involved got NDA-ed to fuck, but some of these truly have no excuse.

Let’s see here…

Elaleth wants to procure the Heart of Darkness, which, through some convoluted story bullshit, is supposed to grant her her happily-ever-after (living with her man in a time paradox). The Dead Shall Rise shows Janos Audron’s death and even includes the infamous line — “Look at his black heart, how it still beats!”

In Legacy of Kain: Defiance, Vorador implies that, as long as the Heart of Darkness still beats, Janos Audron’s body will be preserved. Later, when Raziel uses the Heart to resurrect Janos, his body looks remarkably well-preserved, which is likely because the Heart has never stopped beating, seeing as it was inside Kain’s chest all along.

All of that is a pretty big deal, yet The Dead Shall Rise treats us to this panel:

I wonder if the canon masters were out for a snack for that one.

Kain and Raziel’s characters are changed to the point of being unrecognizable. While the series shows Kain as cold, collected and ruthless, The Dead Shall Rise turns him into someone who, rather than smite Elaleth with his bare claws when the Reaver refuses to hurt her (for reasons unfathomable to us common fandom rabble that probably amount to “because plot”), not only indulges her but actively lets himself be manipulated by her — not once, but twice.

Human Raziel might as well be a brand new character with the same name and whose eyes shit from blue to brown to black over the course of multiple pages (and sometimes on the same page). Gone is the smarmy, self-righteous bastard Wraith Raziel renounces at the end of Soul Reaver 2. Instead, we’re treated to a generic “good soldier forced to do bad deeds” side plot with no actual payoff, since Human Raziel’s death is a play-by-play repeat of what happens in the game, dialogue and all.

As for Vampire Raziel, he exists only as Elaleth’s foil and doesn’t do much otherwise. When Elaleth’s enchanted amulet returns his human memories, he barely reacts to it. Anyone who witnessed Wraith Raziel’s discovery of the Tomb of the Sarafan knows this is one of the most poignant moments in the series, a discovery that brings Raziel’s hatred for his maker to new heights (until he learns of his past self’s true nature, anyway). The Dead Shall Rise uses that revelation solely to bridge the gap between Raziel’s childhood and his final days, which makes it fall completely flat.

Of course, seeing as Wraith Raziel has no memory of any of this for the majority of the Soul Reaver games, The Dead Shall Rise has a magical raven snatch Raziel’s enchanted amulet from around his neck as he gets cast into the Lake of the Dead. Peak writing, 10/10, would read again.

The first time Kain attempts to kill Elaleth with the Reaver, it “refuses”, although the physical Reaver has no will of its own and only shatters when it tries to destroy it/himself. The second time, Kain manages to overpower the Reaver’s “will” and stabs Elaleth through the head .Elaleth survives this, of course, and even comes back stronger (and with glowing eyes because why not).

I could go on, but I’d need about ten thousand more words and some scotch to see me through it.

The Dead Shall Rise looks a(r)trocious

I’m also an avid comic book reader, going all the way back to Rob Liefeld era of shitty art — which is to say, I know shitty art. Shitty art doesn’t bother me if the story is good. There’s plenty of works from that era I still remember fondly because the writers made me forget Cable has no feet and Deadpool’s suit grew six additional pouches one panel to the next.

While I wasn’t familiar with Juan Samu’s work before The Dead Shall Rise, his art style fits Legacy of Kain about as much as Blood Omen 2 fits into the Legacy of Kain continuity. I’m no artist, but even I know that when you draw a character, you should at least try to make sure they look somewhat consistent from panel to panel. Instead, some panels look like caricatures, others use realistic proportions, and yet others are… whatever the heck this is supposed to be:

Just look at what they did to Kain:

Even Turel never stood a chance:

And don’t get me started on the coloring, which makes Nosgoth look like Tumblr noses and the City of Townsville had a baby who then grew up and got addicted to TikTok brainrot. Also, why did the colorist get Raziel’s eye color right in some panels, but not others? And what’s with pink shading everywhere? Where was the art director in all this?

If this is truly the level of quality $1.5 million can buy, I want my money back.

And then, there’s the writing

With two established writers and a narrative director involved, I would have expected the writing to be, y’know, at least kind of OK. Plot aside, there’s typos (millennium is singular, millennia means more than one), wonky grammar (who instead of whom), and a plethora of lines that don’t sound anything like people talk, Shakespearean dialogue or not. The difference is that much more jarring when new lines are interspersed with existing ones.

Panel layouts don’t help, either. I struggled to get through massive walls of text more than once. The letterers did a great job, in fairness, but when the material asks you to do something like this…

…there’s only so much you can do.

Or maybe it’s just my ADHD.

I still believe in Legacy of Kain

Legacy of Kain isn’t dead yet, but I hope to every power that be that the next installment in the franchise is either a remaster (Defiance desperately needs one) or anything other than whatever they teased at the end of The Dead Shall Rise.

Legacy of Kain doesn’t need a Mary Sue girlboss to make it appeal to whatever on-paper audience some clueless executive paid an agency six figures to dig up (a.k.a. “market studies” that have fuck-all to do with what fans actually want). What we need is closure. And Amy Hennig back, but she’s leading New Media at Skydance so it’s a bit selfish to ask her to step back into this franchise.

*sigh*

A girl can dream.