The Legacy of Kain: Defiance remaster does the best thing possible—it gets out of the way

By inexplicable coincidence, the best videogames ever all seemed to come out when I was between the ages of 10 and 13. KOTOR, Oblivion—the list goes on. Scientists are presumably trying to figure out just what was in the water during that period, leading as it did to, objectively, the bestest and most important games ever made.

Somewhere near that list? 2003's Legacy of Kain: Defiance, which a young Josh (that's me) had on his original Xbox and very much enjoyed. Gothic, befuddling and weird, I played the heck out of Defiance back in the day, and I'm rather pleased and, I admit, a little surprised to say its recent remaster seems to have recaptured the magic wonderfully.

That's not to say I had any doubts about Crystal Dynamics' ability to handle the job, just that the Kain games feel sufficiently lost in the mists of time that I wouldn't think anyone would give a team the resources to handle the job right. Well, more fool me. Legacy of Kain: Defiance Remastered does deft work, polishing up the original game to produce something that really does feel definitive.

Nosgoth phase

If you've never touched this series, the broad strokes are: Kain (Blood Omen protagonist, and co-protagonist of Defiance) is an amoral and haughty vampire lord who pretty much doomed the world when he elected not to make a heroic sacrifice at the end of the first game in the series.

Raziel (Soul Reaver protagonist and Defiance's other protagonist) is his ex-lieutenant whom Kain executed (or tried to) for growing wings and thus surpassing Kain in power/majesty. Also, there's aliens and time travel and Lovecraftian elder gods in there. It's a whole thing.

All of which remains unchanged, of course. Also unchanged: the oozing, sonorous voices of Simon Templeman, Michael Bell, and Tony Jay, who serve as the game's main voice actors and who are constantly attempting to one-up each other in a swagger-off, lending even the game's most baffling and esoteric monologues a kind of profound, faux-Shakespearean weight.

So what has changed? Well, the textures, of course. Every polygon of detail has been fed into an upscaler, lending Kain, Raziel, and everything else new bumps and cuts and details. I'm iffy on this. There are times when the game makes the mistake of remasters of yore: cramming so much extraneous detail in that the textures begin to look odd and misplaced amid the old, 2003-era geometry and animations.

Likewise, new lighting tech sometimes runs away with itself—you'll encounter scenes where it looks like your avatar has been illuminated by a torch held by someone off-screen, or where areas that were solemn and moody in the original are just a touch too bright.

But it's never that egregious, and the very good news is that this is one of those re-dos that lets you flick back to the original graphics at the click of a stick, and the original game's aesthetic still holds up quite nicely, all strange and moody and bathed in spectral glows.

The remaster's most successful addition is a new, third-person camera. Follow your playable character around! Rotate the camera at will! With the technology of 2026, all this and more is possible, if for some reason the old-school fixed-camera angles aren't your cup of tea. It works very well, and doesn't even intrude on the platforming sections (in 2003, international law stipulated that all videogames have platforming sections). And if you do miss the old camera, you can pop back to it by tapping a button.

If all this doesn't sound like much has changed from the OG Defiance: you are correct. But that's not to the game's disservice. You ask me, the best thing a remaster can do is get out of the way. Just polish up the graphics for modern screens, sand down the more buckwild aspects of yesteryear's control schemes, and fix lingering bugs. Aside from that? Let the original game speak for itself.

That's exactly what Crystal Dynamics has done here. There's a reason I started this piece by chatting about the things in this game that

changed. That's not to say the studio's not done much, but that the work it has done is—for the most part—tasteful and measured and conservative, aimed at letting you enjoy what was good about Defiance (and lament what maybe was not) in a modern context. It succeeded. My thanks, and congratulations, to it for that.