Reception
Received positively by players and the gaming press, Raziel was praised by GameSpot's Greg Kasavin, who wrote in his review Defiance that "it's rare enough to find a truly memorable main character in a game, let alone two", and closed deeming the title "one of those rare games whose characters and story to some extent supersede the problems in the gameplay". Official UK PlayStation Magazine welcomed Raziel's debut in Soul Reaver, showcasing him on the cover of issue 43; his story and in-game appearance were endorsed, and in a comparison with Tomb Raider III, his free-flowing character animation was described as making "Lara look like a glove puppet". Reviewing the Dreamcast port of Soul Reaver, IGN's Jeremy Dunham described Raziel's narrative as one of the most convincing he had ever heard, echoed later in the site's review for Legacy of Kain: Defiance, which described the series' cast as "just damn good at talking like vampires, tortured souls and gods." GameSpot included Soul Reaver in a 1999 list of ten computer games with the best voice acting of all time, stating about Bell that "you'd never guess that the same person carried out all those voices", and of the cast "there's not one weak link in the bunch, and together they create one of the best examples of voice acting in a game for PC or consoles." In contrast, Douglass Perry of IGN felt Raziel's (and Kain's) dialogue in Soul Reaver 2 was overdone, stating that "overwritten text makes them sound like caffeine-imbued English students verbally jousting in their first semester in college," but liked the advancement and rebalancing of Raziel's personality and aggressiveness, and enjoyed his depiction, stating that he "looks magnificently decripid ."
Alongside Kain, Raziel was selected by IGN's readers as one of ten heroes most wanted to appear in the 2008 fighting game Soulcalibur IV, and was ranked ninth on Electronic Gaming Monthly's list of top ten badass undead that same year. In 2009, he was inducted into Diehard GameFAN's list of top ten video game vampires (dubbed as "Not A Vampire #2"), and was included as one of GameSpot's 64 All Time Greatest Game Heroes (where he, however, lost in the first round of user voting elimination to Donkey Kong), while Thunderbolt ranked him as ninth on their list of the top videogame antiheroes. In 2010, GamesRadar listed him as one of eight "videogame characters we'd go gay for." In 2012, Houston Press listed the character's demise in Legacy of Kain: Defiance among the top five most heartbreaking video game deaths, while IGN also listed Raziel and Kain among gaming's most notorious anti-heroes and "complex characters with a great backstory, and truly awesome anti-heroes, be they fighting against each other to enslave or save the world, or teaming up against greater threats." That same year, GamesRadar ranked him as the 56th "most memorable, influential, and badass" protagonist in games, adding that "as pissed-off vampire antiheroes go, few wear the title as proudly as Raziel." Darksiders' creative director Joe Madureira, former Capcom artist and game designer Akiman, and Clash of the Titans concept artist Tsvetomir Georgiev have also created fan art interpretations of the character.
Read more about this topic: Raziel (Legacy Of Kain)
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