Credits rolled on Soul Reaver 2. The twists in the last quarter were pretty entertaining. Lots of fun temporal loop stuff I genuinely wasn't expecting. Raziel and Kain are really compelling characters for when they were created, and honestly, even now I can't think of many video game characters as layered as them who have been created recently.
Soul Reaver 2 ends on a cliffhanger as abrupt as the first game's, but with a more natural build up, at least. I'm not sure if I want to play Blood Omen 2, knowing it just bridges the gap between Blood Omen and Soul Reaver and doesn't move the plot forward, or if I want to jump right to the final game, Defiance.
As far as the actual game goes, I was a bit surprised that Soul Reaver 2 abandoned the Metroid-like structure of the first game, but at the same time that structure was more of a suggestion than a hard framework to begin with. All you really got out of exploring for secrets in the first game were some health upgrades and magic powers that, honestly, barely mattered. The magic powers were just different flavors of screen-clearing bombs, two of which--the fire and sunlight spells--totally redundant, except the latter costed more resources to cast. There was also the fire forge, which didn't really do anything game changing either. These were especially damning when you consider that combat was basically optional except for the boss fights, which all relied on a central gimmick to win and didnt require you to have any of the optional magic spells anyway, nor did having them make the fights any different, as the bosses were all immune to them.
Interviews with the developers mention that the Soul Reaver games met sales expectations, but the games themselves didn't meet their creative ambitions as far as game mechanics were concerned, and you can kind of feel it. Considering how good the games are despite that, I'm really interested to see what the games could've ended up like in an infinite-time-ininfite-money scenario, but it looked like Eidos was dead set on having the games release annually after Soul Reaver 1's success.
Also, all of the DVD-like bonus features on the PS2 version of Soul Reaver were really good. I loved seeing the footage of the voice recording sessions and seeing the actors all really get into their roles. They seemed like they were having a great time, especially the voice actor who played Moebius, Richard Doyle.