The Elemental Reavers - Soul Reaver - Legacy of Kain: The Lost Worlds

The Elemental Reavers

Soul Reaver's original design included an Elemental Reaver upgrade corresponding to each of the Glyphs - with the exception of the Force Glyph - including the deleted The Spirit Glyph. These enhancements would have been obtained in The Elemental Reaver Forges, which were also removed from the game before release, with the exception of the Fire Forge and the Fire Reaver.

These upgrades would have been based on the elements which are lethal to vampires in the world of Nosgoth. They were intended to function similarly to the Fire Reaver; for example, Raziel would have been able to imbue the Reaver from any of the shafts of sunlight or any of the sources of water that appear in the game.

Issue 19 of PSM (March 1999) featured a list of all of the Reavers planned for inclusion in the game:

Reaver	Effect
Sunlight	The first blow stuns, the second kills in a flash that blinds/stuns nearby enemies.
Water	The first blow stuns, the second kills through burning with water. The projectile burns enemies with water.
Stone	The first blow stuns/temporarily petrifies, the second shatters the enemy and has area-effect damage.
Fire	One blow burns the enemy to death, as does the projectile.
Sound	One blow shatters the enemy, as does the projectile.
Spirit	One blow destroys the enemy, as does the projectile.
Amplified	Encompasses the abilities of all other Reavers.

The Fire Reaver is of course the only enhancement which can be earned in the final version of the game. However, partially-completed versions of most of the others can be enabled either through hacking (see Hack Soul Reaver for the PC) or The Debug Menu. Imagery of unfinished versions of the other Reavers was obtained from pre-release versions of Soul Reaver.

The brilliant green Reaver is the Spirit Reaver, which matches the description PSM's guide indicating it would have been imbued directly from enemies' souls - they use the same colour scheme.

The yellow Reaver is suspected of being the Stone Reaver, but may be an early version of The Ariel Reaver. It is also possible that it is technically both; there is no other Reaver with a stonelike colour scheme, but when it was deleted from the game it could have been decided to use it as a stand-in for the weapon Raziel obtains in The Death of Ariel FMV.

Like The Ariel Reaver and The Amplified Reaver, the deleted Elemental Reavers have no special abilities when activated in the retail game. Most of them do not have functional projectile attacks, and they cannot be imbued from elemental sources.

The concept of elemental Reaver upgrades went on to be used in Soul Reaver 2 (which has its own set of Deleted Elemental Reavers) and Defiance, although the elements in those games are of a more traditional type. It should also be noted that Defiance's Spirit Reaver is more similar in concept to The Ariel Reaver than the Spirit Reaver deleted from this game.

The Deleted Forges, Reavers, and the Spirit Glyph video includes footage of the deleted Reavers.

An early version of the Fire Reaver

The final version of the Fire Reaver

The Sound Reaver

The Spectral Reaver, for comparison

The Spirit Reaver

The Stone Reaver, the Ariel Reaver, or both

The Sunlight Reaver

The Material Reaver, for comparison

The Water Reaver

Audio Reconstruction
File	Size	Author
The Elemental Reaver Forges	263 KiB	CD/TLW
Based on unused audio extracted from Soul Reaver and arranged by Ben Lincoln.

Video
File	Size	Author
Deleted Reavers	30 MiB	Ben Lincoln
Based on video footage captured from several hacked versions of Soul Reaver. Retained for historical reasons even though when I made this one years ago, I mistook the Sunlight Reaver for the Stone Reaver, and vice-versa.