The Amplified Reaver - Soul Reaver - Legacy of Kain: The Lost Worlds

The Amplified Reaver

The Amplified Reaver was intended to be the ultimate weapon in the game. It would have been a permanent alteration to the Reaver.

There is some confusion as to whether "Amplified Reaver" refers to the version of the Reaver Raziel would have obtained by consuming Ariel's soul (see The Death of Ariel), or by striking down Kain (see The Final Battle with Kain).

In early prototypes of Soul Reaver, only the Amplified Reaver is listed in the debug menu.
In later versions of the game, there are separate Reaver definitions for The Ariel Reaver and the Amplified Reaver, bu there are not debug menu entries for either, so their official names are unknown.
The original ending of the game would have required that Raziel possess a powerful weapon to fight against the onslaught of vampires as he made his way to The Pinnacle of The Silenced Cathedral. However, member's of the game's staff have indicated that that portion of the game was planned as a cinematic, instead of a playable section.
The March 1999 issue of PSM, which was written based on a prototype version of Soul Reaver, describes the Amplified Reaver this way: "Near the very end of the game, the default Soul Reaver is permanently amplified. The Amplified Reaver is so powerful that it supercedes all other elemental Soul Reaver types - it encompasses all of their abilities. Raziel needs the Amplified Reaver to be able to set the final game events into motion, when he returns to the Silenced Cathedral. We won't tell you what's gonna happen at the Silent[sic] Cathedral yet, but you're gonna need to be seriously armed."
In some early versions of the Chronoplast cinematics, Raziel obtains the red and black Reaver by killing Ariel, although this is changed to a bright Reaver in the final version of the game.

A few possible explanations:

The original version of the story did not involve killing Ariel, and the Amplified Reaver is the one which Raziel obtained after defeating Kain.
Ariel was doomed in every version of the story, but the game code hadn't been updated to include one of the two Reavers in question.
The battle to reach the Cathedral's sounding pipes was never intended as a playable sequence, and the Amplified Reaver was the one that Raziel obtained by killing Ariel. However, this is difficult to reconcile with PSM's description.

One version of this weapon is depicted in the Chronoplast FMV of Raziel standing on a high balcony with the Soul Reaver transformed into an ominous-looking black spike enshrouded with red energy. It can also be activated in-game using cheat codes (see Codes (Multiplatform)) or The Debug Menu, although it is simply a prop made for the FMV and has no special powers.

It is believed by many fans that the cinematic of Raziel leaving Janos' Retreat in Soul Reaver 2 while wielding the Fire Reaver was intentionally designed to resemble the Chronoplast sequence, as a retroactive correction to the continuity of the story.

The Spirit Reaver which Raziel obtains and the Soul Reaver which Kain receives near the end of Defiance seem to be modified hybrids of the concepts for The Ariel Reaver and the Amplified Reaver. Defiance's Spirit Reaver should not be confused with the Spirit Reaver which was deleted from Soul Reaver (see The Elemental Reavers).

The Amplified Reaver

The Amplified Reaver in the PC version of the game

The balcony FMV from the Chronoplast

Andrew Fradley hacked the PC version to display this Reaver properly