Talk:Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver/GA1

GA Review

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General

• Stability is not an issue.
• Images are fine except that some of the fair use templates are not fully completed (IE portion used and replaceable), the images are not replaceable so I'd just label them as such.

Lead

• There's no mention of the dreamcast port/release in the first paragraph.
• "It is the second game in the Legacy of Kain series and the first game in the series not developed by Silicon Knights." According to the other game articles Crystal Dynamics have created all of them with the exception of the original, this statement makes it sound as though Silicon Knights has an ongoing stake in the series when in fact it's responsible for Blood Omen only.

• Altered but not fixed, something more along the lines of Silicon Knights creating the original game is needed. Using 'first game' at all points to there being some further relationship when there isn't one.

• Could you add a little more detail to the reception aspect of the lead? I know it needs to take a distal view but a single sentence is a little on the short side.

Gameplay

• Left-aligned images shouldn't be directly underneath level-2 headers, can you move it a little further down please.
• "Gameplay in Soul Reaver relies largely on shifting between the physical material realm and the ghostly spectral realm." Hang on, this is the very first sentence of gameplay but instead of giving readers a broad overview of what takes place they're instead lead into a single aspect of play without any context. Could you rectify this please?
• The use of sunlight etc. in destroying enemies is used twice, reword to remove redundancy please.
• Abilities sub-heading - necessary? If some redundancy was removed these two paragraphs could be merged together.
• "As players progress through the game, they acquire numerous other abilities. Players can acquire the ability" The word ability is used twice in quick succession.
• The ability section has several uses of the word 'acquire' or variances of it, could you reword it slightly to remove a few?

Plot

• Nosgoth is now a redirect to the series article, could you fix the 'Main article' link to point at the overview section of that article?
• "Soul Reaver takes place within the fictional world of Nosgoth. In Nosgoth, T>the health of the land is tied to the nine Pillars of Nosgoth, and each pillar in turn is represented by a guardian." Nosgoth is wikilinked here again which is redundant. The reader already knows that Nosgoth is being discussed so the repetition isn't necessary.
• When discussing the characters there doesn't seem to be a link to Boss (video games), which is a pretty important one for non-gamers.
• "he finds Zephon is now a large arachnid, and the cathedral spire he dwells in a part of his body.[12]" The spire has been absorbed into Zephon's body? Could you explain this please?
• Sarafan is redirected to the series article, please remove the link.

Reception

• Media Assault doesn't strike me as being a very desirable source at all. There's a huge review on Allgame here, please replace it with that and cite accordingly (though one of the uses of Media Assault was to act as the fourth cite for one sentence, three or two is enough anyway).
• What makes Totalvideogames and Planet Dreamcast reliable?
• Ref #28 is a press release, please cite it as one.
• Ref #29 is missing the publisher.

That's all for now, I'll go through the internal and external links when I get a minute. Someoneanother 01:33, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

I've updated the fair use rationales basically it's saying what exactly is being presented, along with an assertion that no free alternative exists, in the case of screenshots no alternative does exist because they're copyrighted. I'll look into the other issues. Someoneanother 03:25, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

If you look down the list at WP:CITET you'll see there's a citation template for press releases, doing so highlights to readers that it's a press release rather than a neutral source. Someoneanother 03:27, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that, I'll change the citation accordingly. The Clawed One (talk)

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that TotalVideoGames, having been around for 10 years (confirmed by Alexa) is OK, though I can find no editorial details. Planet Dreamcast on the other hand is very amatuerish, their staff page lists three guys and doesn't go into any detail about their experience as journos, and the piece itself isn't written by any of them. 'Subskin' could be anybody and there's no sign that any editorial control has been brought to bear over submitted reviews. Could you remove Planet Dreamcast altogether and use Allgame's critique instead? It's a massive review so there should be plenty of material to use. I'm aware that citing PS1 era games is difficult because the web hadn't been fully taken up at the time yet there's no databases of PS1 reviews, but in order to take the article beyond GA class those original sources are going to be needed. These will do in the meantime, but leaving such a questionable source in when a good and thorough alternative exists isn't worth it.

A few other little issues:

• Allgame needs wikilinking in the review box (there is an article for it), the citation needs author and publisher details like the other cites.
• Ref #31 refers to 'metacritic reviewers (unknown)', metacritic isn't reviewing the game, they just publish excerpts from other peoples' reviews.

Haven't checked the alterations or the links yet. Someoneanother 03:45, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

OK, fixed the Allgame thing mentioned above, but some more things are popping up:

• The block-pushing image caption still mentions Planet Dreamcast, do no other reviewers which are still used say the same thing? (Needs changing one way or the other)
• Ref #17 = dead.
• Please double-check the text used in citations for things like consistency, for instance Gamespot is also labeled Gamespot.com at least once. Only a couple of the publishers are wikilinked.
• Ref #24 is missing the publisher.
• Why is ref #4's author listed as Lohr, Brad (Unknown)?
• The voice actor information is unsourced, but it's all here on Allgame, please cite it.
• All of the initial points are dealt with bar one, please see above where I've left an additional comment.

I'd like to continue reading through and make some tweaks, getting there now though. Someoneanother 09:30, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

All fixed. For Ref #4, the unknown field was the publish date. The Clawed One (talk)

Smashing, had another quick look and removed a few internal links (be wary of over-linking to mundane things like swimming, which nobody should need an explanation of). Consider everything above resolved. The only thing which I've just picked up after reading through again is that the end of paragraph 2 of gameplay is unsourced and the three last sentences of paragraph 3 are unsourced - I'd expect one of the larger reviews should cover the material so if you could just drop a few cross-references in we can call this done. Thanks for what you've done. Someoneanother 01:41, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Done, the only large thing that remains unsourced is the Fire Reaver upgrade, which was a fairly unimportant upgrade and that bit could be removed easily. And thanks for your help too, I've worked hard on this article the last several months and a GA would be awesome. The Clawed One (talk)

A single non-contentious sentence isn't an issue, but it's best to shore-up as many sentences as possible. Congratulations, Soul Reaver is now a Good Article. Someoneanother 02:22, 30 October 2008 (UTC)