I played this game when I was an elementary school kid at my friend's house. He had just gotten the Gamecube and I was super interested in what the console had to offer. Along with Lost Kingdom, he had Sunshine and Melee, but this was the game that surprised me the most. It was a strikingly exciting new form of gameplay I'd never seen before and because of that, I didn't really understand what was really going on. Years later and here we are.

Lost Kingdoms has its frustrations, but I do enjoy seeing From's old work. It's astounding how they've become one of the industry's leading developing companies despite the clear jank and lack of polish in their past titles. They've really cleaned up their act over the years.

We play as Princess Katia who's trying to save her kingdom and there's a fog that's covered the land. This is reminiscent of what we'd see in Boletaria in Demon's Souls. The story is told pretty up front, but it lacks that extra spicy of mystique that the Miyazaki games would provide in spades. However, we can case appreciate that the structure is there. It is a fairly bare bones story all things considered.

Mechanically, it's jankily implemented, but the idea of summoning creatures using cards is certainly a neat idea. I found that there was a lot to enjoy in terms of the sheer ideas, but actually playing it was much less enjoyable. I can see that the concepts in Lost Kingdom have a lot of potential, but in this game, it did get pretty frustrating. It's a very positioning focused game with a lack of mobility options. Also, a lot of the mechanics around the cards could've been explained a lot better. I played through the majority of the game not even fully understanding how to discard cards. I knew how to do it, but I thought that discarding them would take them out of the game for the rest of the level.

Finally, that final boss is quite a difficulty spike. I had to completely adjust my deck to take it down. Along with that, the road to reaching the final boss is very tedious. The boss right before the final boss was also one of the worst bosses because of how they summoned creatures with some of the slowest summoning animations. It was tedious as all hell.

All in all though, I admit that Lost Kingdoms is a neat game with great ideas. It only falters in the realm of implementation.

FromSoftware's Lost Kingdoms introduced a form of isometric, level-based action-RPG that preferred summoning over physical combat, utilizing cards to determine spells and abilities. A brief, simple albeit somewhat clunky work whose systems borrow and tweak quite a bit from the flexible options of Pokemon (monster capture, evolution, elemental fixation, etc.) to enhance their deckbuilding side. Their battles mark a strange turn of events for the genre, where players are free to run away and conserve resources while letting their minions do the dirty work. Even stranger is the cast of characters, although a select few make for some frustrating boss fights. Other equally weird decisions - namely blue fairies, finite decks and Mario 64-like camera controls, tend to interfere with the proceedings. Overall - this is definitely one imaginative trip, but with little in the way of enjoyment to make that trip worth it.

An interesting artifact, both of FromSoft and of card battlers. You could write a ton about how this relates to other FromSoft games; an eeriely similar if super simplified/kiddie version of The FromSoft Plot (a vague large darkness brings a depressive atmosphere to a fantasy world), the weird experimentation in gameplay of their earlier games, and translating their style to the family-friendly Gamecube. A lot about this game is interesting, but it doesn't totally come together.

You can't get into the story like other FromSoft games as it's a cliche skeleton here, so you gotta focus on gameplay. While there's a lot I like (which is why I'm going to try the sequel), things somehow feel both too simple and too complicated. While each system in the card combat is simple, there's like 6 or 7 systems to manage (attack types, card cost, elemental type, blah blah). Compared to it's closest equivalent Chain of Memories, that game was way more complicated in it's deck building but the way the combat flowed was more natural when you built a good deck. Here, it feels like I'm either running out of cards too fast, or just padding my deck with a few big ones and like a million sword attacks (minor issue, I wish the monsters made more of an impression). I do like that the aesthetic is FromSoft + YuGiOh and some of the Red Fairy scenarios are cute, but getting through this was alternately dull and annoying despite the good parts. Let's see if the sequel improves!

7 hours to beat.

I had to go back and see if the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia held up. This game has a nice sense of charm. Unfortunately it's clunky as hell. Nothing moves right or feels responsive. I really enjoyed levelling up and evolving the cards up couldn't help but feel it was missing a "last tier" of power. Just as my deck building skills were getting into the swing of things I was on the last level. The final boss wasn't great and I moved on before I could finish him.

There's no story here and very little apart exploration, it's purely a casing for a combat system based around cards.

A title with plenty of potential, let down by poor presentation and some broken mechanics.

Lost Kingdoms was the first RPG to grace the Gamecube. It's short, and is certainly lacking in the visual and sound department, yet introduces an interesting real time card battle monster summoning battle system which almost makes up for its other short comings.

The main protagonist in Lost Kingdoms is a young princess named Katia. When her kingdom is engulfed in a black fog casting evil wherever it appears, Katia is forced to take up her family's rune stone gaining the power of monster summoning to fight back against it. As the princess travels to find the other four rune stones to help her she will meet a few characters here and there, but there isn't really a lot of depth to them and the story seems to be just a loose framework to push Katia from dungeon to dungeon.

The game is essentially a 3rd person action RPG. When in a battle against monsters from the black fog, Katia can use special cards to defeat them from a ready made deck. This deck can be adjusted from the menu as Katia gains more and more cards from chests and enemies. There are 3 different types of cards she can use; the first is a card that allows Katia to attack with a variety of weapons; second type is a spell that can be used to heal or attack an enemy; the third allows Katia to summon a monster to aid her in battle.

Some of these cards can be used more then once, like the melee attack cards can often be used two – three times before they fade away. At the end of each battle your deck resets so that you never lose a card for good, however you can only have 30 in a deck, and if you use them all in one battle you are instantly screwed to death as you can't perform any actions. On certain bosses later in the game this gets frustrating; recycling your deck would have been a better option.

Each battle is fought in a limited space, even more limited as some enemies are large, and your summons aren't always small either. So a lot of time in battle is spent running around avoiding being hit while trying to get enough magic stone power to cast your cards. These stones are dropped whenever an enemy dies and can be substituted with Katia's hp if there are no stones around, this seemed like a bit of a needless edition to me.

The monsters that Katia can summon to aid her are essentially carbon copies of the enemies that she also fights throughout her trek, but there are quite a lot of them to choose from, over a hundred total cards to be precise. Each time Katia uses a card it gains experience, once it has accumulated enough it can be evolved into a better card by talking to Gurd who is essentially your card shop, and location guide. In fact there is only one other npc in the whole game worth talking to, Alexander. He collects fairies, so any you come across on your travels he will trade with you for a reward, in the form of a rare card for Katia to use. The only other characters in the game are pretty much all faceless guards or the occasional boss who will speak to Katia, though they do little to bring the ridged world of this game to life.

Despite its rather unique and surprisingly fun battle system, Lost Kingdoms has a lot of presentation problems as mentioned earlier. Firstly, this game is ugly. There isn't really another way to describe it. Pretty much every character and dungeon is blocky with some less then stellar textures and laughable animations. The game is colorful though, and has some interesting creature designs, but these can't make up for everything else. The sound is nearly non existent. There is no voice acting and the music is pretty much instantly forgettable, however it isn't awful either.

Lost Kingdoms is also dreadfully short for an RPG, clocking in at 6 – 10 hours if you do the available side quests and play around evolving cards, but there is no real reason to replay it after you have gone through it the once. That isn't to say it's a bad game though, I just don't think it really lived up to its full potential.

+ Fun battle system.

- Ugly.
- Forgettable music, no voice acting.
- Really short.