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.