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.
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.