Lost Kingdoms (2002)

Lost Kingdoms was a game I spent many afternoons in my Middle School years playing on my Gamecube, Despite playing the early levels many times, I couldn't really remember ever beating it. Having fired up my Gamecube during Covid, I decided to dust this game off and give it a try.

Overview, the gameplay is what sells me on this game. You play as a princess, who thru the power of her runestones is able to summon monsters from a deck of cards. There are a variety of types of cards, with weapons for a quick attack, independents for creatures to fight in the battle with you, summons to pull up a monster for a visually cool and often powerful attack, and spinners for monsters that spin around you damaging enemies.

Each of these types have both weak and powerful monsters, and learning to use a balance of these types is essential to success. The weapon type monsters seem the most powerful, able to do multiple strikes.

Monsters have elemental types, strong against one type, weak against the other.

As you use the cards, they gain experience and can either be copied or transform. Some transformations lead to better cards, others not.

This creates a really fast, fun, and visually dynamic game. I took a lot of pleasure trying to level my favorite cards, while dropping my least favorite quickly. You get cards in chests throughout the level, by capturing weakened monsters, or by selecting cards at the end of the level. After each level you pick from 6 identical card back, the number of cards you select varies from 1-3 depending on how well you did in the level. One out of the six cards will be the boss monster from the level.

You cannot repeat levels, meaning if you want that dope card at the end, you probably are reloading your game to do it all over if you miss the card(you cant save midlevel). Luckily, the designers took this into account, making the levels relatively short 20 ish minutes a piece. So repeating them isn't to arduous.

The levels themselves are varied and really interesting, some taking place in desolate villages, others in forests, and still others in volcanoes or on bridges. Most levels has some light puzzles to them, but nothing too complicated. The variety in layouts and visuals for the levels, which matched the type of monsters you faced, snow level you face snow creatures for example.

I wish you could repeat levels to gain more XP for cards, but overall I loved the gameplay. The cards aren't all useful, and finding your style and preference is a big part of the game. But I loved discovering the uses of the cards, and trying to level them up.

The music is decent, but nothing too special.

I quite liked the visuals, though they are dated. The various monster designs were quite strong. With some really, really cool ones.

The story is mediocre, not terrible, not great. For the time I remember thinking it was surprisingly dark, especially for gamecube, but it is probably the weakest part of the game.

Lost Kingdoms is mostly a hidden gem, that I think deserves more hype then it gets.

It is realistic only in that you don't just stand around waiting for the other person's monster to pick a move and go for it. Instead you are summoning monsters and using magic in real time all over the place. You are on the field, dodging between clashing monsters, trying to gather magic gems to summon more monsters. Fighting bosses can sometimes devolve into a frantic mess of explosions and monsters running in circles everywhere, but somehow that is when I had the most fun with this game. It certainly has problems, some of them the same sort of problems many of the games of that day had, but some of them a bit deeper in the actual design of the game. Here is the breakdown:

The Good

As I already mentioned, the main draw of this game is that you actually summon monsters in real time, making the battles a little more frantic and a little less tactical than you usually see in monster card battling games. Although this game is supposed to be a portrayal of real monsters having real fights, the way the game environments have no real walls made me feel like I was moving miniatures through a diorama most of the time. It was a feeling that matches well with the monster battling theme of the game. I also enjoyed how unpretentious the graphics and the story were. They supported the overall gameplay without getting too flashy, unlike other early titles of the GameCube.

The Bad

What most modern gamers will notice right away is that the camera is a pain. The player controls it (which is a plus) but it does not move in a smooth circle around the player character. Instead it snaps to one of the four compass directions, making precise camera control impossible. Walls often got in the way of the action, and when I tried to move the camera it would whip around a quarter rotation which was even more disorienting. There is also no voice acting beyond a few exclamations and screams in the heat of battle. Of course many games back in 2002 did not have full voice acting, so I guess this is more of a reminder of how happily spoiled I am nowadays with many games having a full cast of voice actors.

The biggest problem I had with this game personally is how difficult it is to get many of the best cards. It was fun to be able to capture monsters in battle, and I was always pleasantly surprised when I managed to actually capture a boss monster, but many of the best cards you can only get through dumb luck or through very specific hunting and gathering. You also cannot reply areas again after you beat them, so if you miss something or you have some bad luck you will miss cards that you may never have the chance to get again.

The Verdict

This game works well because it is not overly ambitious. It sticks closely to its core mechanic of real time monster battling. There are no gameplay mechanics that feel tacked on or distracting, the story is not overly lofty or reaching, and the graphics are straightforward and simple. This purity leads to some fun gameplay moments based entirely on the joy of summoning monsters and then jumping out of the way as they go nuts. Here I am, fifteen years after the game's release, still enjoying the experience of it.