Lost Kingdoms is an Action Card RPG made by From Software in 2002 and published by Activision for the Nintendo Gamecube which had an unique battle system and what might be a generic but functional story to move forward the battle system and card hunting. An interesting fact was that this was the first RPG that came for the Nintendo Gamecube system. The game was featured on Nintendo Power which Nintendo made it seem like it would be seen as a big game for its unique battle system and the Catch Em All style of game but this of course didnt happen since the game didnt get any marketing push from Activision. The reviews for it didn't set the world on fire but it didn't do horribly either as it stands with a 72% on Metacritic. Despite the game not having stellar sales or acclaim the game managed to get a sequel simply titled Lost Kingdoms 2 which had some changes (Removed random encounters, capture system changed, new element classes, new cards and changes to some of the already existing cards and giving exclusive abilities to some transformations that will help you reach areas you normally wouldn't reach with the MC)
The plot of the game is about a black fog that any adventurers that enters it is never heard from them again. (which is similar to Demon's Souls) The 5 Kingdoms that once based on a ancient covenant banned interactions from each other decide to break from that isolation to look for a solution to the fog problem without really finding a way to take care of it. This started making rounds around people on the towns and rumors started that perhaps an ageless evil has been reawakened. The game starts with one of the guards running to Princess Katia (The Main Character of the game) informing her of the current events of the fog and she decides to do something about it by using the rune that grants her power to summon monsters to aid her on her quest to find her father (one of the 5 rulers) and eliminate the fog from destroying her kingdom. This is by no means gonna win any awards for originality but the game did a lot of things similar things as the Soul games in terms of story telling being said through NPCs and items you use in the game (cards) instead of cutscenes.
Now let's talk about the gameplay and what made it unique. The game is an Action Card RPG which definitely sounds weird considering you expect a card game to be taking turns. The game features 105 cards with different elements and types of usage per monsters. You have a basic controller scheme which you'll see below. Face buttons are the cards you will use to attack and not pictured L + Any of the face buttons performs a capture throw (Must do it when the monster has very low health to work or otherwise it will only do a small percent of damage and wasted a card if you didnt catch it) and R + Any face button to discard the card you select.
You have a deck of 30 cards that once they run out you basically will have to restart the stage unless you have restorative cards that put cards back on your deck or find cards to around the stage to add to your deck when you find a bonfire like sphere in the game where you can adjust your deck a bit with the cards you found and heal up. Make sure to keep an eye on your card usage and also the elements of the stages to make the encounters easier to deal with.
Here you can take a look at the cards from the game
The game also featured a Vs Mode which allowed you to play against a friend and bet cards cards that you found in your single player campaign which gave it a real fun side thing to do on the side once you were done with the main game.
Now what were the bad things of the game? There were some cards that only worked against some elements and if used on others wouldn't do a single effect, some buff and debuff cards were not that useful, some attacks would easily miss depending the movement on the enemies since each monster take certain amount of time to do their attacks and some are quite slower than other so you have to sometimes guess where to aim the attack. The random encounters can sometimes trigger a bit too fast which can lead to you running out of cards in some situations if you have a starting deck and haven't grasped how to use your deck for the best. The main story while taking an approach people like on the Dark Souls games here its too simple and predictable even if it has some interesting things about its world to uncover in what basically would be the post game dungeons. There is some levels that can be pretty lazy on its design like a literal bridge being a straight line. The OST were basically small loops and for being an RPG the game was considered too short as you can easily get all cards and finish the game in 8 hours or so.
Overall why do I love this game? It simply one of those games that were unique at the time and it still is quite unique as it does many things differently from what you would expect and RPG to do from being a card action RPG, from being stage based and being a short game. It has that short but sweet charm about it that made it easy to get into and even if it wasnt as polished as many games around that era it somehow got stuck in my mind ever since. I wish there was some Virtual Console release or upscaled port for modern consoles but I know Im probably one of the small amount of people interested in the game.
Now here I leave a video showing all the cards, a speedrun , OST and the character art and the box art of the game.
So anyone else who played this weird gem from From Software?
Also expect Lost Kingdoms 2 Anniversary Thread Next Year.
BONUS & SPOILER WARNING: Killing the final boss with 1 card. From Software needs to give me Lost Kingdoms 1 and 2 on Switch and make 3 already