Lost Kingdoms

Developer: From Software
Publisher: Activision
Genre: RPG
Players: 1-2
Misc.: none
Memory: 2 blocks for each save file
ESRB Rating: T

A mysterious fog surrounds the five kingdoms of Argwyll. It is up to the Princess Katia of Alanjeh to stop the forces of evil. Entrusted with the ancient runestone, she is given a tremendous power to defeat her foes. With the help of Gurd, she travels in search for each runestone of the five kingdoms. What is the cause of this fog? Will Alanjeh be delivered from evil?

Lost Kingdoms succeeds as being the Nintendo GameCube’s first real-time RPG. Being a card-based game, it gives us a taste of a new breed of RPG’s. There is quite a bit of strategy involved, you can’t just go around throwing any card you wish. There are attributes and card-types, which just makes things a bit more difficult. But nonetheless, you get used to it.

The graphics doesn’t use the GameCube’s full capabilities, but captures just right the essence and environment of the game. Most would say that it looks like an N64 game, yes the characters are a bit blocky, but the texturing and lighting of the background and the water effects are sure not from the N64. The FMV and cut scenes are a different story though, beautiful things they are.

Eventually the music does get repetitive and boring, but it is good enough. The battle music is the same over and over again, now that gets annoying.

Without the side quests and the obtaining of all the cards, Lost Kingdoms will only give you at most, 10 hours of game play. The story is quite linear and easy to complete, it provides little challenge for those hard core gamers out there, but for casual gamers like me, it’s just enough to satisfy those RPG cravings. The side quests, collecting all the cards, collecting fairies and the multiplayer boosts up the replay value quite a bit, you’ll be spending about 20+ hours gaining experience points and whatnot.

Overall, it’s a great game to check out, in my opinion, very much underrated. Already there is a Lost Kingdoms II in development, or rather Rune II in Japan, hopefully we will be seeing it in North America.