#23 Lost Kingdoms (GameCube - 2002) 3/5 (8+ hours playtime)
Thinking about FROM before they became “FROM”, I was considering how much I love King's Field IV (The Ancient City), and I was wondering how I might feel about some of their other earlier works. I've played several of their pre-Souls era games, and the only one that is a true classic for me is the aforementioned King's Field. But I've enjoyed some of those other entries, which predate their status as modern-day beloved mainstream creators, to a greater or lesser degree. This time, I decided to look at a very early GameCube release by the name of Lost Kingdoms, which released only a few months after the console dropped.
The game's form is that of a card-collector and battler. You're a princess of a kingdom (one of 5 in this world) whose father, the king, has gone missing and which has become overtaken by a black fog that is consuming all the land. (Reminiscent of Demon's Souls and other Souls games in terms of general tone and concept in some ways. You can see little pieces of that FROM DNA that has been present for so long in the company - long before Souls.) The narrative is rather sparse but offers enough flavor and context throughout to provide impetus to drive things forward. There are a number of cutscenes and character interactions providing dialogue to move things along without getting in the way of the action. There is no voice, however. Everything is delivered via speech bubbles for all conversations. I wouldn't say the narrative was really compelling, but it wasn't off-putting either, serving as a decent enough backdrop without intruding on player agency and forward momentum.
The gist of things is that those who hold special runestones are able to cast magical cards on the battlefield, cards representing and that take the form of creatures in order to aid the caster in various ways. There are a total of five runestones that must be gathered, and there are a variety of quests that build this world and provide opportunity for combat. The first of these runestones is held by her own kingdom, and Princess Katia collects this stone from her homeland's castle to begin her journey, allowing her to engage in combat against monsters that have come to inhabit this world along with other “casters” who hold their own special stones.
There are 16 main missions along with 5 side missions to complete, and they all take place in a pretty diverse set of locations and environs. I appreciated the variety, and the visuals were decent for the old hardware, if not always excellent. Once a mission opens up, you must complete it in order for another to populate the world map. And once completed, you cannot return until after you've beaten the whole campaign. So, it serves you to fully explore and interact with everything possible before fulfilling the conditions necessary to clear each level. You are also ranked on your performance within each level - from 1 to 5 stars - and this ranking grants you a corresponding number of bonus cards for finishing. So, the better your performance, the more cards you can choose from a random set at level's end.
The combat itself is different in that rather than being turn-based as might be typical of the genre, it is a real-time set of encounters, with you and the opponents actively moving about the field of battle as things unfold. The attacks consist of three different types of creature cards. Creatures with a sword icon indicate a weapon-based creature, and these function as a direct attack, and with these you control the direction and timing of the strike. You will briefly embody the image of this creature and strike in the direction of your orientation at the time of deployment. These cards can often be used multiple times before exhausting their energy. There are also independent monsters which you can throw onto the field of play. These creatures will move about and attack foes on their own without your input once they've been cast. Finally there are “summon” creatures, which are essentially the same as weapon-based creatures in that you embody them and attack. However, these creatures come with their own short cutscene when cast, and you embody this creature who does a very powerful attack in the direction you're facing. And all of these interactions are handled via a hierarchy of elements that inform the effectiveness of every creature against every other. In short, water is favored against fire, fire against wood, wood against earth, and earth over water. That's not to say that you cannot cast creatures that don't fall beneficially on that hierarchy. They'll still do damage, but they just won't be nearly as effective. So it's important to be cognizant of these dynamics as you play and construct your deck for each level. And speaking of decks, you are given a maximum of 30 slots for cards, and you can populate it with any creature cards you've collected. There will be many duplicates and a large variety of different types, so the building of your deck will have a great impact on how things play out, along with your selection of when and how to use the various cards. There are 105 total to collect, and I finished with 79, so there is an incredible potential for diversity of strategy, which I really appreciated. And when you factor in the fact that you could theoretically compose a deck of just a handful of different card types if you really find a synergy between them that you like, there's plenty of room to play around with deck construction, which was a really fun aspect of the experience for me. And you can also duplicate cards you like on your own at a certain location and/or evolve them if the card has acquired enough experience via use. All things considered, this was really engaging conceptually, and I was very drawn to the possibilities on offer. You can also sell cards you don't like in order to fund the purchase of cards you are interested in, so there's a constant evolution to the form your deck and strategy takes on. Additionally, you can have the game “remember” decks that you like so that you don't have to rebuild them every time you might think to try a strategy again. Good stuff. A final note on the cards. The artwork on many of them was really nice, and each card not only provides detailed information on their utility but also offers flavor text to give each one a more interesting backdrop to feed the imagination.
In the actual flow of battle, you need magic stones in order to pay the (varying) cost of casting creatures. (Better creatures generally require more stones.) These stones are dropped via creatures you've damaged on the battlefield, and so you must rush to pick them up before they quickly vanish in order to fund further casting. If you run out of sufficient stones, you can still cast, but now it will be at the cost of your health. So everything was very dynamic with the real-time battles, securing more resources to keep casting along with orienting your attacks against a battlefield of moving and counterattacking creatures. The premise was very nice, all things considered. And you can run out of cards on a level if you're not careful, especially early on before you're playing with a full deck. (No pun intended) I found myself in a couple of spots where the level was not complete, and I was running around without a card to cast and had to let myself be killed so that I could retry the level. It becomes less of an issue after the first couple levels, but it's certainly a possibility. There are also certain “pillars” in most levels that will restore your health and allow you to add any cards you've found within the level into your active deck, and there are also certain creature cards that will restore a random number of spent cards back into your usable library, so in practice, it's not too much of a worry outside the opening areas when you're still building an effective roster of cards.
But as much as I enjoyed much of what Lost Kingdoms offered, I did have some issues. Some battles can get a little too busy. Whenever you enter a battle screen, the combat area is a shrunken and dissected section of the place you were already in, and there are some encounters where you're dealing with a variety of your own creatures as well as a variety of opponent creatures, and things can get pretty congested and a little hard to follow in the worst-case scenarios. Also, environmental geometry can get in your way. You can end up getting a bit stuck occasionally, which is not a good place to be in when you're getting peppered by enemy attacks. Or you can get knocked down right as you've killed a creature, and by the time you've dusted yourself off and gotten back up, the magic stones you needed as currency to keep casting had already vanished - they don't stay on the battlefield very long at all. Navigation can be a bit problematic sometimes too. When you go into the battle screen, the field you fight in is still in the space you were navigating prior, albeit shrunken and with borders, as mentioned. But when you're fighting, you are moving around, and it can be easy to lose your orientation in the context of the overall map and direction you were heading, sometimes causing you to retread your steps unintentionally when the larger map reopens. It wouldn't be an issue if the game's camera weren't overhead/isometric without the ability to look at things from ground level. Even though you can zoom in and out of the top-down view, the world geography isn't always distinct enough to identify your sense of direction. It wasn't a major issue, but it did frustrate a bit on a few occasions. There is a mini-map too, but it didn't always help enough to reorient myself. This wasn't a major or prominent issue, but it did cause a couple of moments of frustration. It could also be a little hard to remember or to be able to implement the best strategy since you get a random assortment of 4 cards that continuously refill as used (from your constructed deck) that are assigned to the four face buttons. Every time you exhaust a card, another takes the vacant spot, but you can build an appropriate deck for the level and still find yourself with a group of selectable cards that isn't ideal for the situation sometimes. To be fair, you can discard an active card, but it's hard to justify doing so when you've only got (a flexible) 30 to finish the whole level. You won't know when the level is going to end, and wasting a card is hard to swallow. And things can devolve into spamming cards rather than feeling like you're really executing with finesse sometimes. As fun as it could be, it felt like things could have been tuned and balanced better. There was too often a feeling of randomness to everything. Not in the sense of what cards were good to play, but the movement of opponents could be hard to predict, and you'd end up wasting cards because they missed altogether. Granted, I suppose it made things feel more exciting in some ways, but overall I just felt like things didn't come together as cohesively as I would have liked in terms of the practical execution. It was a fun game to be sure, but it was just missing that element that makes you feel like you're playing a truly compelling package, if that makes sense. Just a hair off from being a very good game. And the final boss (well, two back-to-back bosses) was a large difficulty spike. The first one was frustrating because you're also battling another caster, and when you are both casting “summon” creatures, it really interrupted the flow of that battle because each time a summons card is played, there's an animation that lasts a few seconds. So, the battle had this really herky-jerky and disorienting flow due to those interruptions as well as the large number of creatures, including you and your opponent, running about. It was just too busy. And the final...final boss could wreck you in an instant. I had to kind of cheese my way through that fight, but in true Souls-fashion I “got gud”.
These battles were really tough, but also appropriate for a final encounter, I suppose, minus the awkward flow of the first of the two.
Overall, I did enjoy my time with Lost Kingdoms though. It took me a bit over 8 hours, and I did all 16 regular missions along with the 5 bonus missions, so it's not an overly lengthy campaign. There's also multiplayer if you happen to find someone else who really enjoys the battle system here, which was a nice addition in theory. And as mentioned earlier, there is the potential to return to get better grades on the missions you didn't do so well on as well as collecting all the (100) red fairies, which can be turned in for special cards with a certain character, and simply filling out the complete catalog of cards if you are a completionist. But I had my fill after the final boss and the credits rolled. Like I said, it's got a really interesting premise. A real-time card battler is an interesting twist, and the potential strategies had me salivating. But as much as I enjoyed it, it was just missing that certain quality that makes me feel like I've played something REALLY good. Too many little issues that prevented a strong recommendation. But I'm glad I played it, and I'll be interested in giving the sequel a chance one day to see if it improved on the missteps in this entry. A solid and enjoyable 3/5, and just on the cusp of being a 4 for me.
