Have you ever gone to your favorite video game store, seen a game, and got curious wondering if it was good or not? That’s how I felt when I picked up the Lost Kingdom series. I wasn’t sure if it was good or not, but once I played them, they were pretty dang sweet! My favorite out of the two games has to be the second game in the series.
The second game takes place about 300 years from the events of the first game. You play as a young girl named Tara, who is traveling with a band of thieves across the land. She is trying to find her real self as she travels across the land at the same time it is being taken over by the Kendari’s, who are using an ancient monster to take over the land. It is up to Tara to save the land and bring peace to it.
The game play is the same as the last game, which is an action adventure role-playing game where battles happen in real time. There are a couple of differences, which make this game shine more. First off, they take out the random battle sequences and replace them with a style like Final Fantasy 12, where the monsters are everywhere. Next are new styles of cards, like transform cards, machine cards, and the ability to combine cards to make different combos, which come to be pretty useful in the long run. They also have a pretty decent voice cast, and they don’t overdo it like the voice actors for Sonic. Well, I should take that back because the Kendari King does sound silly. Tara is able to carry with her a deck of 32 monsters to use as attacks, or she can summon monsters to fight by her side, or summon them to do one of two strong attacks. Another big improvement is that the summon cards have two special attacks like the Sea Monk can either attack or restore cards to your deck, whichever you need to do. Now, I mentioned that you can make combos with certain cards and here is a helpful one. Use a Sea Monk and a Mind Flayer and you can get almost all of your discarded cards back into your deck.
The music is very amazing. It feels great during parts of the game, and eerie in the dark levels of the game. When fighting a boss battle, the music gets pretty intense, and it makes you feel like picking up a sword and attacking the monsters yourself. I would rather use a Ghost Armor card and attack them with it though. The graphics are pretty good for a Game Cube game and that’s saying something to other games like Cubivore, which had questionable graphics.
Now, everyone has their list of underrated games that some people will agree with and others won’t agree with. I think for games of today, Lost Kingdoms 2 is a horribly underrated classic on the Game Cube. The best part of the game is that it’s so unique on so many levels of awesomeness. The story is somewhat original, there’s an unusual twist that no one will see coming, the battle system is unique, and it’s just a flat-out awesome game!
Even though I love this game, I’m afraid there are a few things that didn’t age well in the game. For one, you can’t jump. I bet you guys are saying like “what the heck, you mean like the first Legend of Zelda game?” Well, yeah, the only way you can jump or fly is using a transform card and using one of the two abilities. The fixed camera angle could also use some work since you can’t control it. It sucks on how once the card is used, it goes away and you’re relying on either finding other cards or using recovery moves to revive your cards. When leveling up your character, your stats also depend on how much you use one certain deck and in later levels, you need to build up your experience points using that deck to enter a certain room and vice versa. It’s so tedious.
All and all, this is a rare gem for the Game Cube, which deserves more credit then it got. If you are looking for a great Game Cube game you got one!
This game gets an 8.7 out of 10.
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