Lost Kingdoms II

"Disappointing... Nothing compared to the original..."

Developed by From Software, Lost Kingdoms II is sequel to, well, Lost Kingdoms, two of the few RPGs on the Nintendo Gamecube. It's a card-battling kinda deal here, but it's not what really what you'd expect, no turn-based Yu-Gi-Oh stuff here. As a RPG fan and a fan of the first LK, I must say that I am really disappointed with this game.

Gameplay- 7/10
How fun is this game to play? Not horribly boring, not compelling to play, but leaning more towards the boring side. How easy or hard is it? Right in the middle. How are the controls? They're okay, but you'll often find yourself messing up because of how your cards are always available. I absolutely LOVED the first one, but this one is blah.
A couple things they added/changed in this one was how you can use your cards at any time, and they added a new level-up system, new cards and a new attribute (Machine-type cards).
You control this girl and you can use these special cards she has to fight monsters. It's all real-time, though, so that's good. Not some turn-based stuff that'd be a real turn-off. That's pretty much it >_< Walk around, kill things, finish your objective which is usually kill something or get from Point A to Point B.

Story- 8/10
The story is one of this game's strong points. The overall story of the two Lost Kingdoms games goes a little something like this: So there are 5 kingdoms in this land, and each kingdom is given a magic Runestone to protect and isolate from one another by instructions from one of the 3 Gods, the God of Creation. But actually the God split the land in two and put a huge black void inbetween so they couldn't see one another, so there are two big lands and 10 Runestones total. The God created these runestones to contain the power of the other two warring gods, the God of Destruction and the God of Harmony. So one day there's this black fog (how creative >_<) appearing everywhere around the land and monster's are appearing from it. The people of the kingdoms are all like ">_<" and they're all out of ideas of what to do, so someone gets the crazy idea to unite all the runestones and not follow the God's instructions. So one of the kings goes out to have a meeting with the other kings, but he goes missing, so his daughter, Katia takes the Runestone and goes out to find him. When she takes the Runestone she finds out that it gives her power over these cards with pictures of monsters on them. So she goes around the 5 kingdoms after finding out her dad died and collects the Runestone and unleashes one of the Gods, the God of Destruction. She defeats it and becomes the first Queen of both the two lands.
So Lost Kingdoms 2 takes place 100 years after all that^ happened in the first game. You play as Tara Grimface in a story about how she joined the line of the Queens.

Graphics- 8/10
Nothing special, nothing terrible. A nice variety of colors.

Sound- 6/10
There's only about 5 minutes worth of voice acting, and the other sounds get a bit repetitive and dull.

Play time/Replayability- 6/10
This game should take you about 20 hours to play through all the levels. Maybe an extra 10 hours if you want to be thorough and collect all the cards. For an RPG, that is not very long. The first game takes about 30 hours and 50 hours to really finish it. But the thing about this game is that you feel no need to play it anymore after you beat it. You don't feel really compelled to thoroughly finish the game like you would after the first game. It doesn't interest you enough...

Now is it a buy or rent? If you can find it at Blockbuster or something and you were a fan of the first one, rent it. If you haven't played or really hated the first game, don't go out of your way to find this game. Actually just don't get it. It's not worth it. Especially if you liked the first one. You'll feel ripped off with such a bad game for a sequel.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/02/04