Lost Kingdoms is way to short and contains little dialog to keep me interested.
----------Battle System----------
Lost Kingdoms is a 3rd person Card-Based Action-RPG. There's 3 kinds of cards you can use in this game. The first is an action / attack card, this is basically like swinging a sword in a Zelda game. The second card type is an Independent Card, this card can be throw on the ground and turned into a friendly monster that will fight by your side, or heal you. The final card type is a Summon Card, this card transforms you and uses a powerful magic while you can't be touched. When you or an enemy throws a summon, everything stops while you watch the transformation. This throws me off in the battles if an enemy throws a Summon because it zooms in and the camera goes crazy, then warps right back to you after the transformation.
The encounters are set on the stages. If you walk down a hallway and get thrown into a battle, you'll always fight a battle in that spot next time you play that level again. If you wonder around in a certain area for to long they'll also throw you into a random encounter. When you warp into a battle an annoying swirl goes across the screen like a Final Fantasy game. Once you're in the battle you'll notice you are trapped within a square. If you run out of the boundaries, you'll escape the battle and lose a card. The background in the battles are exactly the same as the level you was on at any area of the game, so if you kill a monster on the left side of the square, and go back to the level, your character will appear exactly there. This often confused me and I actually went the wrong way in some areas because I was going straight before the battle, and then ended up going backwards after.
Each time you use a card, you use up "Magic stones". Each card is worth different amounts of magic stones in the game. Everytime you kill a monster, you gain more magic stones to use. If you run out of magic stones, then the amount is taken away from your HP. Each card has a different element to it, like Wood, Fire, Water, Earth and Neutral. Each element has an advantage over another, so this game runs on a Rock, Paper, Scissors system. After you use a card within a level, you won't be able to use it again unless you abort that mission or start a new mission. The card is not gone forever!
There's over 100 different cards in the game, but you can only carry 30 in your deck at a time. Before going into a dungeon you have to sort out what cards you want to use in that particular level. Since some levels have certain elements, its useful to change your cards before battle. Within a level you'll always find a device that will heal all your health and let you add the cards you found within the level to your deck before going into a boss battle.
You don't gain experience in the game, but your cards do. After your cards gain enough experience, you can go to Gurd and she can transform them into more powerful cards or she can copy the existing one. You gain levels by finding Runestones, and there's only 5 in the game, and you start with 1, so there's not much leveling up in this game.
Within the stages you can find hidden switches, puzzles, cards, treasures and blue / red fairies. The Blue Fairies can either help or harm you. Sometimes they can give you health, give you magicstones, give you a card back or engage in a fight. The Red Fairies are one of the few things in the game that talks to you with useful information. After you capture a Red Fairy you can give it to Alexander and he'll trade you for cards.
----------Characters / Story----------
The game features a great premise, but the execution of the story is weak. The story revolves around the black fog that is casting evil on the land and swallowing up kingdoms. The King of Alanjeh left his kingdom to warn the other kingdoms of the black fog. You play as Princess Katia as you search for your father and the 4 Runestones and that basically sums up the whole game. You don't meet up with alot of people in the game, but there are a few like Gurd who deals cards with you, and Alexander who trades fairies with you. The rest are just faceless soldiers, kings or boss' you dialog with shortly before fighting. There's not much dialog to the game, so that makes the story suffer.
----------Graphics----------
The levels are almost cube shaped at times. You're usually running around a square or a straight hallway / path until you reach the boss battle and end the level. There's no backgrounds in the game, similar to Final Fantasy Tactics for the PS1, so you feel like you're walking around in a cube the entire game. The levels are usually really short, but considering how hard this game can get, this is a good thing. However, the level designs look great, and almost always have a nice dark gothic feel to them giving this lackluster game a little bit of character.
There's really only about 4 characters in the game that you see more than one occasion, they look good and are rememberable. The sub-characters like soldiers, kings, and such all look generic and have little personality to them. The monsters, boss' and cards are an interesting bunch to look at. You have fairies, skeletons, lizardmen, and many more.
The artwork for your cards are very important for the game, since you have to remember them for your battles when they pop up at random. The artwork is similar to Magic Cards, just with a little less background detail and more on the character. The loading screens always show off a great art picture of the game that I always enjoyed viewing as the game loads.
----------Sound----------
The music is very good and rememberable from the start, but gets repetitive after a while. Lucky thing this is a short game I guess. There's no dialog voice overs in the game, although some characters will have grunts or sometimes even talk in Japanese. I can't tell if this is laziness or what.
----------World Map----------
The world map is a small chapter / dot to dot based map. You unlock new chapters after you complete a field or dungeon or after you chat with Gurd. After you finish a level you get a grade and that level is locked from ever visiting again. Lost Kingdoms is very linear and barely qualifies as an RPG.
----------Time to Complete Game (first run through)----------
3:32:07
Very short game, but once you beat it you can go back and replay the previously locked levels to get the missing Red Fairies, Cards or to level up your cards.