Lost Kingdoms: Pick a Card, Any Card
When I was a kid I was driven by a single desire: I wanted to own and control monsters. This was because Monsters were everywhere in the 90s. My favorite cartoon shows were Swat Kats, Mighty Max, and Digimon, all of which either involved characters fighting visually distinct monsters or controlling them for the purposes of fighting and adventures. For about a year, I kept a spiral notebook that I took everywhere (especially the grocery store(because I was young and didn’t realize buying groceries would be fun when I was in my 30s) and would draw monsters of various sizes and complexity with the understanding that I could summon these creatures if the mood ever took me. Obviously, once Pokemon came down the pike I exploded into a rapture of pure joy that has only recently begun to ebb and that’s only because I don’t have all the time in the world to play videogames all day long like I used to. I played Pokemon videogames, I collected the cards and plastic statues, I watched the anime, I read the manga, and, most importantly, I played pretend Pokemon with the girls at recess whenever the boys were playing football.
The chance to be a Snorlax, AND hang out with girls?
It was a no brainer.
By the time I was a teenager my appreciation for monsters hadn’t faded, but like, I was a teenager dude, I couldn’t play Snorlax with the girls anymore. They were grown up, and hot, which means I couldn’t even say hello without my voice cracking. While some of my male peers began to leave their Pokemon cards and videogames behind and drift over to Magic the Gathering and Halo I wound up discovering a game that had all the same energy but also, much to my shock two decades after playing it, it was made by the same company that would go on to make the iconic and generation defining videogames Dark Souls and Elden Ring.
Lost Kingdoms was released for the Nintendo Gamecube on 25 April 2002. The game was developed by From Software Inc and published by Activision Publishing Inc. and is a third person, fantasy, action-adventure, role playing game(rpg). The player controls the character Katia, the daughter of the King of the fictional country Argwyll which is beset by peril after the arrival of a mysterious dark fog that is unleashing monsters upon the land. Katia’s father leads an army of soldiers to find the source of this fog and destroy it. Once it becomes clear however that he has become lost or captured, Katia takes the kingdom’s sacred treasure: an item known as the Runestone which allows her to control monsters using magic cards. Once she acquires the stone there’s a brief fight with two living skeletons, and after Katia emerges victorious the obligatory fantasy trope of the mysterious and arcane-knowledge wielding old woman named Gurd appears and informs Katia that she will need to save her father.
From there, the game begins.
Approaching Lost Kingdoms from a critical perspective is more than a tad difficult for me because this is a game I played a lot of. It remains one of the few Gamecube games that I played to narrative completion and, like Freedom Fighters and Pikmin, I played this game over and over again. I mention this because I need to honestly convey that nostalgia is definitely playing its part in why I wanted to write about this videogame.
The fact that it’s also a From Software game is another reason.
Seriously, when I booted it up in the emulator on my PC and spotted the name From Software I literally doubletaked before my lower jaw did a cartoon drop through my hardwood floors.
Before I fanboy too hard(or remind myself that I STILL haven’t written anything about Dark Souls or Elden Ring) I wanted to observe Lost Kingdom’s fighting mechanics because, as my opening paragraph noted, the gameplay is built around controlling monsters. By the time this essay appears on my site it will likely be the year of our Lord Neptune 2025 and the mechanic of using monsters to fight isn’t revolutionary, evolutionary, or even uncommon. In fact as I’m writing this sentence there’s still articles being written about Pal-World, and Gamefreak is almost certainly about to release three new Pokemon games for the holiday season. Lost Kingdoms’s fighting mechanics concepts aren’t new, but they are worth writing about because of their unique structure.
In Lost Kingdoms Katia is armed solely with a deck of cards and the Runestone which she wears as part of her long ponytail. This magical stone is what allows her the ability to summon the motley army of monsters that adorn the cards she carries with her into the levels. At the start of the game the Runestone maximum count is “10” and this is important because each card has a “cost.” This cost is, mechanically speaking, similar to mana or magical energy systems in other fantasy videogames like Diablo or Skyrim. For example a basic Skeleton costs one stone to summon while the Necromancer card(one of my personal favorites(seriously the dude just owns(and his card art makes me ludicrously happy))) costs six stones to summon. As players progress through the story they will encounter more powerful cards that will surpass the original stone count that Katia is able to use.
For example, the Mindflayer card, which is one of the reward cards at the end of the third level Shayel Passage requires 20 magical stones to use. Immediately the question becomes, how am I supposed to use this card? Put another way, why would the game give me a card I can’t use?
The answer is that players can use any card they want, it’s just going to dip into their health.
You read that correctly.
Katia will literally lose health if she uses too many cards. Lost Kingdoms teaches players quickly that throwing every card they have access to at the start of battle will cost them dearly.
Game cover image provided by Moby Games.
This system is worth exploring analytically because, by contrast, a game like Pokemon never required players to juggle a comparable health or mana system for their avatar. Ash could summon Pikachu from a pokeball and then immediately replace him by summoning Geodude instead, and, if so inclined, the player could withdraw him and summon their Snorlax or their Venemoth in a quick sequence with no adverse health effect to their character. Other videogames which have incorporated summoning systems in the past have rarely, if ever, incorporated anything in the way of negative consequences for pushing past energy/magic meters. Typically, in my experience, the game simply stops players either in the form of an error message informing them they need a magical potion or else the character will deliver a line of dialogue like “I can’t do that right now.” Even a game like Diablo II didn’t create a negative health impact if I tried using magic when my mana was empty, and that game literally involves demons, necromancers, and hobgoblins. Before playing Lost Kingdoms there was an understanding: the avatar will not suffer any negative costs for not having energy.
Katia was, and is an exception.
The idea that magic can “cost” at the expense of a player’s health was a unique design, and one that I still find fascinating for mechanical and rhetorical reasons; and this detail becomes painfully relevant to gameplay as players begin to progress and fights become more challenging and frequent.
During fights whenever Katia’s monsters hit enemy non playable characters(npcs) pink and blue magic stones that replenish Katia’s power will drop. These stones are replacement magic points for her runestone, and this of course creates incentive to regularly cause damage. But, at the same time, the player is not sitting on the sidelines of the battle. Unlike many monster-fighting videogames, Katia is moving in and around the battlefield. While there are creatures referred to as independents that will be summoned and then move around the battlefield on their own, there are certain cards that require Katia to move herself within striking distance of an enemy and then use the card, either for a quick melee attack or to summon a monster that will make a dramatic strike.
This generates some wonderful tension, especially against tougher enemies.
For example in a region known as Gromtull Desert a mission involves fighting giant sandworms (where’s Chai Ha Lud when you need him?(or Kevin Bacon?)(or Beetlejuice?))). These creatures are massive and have a long reach which means moving Katia around the battlefield is just as important as determining which cards to summon, when to attack, and finally how to manage how much magic I currently have during the fight. I was regularly attacked by the worm before I could throw a Man-Trap card to distract it, and in no time my health was low, I was out of stones, and all the cards in my deck required at least seven to eight points of magical energy.
To quote the 17th century moralist and philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “I was totally cooked yo.”
On a quick side note, did you know that Thomas Hobbes never wrote anything about videogames? I was shocked. He always struck me as a hard-core F-Zero player, but I guess you never really know somebody.
Fighting the sandworm revealed how quickly making the wrong decisions can affect not only the outcome of the battle, but also my ability to survive through a level.
Fights in Lost Kingdoms have painful moments like this, but in the same breath I note there’s an incredibly satisfying energy to them. Even in the worst moments when it seems I’m almost guaranteed failure, the necessity to balance movement, real time strategy, magic level, health, and just physical space is incredibly rewarding to a nerd like me who spent most of his youth playing strategy games.
And, on the note of strategy I want to discuss the fact that all of this fighting mechanic is founded upon a deck-building system.
Lost Kingdoms is to some extent a Collectathon, a design that’s often incorporated into mini-games of larger videogames. The 1000 Koroks to find in Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is probably one of the best examples of this. In the aforementioned game the npc Hestu has once again lost the seeds of his maracas to his friends the Koroks and needs Link’s help to find them. Koroks are hidden all over Hyrule and can only be found by exploring and winning various puzzle minigames that range from matching metal blocks into shapes, using ascend to move through logs, shooting floating baloons with a bow and arrow, and in some instances simply lifting up a rock. Lost Kingdoms develops its Collectathon through a combination of exploration, combat, a merchant’s shop, and a fairy collecting side-quest. Every level of the game will have one or more red chests that will hold cards that Katia can add to her deck, and Lost Kingdoms will reward players who go off the beaten trail to gather all of these cards. Some cards are hidden beneath fallen trees, breakable crystals, of abandoned carts; these cards can only be acquired by triggering fights in the immediate area, breaking the structures, and then picking the card up after the battle. All of these components help players steadily build up a collection of cards that vary in their offensive, defensive, and valuable aspects. In Lost Kingdoms the player encounters monsters that range from basic fantasy tropes like lizard-men, golems, orcs, walking skeletons, and dragons to more darker fantasy elements like Necromancers, demons, and even malevolent gods.
There’s also a Golden Goose that’s entirely useless, but that’s another essay.
Acquiring these cards is only the first step however.
Like most games built around cards each card has a nature trait that makes them strong against other types. Fire is weak against water, water is weak against plants, plants are weak against earth, etc. Apart from simply being a continuation of every flipping card-game in existence in this post-Pokemon reality, this plays another important design role because some levels are predominantly populated by specific monster types. In the aforementioned desert realm about 90% of the monsters players will encounter are earth types, with the remaining 10% being some plant and one or two water types.
The first time I played Lost Kingdoms, I went into the desert with a handful of fire-based cards and promptly got owned in the space of three fights.
And then Thomas Hobbes laughed at me about it on Twitter.
I didn’t even know the dude was on Twitter!
Point is, Thomas Hobbes is a jerk, and I should have paid attention to types.
Building decks for combat requires a tremendous amount of strategy, and I’ve enjoyed, and still enjoy this aspect of the game a lot. Certain players gravitated to Lost Kingdoms because of the strategy it offered alone, but as much as I enjoyed these intellectual exercises, I know in hindsight that the fantasy setting and the expanding narrative about the threat to the kingdom of Argwyll was what captivated me the most. I enjoyed playing a game that let me control a group of monsters while it told me a high-fantasy narrative. The fog that’s slowly consuming the kingdom is the work of malevolent forces and as Katia searches for her father she observes the atrocities that are taking place in each of the kingdoms because of this force. She’ll regularly encounter soldier npcs who were part of her father’s retinue who have lost hope or become despondent as they realize the fog will either soon consume them, or they will become lost within it. Various side-quests that I accept from Gurd are regularly about collecting items to make medicine for people plagued by mysterious diseases emanating from the fog, or else it’s centered around eliminating monsters that are hindering local operations.
It’s easy to miss but this deck building serves just as much of a narrative function as it does a design function.
By fighting these monsters that are appearing, and discovering the source of this fog(which I’ll hopefully write about in a later essay) Katia is slowly saving her kingdom and people from destruction. Though she is, arguably, flat as a character, Katia’s continual struggle to find her father, and to fight to keep the fog from completely absorbing her kingdom is the stuff of solid fantasy fodder. Katia is a woman who wants better for her world, and even if it means risking her life, she won’t stop until the people of her kingdom are safe.
And along the way she’ll make some friends…and control those friends by sealing them in magic cards and releasing them to fight other, friends…huh.
Okay, so that last part falls flat.
BUT.
The deck building does reinforce the idea that Katia is steadily gaining control of this powerful, malevolent force, by using its own power against it. Acquiring cards is a collectathon, and it’s also about demonstrating Katia’s growing agency as she moves from being a sheltered princess to a magical warrior that can stand her own against skeletons, sand worms, golems, dragons, and even demons and necromancers.
Lost Kingdoms employs a deck building mechanics for players, not simply for the sake of providing a plot for its system. It’s a well crafted design that reflects as much concern for the high fantasy narrative as it does active gameplay. While other games have come along that have refined and re-packaged the controlling monsters system to high praise and acclaim, Lost Kingdoms has, arguably, languished in an obscurity, remembered by only a few dedicated fans that were totally riding the From Software train before the first obligatory Dark Souls tribute was even a thought of a thought of a meme. I spent hours with this game because it was a beautiful mix of fantasy and real-time strategy all built around visually resplendent creatures
(And because I was a teenage boy and Katia’s outfit showed off her midriff).
Disregarding my nostalgia, the game holds up as a work of art that deserves far more attention and recognition.
I play Elden Ring and Dark souls, largely because of the fantastic creatures that I’ll get to see and fight as I explore their world.
I play Lost Kingdoms because I’ll get to control these fantastic creatures, and that difference in agency makes all the difference.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
9.8.2025
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