Lost Kingdoms II Critic Reviews

With beautiful music and great visuals, this is one sleeper hit no one should miss.

Although it is easy to battle using sommoned monsters and attack cards, the system is somewhat limiting.

If you have yet to play this series and like card games or RPGs, Lost Kingdoms II is a no-brainer.

It's bigger, prettier, and ultimately more of the same.

A significant improvement over the original. The game is longer, the quests are more varied, and the game looks a lot prettier.

Naturally lacks the novelty of the original, but it succeeds in correcting nearly all its faults... even if it creates a few in the process.

Long lived and varied and offers a decent challenge without been frustratingly difficult.

Expands on the gameplay of the original, improves the production values all around, and is a generally better game that will please both fans of the original and anyone looking for an action-packed, RPG-style game for Nintendo's system.

Looks good overall; those all-important cards are nicely detailed and the whole display is rendered in crisp resolution.

A good RPG for adult gamers and possibly even a great RPG for young gamers - especially those obsessed with deck-building card games like Yu-Gi-OH! and Dragonball Z.

Walks a middling line between being a straightforward RPG and an action explorer but unfortunately excels at neither style.

Newcomers will be treated to a title that’s superior to its predecessor in many respects, but also fails to improve on some of the first game’s faults.

The game is longer, the gameplay is more fun and flowing and the main character is a bit more interesting. The only parts requiring more work are the story, the visual interface and the camera.

The characters in the game are pretty stereotypical, and the plot and story is certainly not up to the standards of story-oriented RPGs like "Final Fantasy X." The characters seem flat and uninteresting to me, and the story didn't really get me emotionally attached to them.

The whole experience is more balanced and the changes are definitely welcome, but Lost Kingdoms once again is hampered by a cookie-cutter storyline and an overall feeling of blandness.

Entertaining though Lost Kingdoms can be when it's raising two fingers to RPG convention, it's still blighted by conventional RPG problems.

This is one of those games that, for the look alone, you want to like, but the game play and combat system make it difficult.

The combat is so-so; it's tense and action-packed, but unforgiving summoning and attack systems drain most of the fun.

A glimmer of the first game's superb design and balance remains underneath these missteps, but the bottom line is that instead of building upon the solid foundation from the first game, they undermined it.

Even with all of the cosmetic and gameplay changes, the improvements from the first game are minimal. They're not enough to bump it up an extra star.