20 years ago, Lost Kingdoms defined FromSoftware’s style

digitaltrends.com:

If you ask your average gamer what comes to mind when you say “FromSoftware,” odds are that they’re going to say Dark Souls. The Japanese studio has gone from a niche developer to a household name over its long career thanks in no small part to the success of its “Souls” style of games. Its now-signature genre began with Demon’s Souls in 2009 and culminated in FromSoftware’s crowning achievement in 2022: Elden Ring.

But longtime fans of the studio will be quick to tell you that FromSoftware isn’t solely notable for those titles. The company has been creating games for nearly 30 years, starting with 1994’s King’s Field. While it’s been more focused in recent years, the developers’ catalog contains a fairly wide variety of titles, from the Armored Core series to Eternal Ring, a title that’s a little hilarious today.

FromSoftware’s hidden oddities are especially fun to revisit in the age of the soulslike because they’re often more informative of the subgenre than you might expect. Case in point: Lost Kingdoms. The GameCube classic, which launched 20 years ago in North America, may look like a left-field piece of the company’s repertoire now, but it contains DNA that still exists in its recent hits.

Lost Kingdoms may not be widely hailed as one of the GameCube’s greatest hits, but it was an important game for the console early on. A console exclusive, the peculiar title is a far cry from Nintendo’s usual stable of mascot-driven platformers drenched in bright colors. Instead, it was a grim RPG that gave the console a bit of an edge in its first year — one that wasn’t traditionally associated with Nintendo consoles.

The game features one of the oddest premises FromSoftware has invented to date. Players control a princess named