YMMV / Lost Kingdoms

• Alas, Poor Villain: The God of Harmony in Lost Kingdoms 2. The history of the God of Creation, Harmony, and Destruction is recounted in the Cathedral library near the end of the game. The God of Creation and Destruction got into a bloody war where they enslaved humans, but it was Harmony who finally sealed both of them away as Runestones on separate continents. He then used his body as a barrier between them so that they never meet again. The God of Harmony you fight in-game is actually The Body, basically what amounts to an animal working off its instincts. Unfortunately, part of its process to regrow is consuming human souls. He doesn't seem quite mentally developed enough to understand why harvesting human souls might be looked down upon, but from his perspective he's resolving centuries of bloody conflict among the humans by "granting them eternal peace." He also seems genuinely confused and hurt when you reject his offer by killing him.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Vodianoi. They're fast, they hit hard and have high health and defenses. Fortunately any earth damage kills them.
  • Chariobots. Their movement hurts and they're resilient as all hell get out. As icing on the cake, you can miss out on getting one if you're not so lucky with the mission results screen.
• Difficulty Spike: The final boss of both games are notorious for how difficult they are to the rest of the game.
• Game-Breaker: Way too many.
  • The balance of the first game is pretty much snapped in two if you disregard the large deck size limit, and instead build a small deck comprised of nothing but your most powerful attack cards and "recover used cards" cards.
  • The God of Destruction is a huge game breaker in 1. It brings everything on the field (including yourself and your own monsters) to 1 HP.
  • The Doppleganger. Moves slowly and randomly around the field, but has massive HP and will kill the first thing (even you!) that it touches. Throw it right on top of a slow but hard to take down boss and it takes it down like nothing. Of course, some enemies were given an immunity to it's effects in 2.
  • The White Tiger, unlike the other Flash cards, deals massive damage to every enemy on the field. The only way it could be more broken is if it was a Neutral type.
  • A lesser example, the Steel Skeleton. Great HP, huge Defense, powerful attacks, and each attack has a chance to petrify or OHKO almost any monster (certain ones are immune, but they are far fewer than you'd think). It's fun to one-shot the Sand Worm 4 times in a row in Gromtull Desert. Plus, doing damage sometimes HEALS it. With some luck, it's entirely possible to beat some of the early-mid levels(basically, anything before Ruh-Arok Temple) with just 2-3 Steel Skeletons and nothing else. Oh, and did I mention that you can get the card that transforms into this after the first level? It takes 5,000 EXP to transform it, but that's nothing that some grinding can't solve.
  • The Blue Dragon. In 1, it restores you to 100% health and shuffles everything back into your deck except for the copy you played. Two of them equals immortality. The effects ended up being split in 2, with hefty drawbacks, nerfing it substantially.
  • There's also the casting from HP system in the 1st game, where the game would stop your HP falling below 1 when using cards. You could cast any spell in your deck for free if you were at 1HP.
  • The Wizard card doubles your damage, essentially giving you a free Z-Charge that stacks with actual Z-Charging. Combined with an appropriate Lizardman card and most enemies can become 2-3 hit kills.
  • The Demon Swordsman in multiplayer. Instantly discard your opponents hand if you hit them, and is why the last boss in the Sacred Battle Arena is such a pain.
  • The Banshee card. It's cheap to use, has amazing range, does good damage, ignores defense and helps expedite grinding. 2 made it even better by making it a weapon card.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • CatoBless^Explanation Scaz, a speedrunner for Lost Kingdoms, couldn't pronounce Catoblepas correctly, pronouncing it as cat-o-bleep-iss, something that's close to the Bepis meme. Papaya, another speedrunner, thought he meant Cato-bless cause they thought the monster's attack was a sneeze. Shortly afterwards, MooseEatsBear, yet another speedrunner, got his first good time on 1 by having a Catoblepas stunlock the God of Destruction. Thus the Catoblepas became a Memetic Badass and a fan favourite.
  • NoJack ^Explanation Jack-O-Lantern is inexplicably unobtainable in the American version of 2 without importing from 1. That didn't stop the fanbase from trying to find him for decades. The hunt to find Jack got so bad, there's a cash bounty for anyone who can prove they spawned him. Naturally, he's now a Memetic Troll for denying proper 100% completion.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The first game was an interesting concept, but it had a few annoying problems like not being able to replay stages until the game has been cleared. The second game greatly improved many of the problems with the first game and it was better received.
• Tear Jerker: Helena's ultimate death in the first game. Sol in the bad ending.
• That One Boss:
  • Helena and Thalnos in the first game. Thalnos is notable that even with proper strategies he's difficult, leading some to think he's the actual final boss.
  • Both final bosses and Body of the God from 2 if you don't know their Weaksauce Weakness.
  • The Firefox, Beelzebub & Behemoth in Alanjeh Castel, Middle Tower, thanks to janky hitboxes to their attacks.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The chief criticism of the games are the unusually thin characterizations for every character, bar Tara.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Tara being raised by the Band of the Scorpions is never touched upon aside from a passing comment by a villager, and they're never brought up again after they're all killed by the God of Harmony.