There’s never been an isometric action RPG quite so expansive or adventurous as Lost Ark. This stylish, free-to-play MMO took South Korea by storm in 2019, so it’s no surprise it’s now blowing away Steam charts in the West. Its story may be generic fantasy, but there’s a surprising degree of depth to each of its sprawling systems, and most of its content is accessible to play through by yourself or with friends. It’s the kind of game that’s easy to lose hours in even without spending any money, especially once you get your very own ship and set sail to pave your own path through its mysterious world.Once you finish Lost Ark’s tutorial with less information than you probably need, you enter the online world where you’re propelled through a 10-hour linear series of main story quests. It’s all very flexible in how you approach other players: most story progress happens in instanced events, but sometimes you’ll need to complete an instanced dungeon – which is a completely separate thing, as Final Fantasy 14 fans are already familiar with – and you can complete that alone or in a party of up to four, based on your own preferences instead of absolutely needing to play with others. It’s also rare that the many other players running around will get in your way, due to how quickly enemies and quest objectives respawn in public zones. In fact, the only content that absolutely requires you to team up doesn’t arrive until after level 50, and that’s largely part of Lost Ark’s open-ended (albeit grindy) endgame where you’re free to pick and choose what you want to do.The story of Lost Ark boils down to the now overdone “Humans and Angels team up to fight Demons and save the world” structure, and it suffers from some pretty hamfisted writing and voice acting that can make the tone and pacing come across awkwardly at times. Action-packed cutscenes often help tell that story, and they tend to be a visual treat, but it’s unfortunate that characters’ emotions are poorly conveyed at basically all times. A major contributing factor is that character voices tend to bounce between either wild exaggeration or an inappropriate lack of emphasis in relation to the stakes of the moment. As a result, they generally come across as one-sided and forgettable rather than unique or interesting, and emotional moments struggle to land. It was surprising to learn that Lost Ark is still using Unreal Engine 3.“What saves it are the great action sequences, which are well scripted and fantastically creative enough to do all the heavy lifting for the story. There’s an excellent segment where your character runs through a king’s tomb while being chased by an otherworldly, fire-breathing dragon as the firmaments crumble around you. You’re eventually forced to face it down in a climactic final confrontation, which is equally difficult and satisfying, and even looks great by modern standards – so good, in fact, that it was surprising to learn that Lost Ark is still using Unreal Engine 3.Each of Lost Ark’s five classes and numerous subclasses have special abilities that define their playstyles. For example, the Assassin can choose to subclass as the extremely stylish demonic Shadowhunter, who absolutely stands out amongst the rest as one of the coolest melee classes in any action RPG. It’s deeply satisfying to unleash the Shadowhunter’s souped-up demon form (which you do after summarily consuming the blood of your enemies, naturally) and rip and tear your way through anything that gets in your way. Another favorite is the Striker, who slowly builds up a resource that they can unleash in powerful martial arts-inspired flourishes. One of these transforms you into a tornado that lifts entire crowds of enemies into the air at once, which is both an effective stun power and a lot of fun to watch in action. Meanwhile, you have ranged classes like the Gunslinger who can fire a barrage of bullets, the Sorceress who can rain destruction upon her foes but has little armor and health, and plenty more. The only failing here is that there’s no real reason for any of these classes to be gender-locked. Why can’t you make a male Bard or a female Paladin?The Shadowhunter absolutely stands out amongst the rest as one of the coolest melee classes in any action RPG.“There’s a slickness to the flow of Lost Ark’s combat that feels more in line with Diablo 3 than games like Diablo 2, Path of Exile, or Grim Dawn. Your hotbar has a set number of skills and special attacks that each have their own cooldowns, but there’s no enforced “type” of skill that needs to go in any one slot. Instead, Lost Ark allows you to mix and match to your heart’s content, which lets you get creative with your character builds. For example, the Striker’s arsenal is mashed up between skills that build its Esoteric Bubble resource and skills that expend that resource to deal incredible bursts of damage. You could theoretically ignore the Esoteric Bubble resource altogether and kit yourself out with more low-stakes DPS skills with shorter cooldowns, making you a more rapid damage-dealer. Inversely, you can do the opposite of that and give yourself more skills that take a long time to power up but carry a higher payoff.Despite all that customization, classes adhere to specific mechanical roles no matter what. The Bard is always a support class, the Striker is always a DPS class, and the Gunlancer is always a tank. However, it’s nice to be able to swap out or respecialize your skills on the fly, and if you’d like to make your fighting style even more dynamic, you can always store grenades and other useful items on your hotbar to supplement your skill loadout even further.Lost Ark ScreenshotsYou’ll generally need to fight many enemies at once, and some of your skills require you to hold their respective key down in order to power them up or keep them rolling in a combo, which usually feels good to do since those moves often have the most explosive effects. Another nod to Diablo 3 (the console version, specifically) is that Lost Ark lets you use a limited rolling dodge ability to quickly get out of harm’s way every few seconds, and some battles absolutely require you to make good use of that ability. Most bosses telegraph their attacks as shown by red areas (cones, circles, etc) on the floor, giving you a short window of time to get the heck out of there.Fights begin to stagnate once you’ve bashed your way through swarms of enemies for a few hours.“However, fights begin to stagnate once you’ve bashed your way through swarms of enemies for a few hours because you can’t adjust the difficulty manually. Most enemies rush you in groups that you can easily dispatch by spamming your hotkeys in a steady rotation, and it’s easy to tune out unless you’re specifically fighting a boss with unique mechanics, such as Rekiel of Despair (who’s protected by a special shield that makes his attacks hit harder and make him impervious to being Staggered until you break it by using a Destruction Bomb) or Jagan, the giant dragon demon guarding King Luterra’s Tomb that you need to kill several times as you venture through that dungeon. What makes Jagan especially interesting is that he rips apart the walls and staircases as you move through the environment, which is impressive, but spectacle like that makes normal fights feel like you’re just bashing apart the same identical exploding sacks of gore. Not to mention, when you wander through the open world enemies tend to respawn before you get a moment to step away from where you defeated them seconds prior. This would be far more rewarding if they actually dropped a significant amount of experience points or better loot, but they never do. The best you can hope for is a piece of gear that offers a slight stat point upgrade, but no visual variation from what you were already using.That first 10 hours or so are entirely linear, but once you unlock your first ship and head out to the open seas you can theoretically go in any direction you’d like to (but, pro tip: you may want to stick to the upper-right side of the map until you reach level 50 because things can get rough out there). Sailing is simpler yet more enjoyable than Pillars of Eternity 2’s, which is my closest point of comparison for what Lost Ark is trying to accomplish as an open-world isometric RPG. Both games give you a ship and say “you can do anything you want as long as you don’t crash it,” but Lost Ark cuts everything that made sailing a boring or trifling experience in Pillars. You can run headfirst into various nautical hazards, such as sandstorms and ghost ships, which adds tension and risk to your travels. You can also find treasure, go fishing, and hang out with whales. Your ship needs regular maintenance, compelling you to dock and, since you’re limited to teleportation across the continent you’re currently on, you’re provided a real motivation to explore your immediate surroundings whenever you go on shore leave. It’s already great fun to chart a course across the high seas, but I’m extremely excited to see how that system evolves over time.Once you earn your sails you can discover unique and interesting settings, such as a remote library filled with talking books, derelict ghost ships, and distant continents that were previously unreachable by foot. Each of the 13 substantial continents has its own theme, culture, and environment, and the impressive variety works well in Lost Ark’s favor. More importantly, the story actually uses these unique settings to show something interesting on screen. For instance, the technocratic society of Arthetine looks and feels like Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s rendition of Midgar, even though its story also pulls from a bucket list of Warhammer 40k tropes; even its guards look like space marines. But that’s just one location in the broader world of Arkesia, and no two places are similar. In stark contrast, the island-continent of Tortoyk is populated by Mokokos, faeries that live in a village that requires you to shrink yourself in order to visit. Once there, you ride lady bugs as mounts and even face off against a giant parrot. Yes, Lost Ark features a boss battle that’s just a giant parrot.Once you earn your sails you can discover unique and interesting settings.“But if sailing isn’t your thing, there are plenty of other ways to spend your time. If you’d prefer to run off and try to impress every NPC through the conceptually interesting Rapport system, which allows you to use emotes or exchange gift items for rewards, you can do that. Or (after reaching level 26 and unlocking the Luterra Castle zone) you can focus on PvP, which are fun, short skirmishes that often come in the form of Team Deathmatch, Deathmatch, and Team Elimination with up to five other players. Or you can focus on building up your personal stronghold through the decent crafting and gathering systems, which are pretty standard if you’ve played other MMORPGs apart from a few twists of their own, like being able to team up with other players to gather large trees faster. It’s worth mentioning that Lost Ark also conveniently lets any character chop every log and mine every ore node as long as you’ve equipped the right gathering tools and have sufficiently leveled up your respective gathering skills. Your stronghold essentially becomes your base of operations after you’ve reached a specific point in the story. Here, you can construct and upgrade buildings, assign missions, craft goods by placing requisition orders, and entertain luxury merchants who stop by to do business every so often. It’s a cool idea on paper, but I rarely felt a need to ever go back to after a certain point. The deterrent for me was that stronghold actions are timed and require a limited resource to speed up, and that resource is, of course, for sale for real money. It feels very much like a Farmville-style mobile game mechanic that shatters the otherwise-successful illusion that Lost Ark isn’t out to wring cash out of us. Granted, it’s not essential to engage with your stronghold in order to enjoy the rest of what Lost Ark offers, but it’s the one thing that I might have felt tempted to spend real-world currency on had I invested myself deeper into the crafting systems, which of course, I ended up choosing to avoid.Strongholds feel very much like a Farmville-style mobile game mechanic.“That said, it is quite cool that the gathering skills that fuel it are shared across characters on your account, as is the account-wide Roster level that raises the baseline for how powerful every character on your account starts out as. That means starting a new class doesn’t feel like going all the way back to square one. When I put aside my Striker main and started a Shadowhunter alt, the leveling process was far speedier than I’d remembered it, and I also achieved some extra progress for my Striker, who became more powerful simply because the Roster level went up a few notches in his absence. The only annoyance is that Lost Ark doesn’t apply Roster level rewards automatically, so if you aren’t paying attention you might just miss the menu where you need to claim the Roster level rewards for the individual character you’re currently playing as.Microtransaction ReactionAs is the trend in other MMORPGs, Lost Ark is free to play – though it does dabble with power-boosting pay-to-win mechanics a bit more than most. For example, you can pay real money to buy Royal Crystals, which function as the primary currency in the in-game store where you can buy cosmetic mounts and skins. Skins seem to vary wildly in cost (going no higher than 2,400 Royal Crystals at the moment), but mounts seem to cost somewhere in the ballpark between 1400-1700 Royal Crystals – roughly $14-17 USD.Then there are regular Crystals, which can be earned through quests and high-end content like raids – but can currently be purchased with Royal Crystals at an exchange rate of 400 Crystals for 940 Royal Crystals or 200 Crystals for 470 Royal Crystals. That’s where the troublesome part comes in, because Crystals can be used to buy items like Phoenix Plumes that instantly revive you when you die (except for in PvP), making death irrelevant if you’re willing to spend roughly 25 real cents every time you go down. You can also purchase items that instantly complete certain repeatable daily quests, called Una’s Tasks, for you – as long as you’ve completed them before. That gives paying players a distinct advantage by decreasing the amount of time they’ll need to wait in order to get major payouts of another type of ingame currency, called Una’s Tokens. These special coins are used to trade for Gold, the main currency that is spent on high-level gear and traded between players at the Market Board and Auction House in each major city.Those are some undoubtedly questionable applications for a real-money currency. That said, it is neat that you can also use regular Crystals to buy the Crystalline Aura, a sort of subscription package that grants you major benefits to Lost Ark’s crafting, gathering, NPC schmoozing, and stronghold-building systems for a limited time upon activation. That means you can get many of its paid perks without spending a dime on Royal Crystals or buying one of Lost Ark’s several Founders Packs.As I mentioned before, most of the meat of Lost Ark’s story unfolds in instanced events and dungeons, both of which feature tons of elaborate cutscenes that fit seamlessly with all the hacking and slashing you spend much of your time participating in. Some of these moments are absolutely breathtaking, such as the aforementioned King’s Tomb or the battle of the Glorious Wall wherein you climb atop a siege tower and bang on a war drum, rallying your troops before landing on the battlements of the castle you and your NPC buds are sieging. It was a great feeling to be dropped directly into the thick of combat as the camera panned around the battlefield from above, and it sticks in my head as not just a standout moment of Lost Ark but one of the more memorable highlights of any video game I’ve ever played.That said, you’re required to grind your way to a certain gear level before you can see the very end of the story, and that’s a drag. There’s a way to bypass some of the grind by unlocking and completing the northern continent, Shushire, but if you just want to stick to the much simpler combat-focused, wave-based Chaos Dungeons, you’re limited to only two runs per day. Since you’ll only find gear sporadically, that’s hardly enough to ensure a full set of endgame-suited equipment on your first run, or even your first several runs. It’s a big hill to climb.
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