Yep gonna be giving my impressions on Lost Ark in this one. This is NOT review, while I have given reviews for MMOs in the past (namely FFXIV) it was mostly individual expansions rather than the game as a whole. But anyway this will be split in two; the good and the bad, I'll also have a shot of my Lost Ark character as well.

So the good, or the section of things I like.

There's actually quite a bit I like. Most notable is the combat in it, I find the combat to be really enjoyable from the classes I played using the teaser you get after character creation. In fact I've found something I like in all but one of the classes be it the speed and combo ability of one of the assassin classes (I can't remember their names,) or the magic of the sorceress. The story is also a good one, if a bit basic. But after playing through Endwalker a simple magical Macguffin hunt is a nice change of pace. And while I'm not necessarily a fan of ARPGs they are absolutely one of the best ways to do massive set pieces in cutscenes, I've seen two of them both involving sieges and they are amazing cinematics as the devs can cram an absolute shitload of NPCs into these cutscenes. Additionally the way they designed the sidequests cuts down on the back tracking as the quests finish near the next main story NPC so you can do them on your way to each story point.

I also like that they have separate EXP sets, one for the character called Combat EXP and one for all your characters called Roster EXP, this I feel actually incentivises alts and as an altoholic I very much approve. It's annoying having to do everything from scratch again, especially if it's something grindy.

Now the bad, or things I don't like.

I have to address the elephant in the room (and something I dedicated an entire entry to) and that is the censorship and blackwashing. As far as I'm concerned both of these are unacceptable, I consider video games to be art and forcing the creators to change that art to satisfy some self righteous wank stains on twitter is evil. It's like painting over the Mona Lisa because it's some Italian chick in the painting rather than a black one and the most insulting part? This censorship and blackwashing has been done in a half assed manner, the textures used for the now black characters (changes made to "appeal" to the Western audience, when I guarantee you the regular game doesn't give two shits about that and just wants a good game) are garbage and look MORE racist than if you just left the characters as is, same with the censorship. I have no issues if all my characters, male and female, are covered head to toe in awesome looking armour (hell my favourite glamour set in FFXIV is basically a full suit of armour) but all they did was change the female character's skin colour for the bits of armour that would show exposed skin example here (female martial artist:)

It's not just the censorship either, the actual localisation is pretty bad too. The voice acting for Armen and Thirain (two of the central characters for the first part of the game) is pretty good but the rest is mediocre to outright terrible. There's a tutorial NPC when you get access to sailing and her VA not only sounds bored but she also sounds like she's been given no direction, there's weird pauses in her sentences and the whole thing sounds pretty stilted. This wouldn't be too much of an issue but this NPC by virtue of being a tutorial NPC has to do A LOT of talking. There's also instances of the spoken dialogue not matching the text as well, not a major thing but when taken in addition to the other issues with the localisation (like the poor lip synching) it's clear to see that this localisation was half assed, it feels like the localisation team was split between actually localising the game (translating from Korean to English and giving the VAs even basic direction) and making pointless changes to appease people who would never play the game in the first place.

That's the localisation over and done with so what else don't I like? Well it's the genderlocking of the classes, I do not like genderlocking classes yes I'm one of those people who chooses to play a female character in an MMO but what happens if I want to play as a male assassin? (Which I did in Guild Wars, I loved my assassin in Guild Wars) but I'm stuck without the option to choose to do that. Same with sorceress, what if I wanted to play as a really beardy Gandalf looking dude rather than a cute elf? It's something I don't like in Black Desert and I don't like it here either. I like having choices and luckily I'm not one of those picky players who will ONLY play male or will ONLY play female characters but it still feels like a good chunk of the playerbase is getting locked out of those classes because they are picky.

So to wrap up, overall I do actually like the game most of my complaints are about cosmetic stuff and nitpicks. The core gameplay is good, the music is good and the graphics are actually really nice, however the negatives are enough to make me not want to spend money on this free to play game. I also don't see why it had to be an MMO outside of greed (although if it wasn't and with all the changes forced on it by Amazon I wouldn't have bothered, I've still not even farted in the general direction of Persona 5 Royale) as it would be a perfectly good regular ARPG.

I honestly don't think Amazon Game Studios are a good publisher, they fucked up New World and they've fucked up Lost Ark. I said in my last entry about this game that Smilegate (the devs) could have gotten just about any publisher in the world to publish this game but it ended up being the fuckups at AGS who didn't learn from their issues with New World so it resulted in the first week or so of the game's Western release being a shitshow of server issues. Amazon is probably the richest company in the world but they should just stick to what they're good at and let actual game companies and publishers publish these games.

Anyway sexy assassin lady in the spoiler below.