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Lost Ark’s Mokoko island is a great example of the game at its bestA little tangent
A little tangent
This article contains spoilers for Lost Ark’s main questline.
Lost Arkis a very silly game, but not in the way it initially seems. For its first 15 hours or so, Smilegate’s ARPG is like someone described Lord of the Rings to the developers through a door, an overblown yet generic riff on Western fantasy tropes with overdesigned yet underwritten characters, all of whom talk about the game’s plainly ridiculous lore with the gravity of a neutron star. The game’s ignorance of its own absurdity is funny, but the story itself is not much fun.
This begins to change once you approach level 50. After completing the continent of East Luterra, Lost Ark suddenly explodes in scale. It gives you a ship, and sets you off on a massive globetrotting adventure, with around a dozen other continents to explore, and dozens more tiny islands, each with their own little questlines. Your first destination across Lost Ark’s ocean is an island called Tortoyk (pronounced like “Tortoise”, but with a K), and it’s here where the game stops pretending to be a serious high-fantasy adventure, revealing itself to be something much more entertaining.
Lost Ark: Launch Gameplay TrailerWatch on YouTube
Lost Ark: Launch Gameplay Trailer
At first, Tortoyk seems like a typical Lost Ark zone, albeit sunnier. You walk around the jungle, smash a few pirates, and wade through a river of exclamation marks ticking off the game’s typically rudimentary quests. Then Mokamoka gives you a quest to create a potion, and when you drink it, your character shrinks down to Mokoko size.
Suddenly, the game shifts gear from a standard fantasy fare, into a whimsical borrowers-like adventure. The next zone sees you exploring the forest undergrowth, where flowers appear as tall as trees, and a pair of dropped spectacles seems the size of a car. From here, you travel to Mokoko Village, a delightfully designed adventure hub where the mokokos reside in houses made from leaves and use mushrooms as picnic tables. If that doesn’t communicate the vibe of the place, justlisten to the soundtrackfor Mokoko Village, possibly the jauntiest tune ever composed.
Your tiny adventures don’t last through the whole continent, sadly. But Lost Ark compensates for this with a neat concept reversal. Tortoyk, it transpires, isn’t actually an island, but is the sleeping form of an enormous rock creature that the mokokos worship as a god, Xenoblade style. To reach the Ark that you are seeking (there are seven in the game), you need to wake him up. Hence, throughout the continent you have this gradual escalation in scale, from fighting insects in the undergrowth to awakening a god.
Does Tortoyk make it worth pressing through the less interesting opening areas of Lost Ark? Probably not on its own. But Tortoyk isn’t the first cool thing to happen in Lost Ark. There are plenty of impressively crafted dungeons and zones before this, as well as a massive battle against an army of clowns (as I said, Lost Ark is a silly game). Tortoyk is simply the point at which the game fully embraces that silliness. It becomes less of a Diablo knockoff and more like an ARPG Mario, with you jumping between weird and colourful worlds that may not have much logical connection, but are so much fun to explore that it simply doesn’t matter.
