YMMV / Lost Ark

• Breather Boss: After Velganos, the hardest Guardian fight currently in the game, comes Deskaluda. Not only is Deskaluda far easier, it also uses five different abilities that you can use counterattacks on. This makes it perfect practice for Valtan, another much harder fight that is also reliant on players countering properly.
• Ensemble Dark Horse
  • Thar in the Vern continent has proven to be a rather popular NPC due to his cool design, awesome moments, and willingness to swallow his pride and do mundane work for the greater good as shown in Rania Village.
  • Technologist Krause is pretty popular due to his sympathetic motives and backstory, as well as having a cool, challenging boss fight.
  • Some of the female characters certainly have their own following, such as Sasha and Blackfang, due to their parts in the story and their Ms. Fanservice designs.
• Game-Breaking Bug: For awhile, progression in the game was impossible because the player could not enter a story mandated dungeon in the Candaria region.
• Nightmare Fuel: The North Vern arc is surprisingly dark compared to what came before it. Between Sigmund's brutal attack on Port Krona, rampaging monsters and undead, entire villages being slaughtered (with aftermaths you can see), enemies with heavy Body Horror in the final region, and Sigmund's nightmarish One-Winged Angel form, its one of the darkest portions of the game.
  • Luterra Neria's Rapport questline revolves around a crazed stalker who sends her threatening letters while poisoning anyone he feels is getting too close to her. Its pretty unnerving.
  • Metus Island. It is an ominous island located in Dead Waters. You arrive to find a crew shipwrecked there and most of them scared out of their wits, screaming about demons and ghosts. The captain soon tells what he knows about the place and you play as an unarmed investigator in a haunted mansion filled with specters, ghouls, a giant Butcher, and a little girl possessed by a demon. All you have to defend and guide yourself is one lantern and the benevolent spirit of the girl's sister. It is essentially a horror story from start to finish complete with creepy atmosphere, music, and jump scares. Then it turns out the girl's sister is Evil All Along in the end, shatters the investigator's lantern at a crucial moment, and the investigator gets Eaten Alive by the demon-possessed girl.
  • Kakul-Saydon's return in Punika. His skin and outfit are bleached black and white, his eyes are empty, pitch black holes that constantly leak black tears, and despite his card calling this form his "Sane" self, he's actually more demented and ruthless than he was in East Luterra! Its especially jarring considering that the Punika arc takes place after Feiton and is considerably Lighter and Softer until he appears.
• The Scrappy: A large portion of the playerbase heavily dislikes Armen. He has a big Spotlight-Stealing Squad tendency where the player will suddenly suffer from Cutscene Incompetence and get knocked flat on their ass, allowing Armen to swoop in to save the day, even if in the prior battle the player was mechanically winning with no issues. For most of Luterra, the player feels like Armen's assistant rather than the protagonist. And his arc is about his insecurities about being a Delain, a half human/half demon, and how he feels that it makes him a monster, but this generally comes across as Wangst since major allies such as Thirain accept him for who he is. It is especially so with Assassin PCs, as they are Delains who have fully mastered their demonic side with no baggage associated with it. Sufficed to say, rather than feel sad, those players were very happy when Armen pulls a Face–Heel Turn and joined the demons as it meant that they no longer had to deal with him for the most part.
• That One Boss: Quite a few of the Guardians in the last of their Tier are essentially this, being considerably tougher than the previous Guardians. It has gotten to the point where some of them have been nerfed to make them slightly easier.
  • Vertus is the last of the first tier of Guardians and is essentially a Wake-Up Call Boss for those starting out in Guardian Raids. Ur'nil, Lumerus, and Icy Legoros all have relatively simple and few mechanics to deal with. In comparison, Vertus is able to CC players with quite a few of its attacks, such as its 360 degree tail spin and its tail swipe (Pre-nerf). It is also able to dive into the ice and chase after a player before bursting out for massive damage, potentially oneshotting said player if they don't successfully avoid it. Vertus is also able to grab a player with practically zero windup, slamming them down repeatedly before hurling them into the air and breathing icy fire on them, killing or heavily damaging them depending on their gear. Teammates can free the trapped player if they manage to stagger Vertus, but it's easier said than done.
  • Tytalos is the last Guardian of the second tier and is the first Guardian with a oneshot wipe mechanic that is somewhat tricky to avoid. It will periodically summon sand cyclones which slow and debuff players caught in them before freezing them when the debuff reaches three stacks. However, being frozen also renders a player invincible for a time. Players have to freeze themselves at the right time in order to survive Tytalos' Annihilation attack or pretty much die. Tytalos also has several other attacks in his arsenal that aren't easy to contend with, such as AoE attacks that lock ability use for several seconds.
  • Achates is the final Guardian in the third tier. While its oneshot ability is relatively easy to avoid, it makes up for it with a shield mechanic. Players have to destroy statues that spawn while Achates is invincible and throw the matching colored cube twice onto the shield to shatter it. Then they must break his wings with Destruction. If the players fail to break the wings or are too slow in breaking the shield, Achates will enrage and debuff the players' damage massively every time he roars until he is staggered.
  • Velganos is often considered one of the most difficult fights in the entire section of the game where he comes up. While he's just a normal Guardian, he has two wipe mechanics, massive ranged attacks, high mobility and a complex light buff/dark debuff system set up that makes it very difficult without good communication and cooperation. In the second part of the fight, his attacks get even harder to dodge and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up the buffs needed to do reasonable damage. As such, most people typically end up relying on carries to get it done a single time and then farming the much easier Night Fox Yoho, who has worse drops but only takes about five minutes and is of little threat to a competent party.
• That One Level
  • The Isle of Yearning Island Soul is a very rare drop acquired through opening a bag that is itself a pretty rare drop from an enemy with only two spawn locations on a single island. Most players do not even bother coming to this island as a result because it's actually rare for people to get it with less than a hundred hours of farming.
  • Metus has the opposite issue. It's a storyline generated Island Soul, meaning you don't have to rely on RNG drops, but it's the result of an annoying stealth mission that takes twenty to thirty minutes to handle, has to be started over from from the very beginning if you make any mistakes and has some rather unforgiving mechanics. Notably, the only means of self defense on this island is a lamp that both has limited fuel and doesn't even kill the weakest island enemies 100% of the time. Even though the enemies don't hit hard, if you get caught in a corner or stuck behind a door that needs to be opened and have no fuel, you'll die and need to start all over. It's not a hard island, but it's a frustrating and stressful one.
  • For main story chapters, Yorn tends to be pretty unpopular due to the dull writing and the story not really seeming very connected to the greater story arc. Other players who don't mind Yorn instead refer to Rohendel as Rohenhell instead for how long the area takes and how little of it seems to actually matter much, such as having to stop what you're doing to feed an Owlbear that refuses to get out of your way.
  • Vykas is generally the least popular Legion Raid and the first to be dropped when players have the chance. The first gate is fine, but in the second gate the boss moves around constantly and uses very annoying attack patterns. The third gate is also criticized for simply bouncing from mech to mech to mech and just being generally obnoxious. While G1 Valtan is about as disliked as G2 Vykas - they have similar issues in just being annoying fights - Valtan himself remains a fun fight and is thus much less likely to be dropped than Vykas.
• The Woobie
  • Beatrice in Trixion. One of the Lazeniths punished for their bringing of the Ark to save the mortal races during the Chain War, Beatrice kept her wings but was punished by Regulus to watch over the mortal world from Trixion without being able to leave or interfere. She has been there for centuries. Worse, she reveals to the player that she suffers from nightmares which turn out to be prophetic visions that always come true. Thankfully, the player can avert these events before they occur and give her hope that the future can be changed as they raise their Rapport with her.