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Written by Patrick Orquia
Title: Monark
Developer: FuRyu
Publisher: NIS America
Genre: JRPG
Number of Players: 1
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: 22 February 2022
Price: $59.99
What comes to your mind when you encounter the term “JRPG”? As many of us know, it stands for Japanese Role-Playing Game, since they mostly originate from Japan and have uniquely Japanese characteristics and aesthetics. For me, I expect a JRPG to take many hours to complete, with an expansive story and cast of character, with many twists and turns in the plot. That usually equates to a real good way to spend your time playing and a good bang for your buck.
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I don’t usually play JRPGs too much nowadays, since I’m not getting any younger and the time I spend for playing games can be hard to come by. But I had some wonderful time playing some JRPGs in the past, like Xenoblade Chronicles 3D, which I played and beat for more than 100 hours on my 3DS. Its sequel, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 which got released on Switch, is also a long one, and I have clocked about 50 hours playing it, and I still have not reached the midpoint of it. I am also finished with Octopath Traveler, with more than 100 hours of play time.
So yeah, JRPGs are long and could be very tedious to play, depending on the story and content and gameplay. The subject of this review, Monark, is a new JRPG from FuRyu and published by NIS America that is long and full of twists and turns and a rather complex gameplay. I read somewhere that it is somewhat comparable to the gameplay of the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona games. That is actually how my editor introduced the game to me. “Hey, do you want to review a game similar to Persona?” he asked. But I have yet to play any of the SMT and Persona games, so I really have no idea what it is about, other than it will probably take a long time to complete. Anyway, I accepted and played the game.
I actually first heard about the game some weeks prior, and I saw the trailer of it. I found the trailer a bit convoluted, and honestly, I was not too keen to pay it. But good thing I did, because the game somehow grew on me as I played it.
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Before anything else, I have to commend its performance on the Nintendo Switch. It looks good, with a stereotypical anime look which is usually used on JRPGs. The music is also good, especially during battles, plus the voice acting is top-notch. Indeed, it is quite obvious that FuRyu did great work in developing the game.
In this game, you play as a student from the Shin Mikado Academy. You wake up with your school engulfed with mist, after losing an unwinnable battle, sort of a prologue intro of what you can expect in the game. Students cannot leave, and those who have succumbed to the mists are now in a trance-like state and referred to in-game as “Unsettled”. Some of them will try to attack you and will cause your MAD gauge to reach max level, which means game over for you, and you will have to start all the way from the infirmary. The MAD gauge goes up gradually the more you explore your mist-filled surroundings. Anway, the mist originates from the Otherworld, a dimension where creatures called daemons roam free. Powerful daemons that personify the seven deadly sins, called Monarks, have made pacts with humans in the real world, referred to as Pactbearers.
You meet one of these Monarks, called Vanitas, very early in the game. He reveals that you are one of the Pactbearers yourself, the Pactbearer of Vanity, to be exact. You are tasked to defeat all the other Pactbearers to free the school, and in order to do that, you have to travel to the Otherworld to face your daemons. Vanitas also provides you some key expositional information to move the story forward. To further assist you with the game, he gives you a smartphone where you can access different menus for character customization, in-game help guide, student profiles, game saving, etc.
To reach the Otherworld from the real, you have to locate a bunch of mobile phones ringing, which can be located at the end of puzzles that you have to complete. Taking the call while you are near them transports you to the Otherworld, and here, you can face the daemons in battle. Reaching these mobile phones is not as easy as going from point A to point B. As previously mentioned, you will have to solve some area puzzles, collect some reading materials that will provide you clues or additional details for the game’s lore, and other info. You will also have to interact with Unsettled NPCs with varying degree of madness. Those that are fully mad, identified with red glowing eyes, should be avoided at all cost, as getting near them will instantaneously max out your MAD gauge, resulting to instant game over.
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The Pactbearers are located at different areas of the school. You have to first destroy their Ideals, which are represented by large crystals in the Otherworld, before you can have the chance to go to battle against the Pactbearers and the Monark they are aligned to. Defeating them will get rid of the mist and free the area they rule over. To destroy these Ideals, you have to battle against daemons in the Otherworld and defeat them.
The combat mechanics is pretty much the only straightforward aspect of the game. You have to defeat all of the enemies to survive. During battles, you have your Art and Authority skills. Art skills are your basic attacks, like slashing enemies, etc. They consume a bit of your HP, by the way, so you have to think things through before attacking. Authority skills raise your MAD gauge. Some Authority skills get more powerful the higher your MAD gauge is, but you should be careful as maxing out your MAD gauge will make your character lose control, like in berserk mode. They may attack other members of your party, and the kicker is after 3 turns, they will die. If it is your main character, game over for you.
By the way, the battles are turn-based, and you have to position your characters to within striking distance of your enemies before you can act. If there is another party member within range, they will assist you in attacking during that turn, referred in-game as an Assist Attack. If you choose not to attack during a turn, you may opt to either Wait, which heals a bit of your HP, or Defer, which will let another character within range to go for an extra turn in exchange of raising that character’s MAD gauge a bit. Human characters can also opt to Resolve, which raises the Awakening gauge. Max it out and you enter the Awakened state, which raises all of your stats and all Art and Authority moves are free for three turns, very useful in battle, especially against bosses.
Once you have destroyed an Ideal of a Pactbearer in a given area, that area will get freed, dissipating the mist and allowing your character to freely move. Again, you have to destroy all the Ideals of a Pactbearer before you can go head-to-head with the Pactbearer themselves. Defeating a Pactbearer will completely free the area in which he has Authority. Then you have to go to another area in the school to repeat the process.
Still keeping up? Yes, the game has a lot of different concepts and terminologies that can take some time to get used to. You may consult the in-game manual to review these terms and game mechanics for you to understand them better, and that would mean having to go through walls of text on readings. Just like going to school, maybe just a tad less boring and with better-looking students. The best way to see the mechanics in action is though battles. Then you can come up with different strategies to give you the best advantage in battle.
The gameplay is pretty decent, albeit having the tendency to get very tedious, especially near the end. You have to solve puzzles to reach the otherworld to destroy Ideals to destroy Pactbearers. The path doing all those are never a straight line, though. This game is very long and often longwinded in its narrative. It can take about 80 hours to beat the game, with much of that play time used for grinding.
Winning battles rewards you with Spirit Points, and each battle is ranked depending on how you perform. The higher the rank, the higher the SP. These SPs are used to acquire new skills and abilities, and acquiring such will level up your character. By the way, the SP pool is shared with the entire party, so it may be necessary for you to re-play past battles to get higher ranks to get more SP. Aside from SPs, you also get loots from defeated enemies, which may be consumables such as health potions or gear for robotic companions, referred in-game as fiends. These fiends are the extra characters that you can bring to battle alongside the protagonist and another companion, which varies depending on the point you are in in the story.
There is quite an expansive group of characters that you will meet along the way. Most are just NPCs that get automatically added to your smartphone database, which you can then look up later for additional info and clues. The rest are playable characters that will join your party. Most of these will leave once their part of the story is completed and they get replaced with a new one. Once they join your party, you will then have to level them up so that they will be useful in battle. There is no option to release Spirit points used on other characters who have left your party, though, so if you need more SP, you will have to replay battles and grind to get the SP that you need.
Each character has their own skill trees. The more advanced the skill, the more SP is needed for it to be unlocked. As previously mentioned, unlocking skills is the only way for the characters to leveled up. And since battles get more and more difficult as you progress, you have to level up your characters to get a better chance in winning battles with higher rank (the higher the rank, the more SP you get). You can also get SP from some of the glowing blue orbs that you collect from the environment. You can also have Vanitas dismantle items and equipment that are no longer used, but really, the bulk of them can be won from battles. So, you really have to grind your way to victory on this game.
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Overall, Monark is good, fun game, with good performance on this Switch version, large cast of characters, good overall aesthetics. I, however, am not much a fun of it, as I would prefer a much more action-driven game with less talking and more kicking and magicking or whatever is typically found on other JRPGs. If I would spend a long time playing a game, it better be worth my while. Anyway, for the rest of the JRPG fandom, this may be their cup of tea, as this game has some quite an interesting story with lots of intrigues and plot twists that will entice them to play more, if you can readily understand the story, that is. I wish I liked it more, I know I tried, but I think there are much better JRPGs out there, like the aforementioned Xenoblade Chronicle games or Astral Chain or even the Final Fantasy games. I think they are more exciting to play and are more straight to the point. I’m not a fan of meandering narratives with cryptic dialogues and overly complicated game mechanics. If you want to give it a try but still on the fence, maybe play the demo first (your save will transfer over to the actual game if you decide to buy it later on) or maybe wait for a sale. Either way, if you think this game is for you, you will probably have a great time with it
REPLAY VALUE: High
PROS
CONS
Number of Players: 1
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: 22 February 2022
Price: $59.99
What comes to your mind when you encounter the term “JRPG”? As many of us know, it stands for Japanese Role-Playing Game, since they mostly originate from Japan and have uniquely Japanese characteristics and aesthetics. For me, I expect a JRPG to take many hours to complete, with an expansive story and cast of character, with many twists and turns in the plot. That usually equates to a real good way to spend your time playing and a good bang for your buck.
.webp)
I don’t usually play JRPGs too much nowadays, since I’m not getting any younger and the time I spend for playing games can be hard to come by. But I had some wonderful time playing some JRPGs in the past, like Xenoblade Chronicles 3D, which I played and beat for more than 100 hours on my 3DS. Its sequel, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 which got released on Switch, is also a long one, and I have clocked about 50 hours playing it, and I still have not reached the midpoint of it. I am also finished with Octopath Traveler, with more than 100 hours of play time.
So yeah, JRPGs are long and could be very tedious to play, depending on the story and content and gameplay. The subject of this review, Monark, is a new JRPG from FuRyu and published by NIS America that is long and full of twists and turns and a rather complex gameplay. I read somewhere that it is somewhat comparable to the gameplay of the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona games. That is actually how my editor introduced the game to me. “Hey, do you want to review a game similar to Persona?” he asked. But I have yet to play any of the SMT and Persona games, so I really have no idea what it is about, other than it will probably take a long time to complete. Anyway, I accepted and played the game.
I actually first heard about the game some weeks prior, and I saw the trailer of it. I found the trailer a bit convoluted, and honestly, I was not too keen to pay it. But good thing I did, because the game somehow grew on me as I played it.
.webp)
In this game, you play as a student from the Shin Mikado Academy. You wake up with your school engulfed with mist, after losing an unwinnable battle, sort of a prologue intro of what you can expect in the game. Students cannot leave, and those who have succumbed to the mists are now in a trance-like state and referred to in-game as “Unsettled”. Some of them will try to attack you and will cause your MAD gauge to reach max level, which means game over for you, and you will have to start all the way from the infirmary. The MAD gauge goes up gradually the more you explore your mist-filled surroundings. Anway, the mist originates from the Otherworld, a dimension where creatures called daemons roam free. Powerful daemons that personify the seven deadly sins, called Monarks, have made pacts with humans in the real world, referred to as Pactbearers.
You meet one of these Monarks, called Vanitas, very early in the game. He reveals that you are one of the Pactbearers yourself, the Pactbearer of Vanity, to be exact. You are tasked to defeat all the other Pactbearers to free the school, and in order to do that, you have to travel to the Otherworld to face your daemons. Vanitas also provides you some key expositional information to move the story forward. To further assist you with the game, he gives you a smartphone where you can access different menus for character customization, in-game help guide, student profiles, game saving, etc.
To reach the Otherworld from the real, you have to locate a bunch of mobile phones ringing, which can be located at the end of puzzles that you have to complete. Taking the call while you are near them transports you to the Otherworld, and here, you can face the daemons in battle. Reaching these mobile phones is not as easy as going from point A to point B. As previously mentioned, you will have to solve some area puzzles, collect some reading materials that will provide you clues or additional details for the game’s lore, and other info. You will also have to interact with Unsettled NPCs with varying degree of madness. Those that are fully mad, identified with red glowing eyes, should be avoided at all cost, as getting near them will instantaneously max out your MAD gauge, resulting to instant game over.
.webp)
The Pactbearers are located at different areas of the school. You have to first destroy their Ideals, which are represented by large crystals in the Otherworld, before you can have the chance to go to battle against the Pactbearers and the Monark they are aligned to. Defeating them will get rid of the mist and free the area they rule over. To destroy these Ideals, you have to battle against daemons in the Otherworld and defeat them.
The combat mechanics is pretty much the only straightforward aspect of the game. You have to defeat all of the enemies to survive. During battles, you have your Art and Authority skills. Art skills are your basic attacks, like slashing enemies, etc. They consume a bit of your HP, by the way, so you have to think things through before attacking. Authority skills raise your MAD gauge. Some Authority skills get more powerful the higher your MAD gauge is, but you should be careful as maxing out your MAD gauge will make your character lose control, like in berserk mode. They may attack other members of your party, and the kicker is after 3 turns, they will die. If it is your main character, game over for you.
By the way, the battles are turn-based, and you have to position your characters to within striking distance of your enemies before you can act. If there is another party member within range, they will assist you in attacking during that turn, referred in-game as an Assist Attack. If you choose not to attack during a turn, you may opt to either Wait, which heals a bit of your HP, or Defer, which will let another character within range to go for an extra turn in exchange of raising that character’s MAD gauge a bit. Human characters can also opt to Resolve, which raises the Awakening gauge. Max it out and you enter the Awakened state, which raises all of your stats and all Art and Authority moves are free for three turns, very useful in battle, especially against bosses.
Once you have destroyed an Ideal of a Pactbearer in a given area, that area will get freed, dissipating the mist and allowing your character to freely move. Again, you have to destroy all the Ideals of a Pactbearer before you can go head-to-head with the Pactbearer themselves. Defeating a Pactbearer will completely free the area in which he has Authority. Then you have to go to another area in the school to repeat the process.
Still keeping up? Yes, the game has a lot of different concepts and terminologies that can take some time to get used to. You may consult the in-game manual to review these terms and game mechanics for you to understand them better, and that would mean having to go through walls of text on readings. Just like going to school, maybe just a tad less boring and with better-looking students. The best way to see the mechanics in action is though battles. Then you can come up with different strategies to give you the best advantage in battle.
The gameplay is pretty decent, albeit having the tendency to get very tedious, especially near the end. You have to solve puzzles to reach the otherworld to destroy Ideals to destroy Pactbearers. The path doing all those are never a straight line, though. This game is very long and often longwinded in its narrative. It can take about 80 hours to beat the game, with much of that play time used for grinding.
Winning battles rewards you with Spirit Points, and each battle is ranked depending on how you perform. The higher the rank, the higher the SP. These SPs are used to acquire new skills and abilities, and acquiring such will level up your character. By the way, the SP pool is shared with the entire party, so it may be necessary for you to re-play past battles to get higher ranks to get more SP. Aside from SPs, you also get loots from defeated enemies, which may be consumables such as health potions or gear for robotic companions, referred in-game as fiends. These fiends are the extra characters that you can bring to battle alongside the protagonist and another companion, which varies depending on the point you are in in the story.
There is quite an expansive group of characters that you will meet along the way. Most are just NPCs that get automatically added to your smartphone database, which you can then look up later for additional info and clues. The rest are playable characters that will join your party. Most of these will leave once their part of the story is completed and they get replaced with a new one. Once they join your party, you will then have to level them up so that they will be useful in battle. There is no option to release Spirit points used on other characters who have left your party, though, so if you need more SP, you will have to replay battles and grind to get the SP that you need.
Each character has their own skill trees. The more advanced the skill, the more SP is needed for it to be unlocked. As previously mentioned, unlocking skills is the only way for the characters to leveled up. And since battles get more and more difficult as you progress, you have to level up your characters to get a better chance in winning battles with higher rank (the higher the rank, the more SP you get). You can also get SP from some of the glowing blue orbs that you collect from the environment. You can also have Vanitas dismantle items and equipment that are no longer used, but really, the bulk of them can be won from battles. So, you really have to grind your way to victory on this game.
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Overall, Monark is good, fun game, with good performance on this Switch version, large cast of characters, good overall aesthetics. I, however, am not much a fun of it, as I would prefer a much more action-driven game with less talking and more kicking and magicking or whatever is typically found on other JRPGs. If I would spend a long time playing a game, it better be worth my while. Anyway, for the rest of the JRPG fandom, this may be their cup of tea, as this game has some quite an interesting story with lots of intrigues and plot twists that will entice them to play more, if you can readily understand the story, that is. I wish I liked it more, I know I tried, but I think there are much better JRPGs out there, like the aforementioned Xenoblade Chronicle games or Astral Chain or even the Final Fantasy games. I think they are more exciting to play and are more straight to the point. I’m not a fan of meandering narratives with cryptic dialogues and overly complicated game mechanics. If you want to give it a try but still on the fence, maybe play the demo first (your save will transfer over to the actual game if you decide to buy it later on) or maybe wait for a sale. Either way, if you think this game is for you, you will probably have a great time with it
REPLAY VALUE: High
PROS
- Cool visuals, despite being bland and repetitive on some areas
- Good music, especially during battles
- Decent character design and animation
- Excellent voice acting
- Game performance on Switch is good albeit with minor slowdowns
- Very good combat mechanics
CONS
- Overly complicated game mechanics
- Walls and walls of text
- Low variety of enemies
- Very slow pacing for the most part
- Long-winded dialogues during cutscenes
- Battles can drag for a long time
- Very grind-heavy
- Narrative can be hard to follow due to multiple terminologies and concepts being introduced especially during the first few hours
RATING: 3.5/5 phones and daemons
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