2.5/5 ★ – Gandheezy's review of MONARK.

I reviewed this game before launch with a free key from NIS America. It’s no secret that turn-based JRPGs are definitely not my favorite genre. Unless there’s great visuals to hold it up, like Persona 5, or an unforgettable story, as in Yakuza Like a Dragon, or Bulbasaur is there, I don’t tend to get very far with them. Typically, I find turn based combat to be too slow for my liking and I start to lose attention. I say all this so that when I tell you the turn-based combat is the best part of Monark, you’ll understand how disappointingly mediocre the rest of the game is. Monark is a new JRPG from Lancarse Studios, and right from the start it wears its inspirations from Shin Megami Tensei and the Persona series on its sleeve. In fact, there is a connection to those games, but it’s tenuous at best. Ryutaro Ito, a co-writer of some of the Shin Megami Tensei Games, did work on scenario planning for Monark. Unfortunately, after nearly 3 decades of superior SMT and Persona games that have followed those titles, that’s just not enough. Monark’s story, while intriguing at the beginning, falls flat very quickly. The player character awakens in a locked down school with no memories as a madness-inducing mist obscures the upper floors, trapping students in insanity loops. A teacher who knows way too much about the Otherworld and offers no explanation as to how info dumps a lot of unneeded background information is to the player. Meanwhile, the answers to questions I had in an attempt to understand the story were met with “It’s not the right time to talk about that.” The characters aren’t too memorable, and the ones that I do remember feel very flat. Nozomi, your first companion, is the former Student Council President and now President of the secret True Student Council (more on that later). Her only personality traits are that she panics easily and feels that she is unfit to lead. I’m inclined to agree with her. Even by the end of the first chapter, her character doesn’t seem to have grown at all; she just has her old position back. Chiyo, the protagonist’s sister, is an anime little sister. That’s about it. Vanitas is probably the most notable character, as the protagonist’s Monark (see: persona), but he might already be my least favorite character in all of video games. He speaks almost exclusively in rhyming couplets, until he switches to unmetered alliteration, then back again with no pattern. The English voice actor for this character seems to be going for Josh Gad as Olaf, which maybe doesn’t work for this demon who bestows otherworldly powers to you. The basic setup of the game is that the upper floors of each building, each of which serve as the home of a different boss representing each of the seven deadly sins, are covered in mist. While traversing misted floors, you and your companion gain MAD points, and at 100% MAD your character dies. Essentially, the misted floors are the dungeon and your sanity is the resource that will cause you to retreat eventually and regroup. MAD increases over time, regardless of what you’re doing, so it’s not like Persona where you can gauge your SP usage carefully to spend longer in the dungeon. At the beginning of each floor, you receive a call on your smartphone that transfers you to the otherworld, where all combat takes place. I will compliment the combat system in Monark, as it lives somewhere between traditional turn based RPG combat and a tactics game like Fire Emblem, and it finds a happy medium there. I must unfortunately reveal to you now that there is only one enemy in the game, and that is this skeleton. Sometimes the skeletons have different weapons - one has a bow, one has a sword, one has a big sword, etc. I will never complain about enemy variety in another game ever again. Outside of the actual bosses, it’s just skeletons all the way down. In addition, the third party member of your team is not a third person, but yet another of the same Skeleton. At least yours gets a fun haircut, I guess. Combat utilizes a number of stats, such as agility and luck, and a combination of ranged and melee spells and attacks that have a radius and percentage chance to hit. Each of your basic attacks can be performed for free, while Authorities (spells) increase your MAD gauge. There’s a second gauge called Awakening that slowly powers up during combat, that you can also add to by using Resolve to wait out your turn. Becoming Awakened drastically increases your attack power, but if you can manage to reach 100% madness on the same turn you reach awakening, you’ll reach enlightenment. I was not able to pull this off but theoretically it’d make you unstoppable for a few turns. Poison pods, healing fields, and breakable obstacles can be scattered around the field to add another layer of strategy. Altogether I actually had fun in combat - but there’s of course another issue. Getting into combat in the first place. On each floor you’re guaranteed two battles, one when you reach the floor and one at the end. Outside of that, encounters can only be triggered by pulling out your smartphone and dialing random phone numbers and hoping you get lucky. That’s right. At level 4, I stood next to Vanitas as instructed and dialed random numbers several times. Each time, I was pulled into a battle with level 99 enemies and forced to flee. So there’s no grinding in this game; you essentially only can fight during the assigned combat sequences. If you’re not strong enough for a battle, tough shit. Figure it out. Your character's base stats are the seven deadly sins. You’ll stat your character at the beginning by answering a personality test, which was a fun feature I appreciated. There are random students that ask personality test questions scattered around the school too, and answering those nets you additional stat points. Encounters will buff your stats but not in a way that’s made clear - when I finished a battle I’d see that I gained 7 lust points and had no idea why. There’s also a pretty basic skill tree that unlocks attacks. While there are a few passives on there, I didn’t see nearly enough. You only need so many attacks. The only gear upgrades that are available are actually for your skeleton friend, or fiend, And you can equip different kinds of headgear, armor, and footwear to boost their stats and give them new abilities. This is a key element that should be underlined, because you will definitely come up against a difficulty barrier fast if you're not upgrading your skeleton. This is sort of a broad reaching statement, and I have to preface this by saying that I love a lot of lower budget and smaller games. Most of them, even. But I don't know that I've played a game in a long time that FEELS This low budget. The animations are pretty stiff, the art is unremarkable, The textures are blurry even on the PS5 version, And the English voice acting is so stilted I'm beginning to suspect the actors literally phoned it in. In addition, the voice acting consistently feels like it's being paced inordinately with long intervals of silence between lines. It reminds me a bit of the problems I have with Kingdom hearts 3's VA. The entire game is themed heavily around the human mind, but none of those themes seem to mean anything or relate to the story in a meaningful way. It’s all set dressing. At this point I cannot figure out how or why the seven deadly sins fit into the story other than that they were a cool thing in FullMetal Alchemist. Characters will drone on about the power of the mind, the ego, pseudoscience about brainwashing and control, but they never actually say anything. And this is a hard thing to quantify but I almost don't feel as if I've actually been playing the game - More that it's just a bunch of textures and sounds that I'm interacting with sometimes. None of it feels real or lived in. It’s an issue that persists through a lot of the game, all the way through the six or so hours that I played. Monark creates the most inorganic means imaginable of keeping the player on a linear path. There will be student guards at certain doors that just repeat “you can’t go in there” with no further explanation. Open stairwells are inaccessible because “It’s not the right time to go here.” The story is about as linear as it gets, which isn’t a detriment to it, but the game steers you through the linear areas in such an outright obvious way I found myself sighing exasperatedly every few minutes. Some of the stairs are barricaded, indicating you can’t go that way, and others will just be open with an invisible barrier and no explanation. I haven’t talked about the music yet, which, following its spiritual predecessor Shin Megami Tensei, does actually slap. Unfortunately, most of the overall package comes together to create a very mediocre RPG. Almost nothing about it is noteworthy, and it’s not even exceptionally bad - it’s just forgettable at every turn. Anything that you’re looking for in Monark is being done better by a dozen other games you can play right now instead. I recommend this game only for hardcore JRPG fans who loved similar games from NIS America, like the Caligula series, and can ignore the poor craftsmanship. Anyone who has taken an interest in Monark because of its relation to Shin Megami Tensei and Persona, give it a pass.