Monark, the “new school RPG” from former Megami Tensei and Shin Megami Tensei staff, will launch for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and Switch on October 14 in Japan.
The story follows the True Student Council, which was established to solve the abnormal situations in the school. The protagonist, who becomes the deputy head of the council, chooses a buddy from four characters to defy the unreasonable.
The main story has multiple endings. There are different routes for each of the four buddy characters. To make multiple playthroughs easier, you can also skip shared routes and advance through different buddy routes.
Battles are command-based with a free move turn system. Increasing your madness will allow you to use more powerful skills, but if you increase it too much, you will go insane and rampage against targets both friend and foe, making it impossible to fight.
There is also an “EGO” system, which represents the player’s desire levels of pride, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth....
Monark can be seen as a good opportunity to try something new in an ocean of stale JRPG tropes, especially for the players who enjoy tactical thinking and resource management gameplay.
Monark has a refreshing battle system that will appeal to turn-based strategy gamers, but the dated graphics and overall redundancy make it a hard game to recommend at its full asking price. As with the game's dangerous Mist, enter with caution.
Despite its flaws, Monark is not such a bad experience. Admittedly, it is not very pretty, a little heavy, but quite enjoyable. And while it's true that the real interest lies only in the combat system and its riches, that seems enough to draw attention to the title.
Monark is a game that boasts a solid foundation with some really good ideas and fun combat. It’s lack of polish, however, means this game is likely destined to be more of a cult favorite as opposed to a big hit. It’s a shame as the story alone is worth the journey. If you like an old-school 3D JRPG with interesting gameplay and don’t mind budget visuals,...
Monark has a solid combat system that combines great tactical elements with turned-based action. There is way too much grinding throughout the game that may turn off players who aren’t fans of the genre. But as a whole Monark does present some great ideas that will intrigue newcomers to the genre but nothing groundbreaking for JRPG veterans.
