Video Game Review: Monark

Developer: LANCARSE

Publisher: FuRyu and NIS America

Genre: Strategy JRPG

Reviewed On: PlayStation 5

Also Available for: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Windows

The most disappointing games to review, dear reader, are not the ones that are just out and out bad; no, it is the games that could have been very good if not for a few key elements that hurt the most. Today I’ll be talking about one such game, a game where the gameplay and story are excellent crafted but poorly balanced to such an egregious degree that the entire experience becomes a slog and it’s almost not worth seeing through to the end.

The Basics: Monark is a strategy JRPG themed after both chess and the seven deadly sins. The game takes place in a Japanese high school trapped inside a supernatural bubble, confining its students and staff on campus along with madness-inducing mist and several “Pactbearers,” humans who’ve made deals with Daemons for powerful and dangerous supernatural abilities. The player takes on the role of one of these Pactbearers – that of Vanity or Vainglory, which was originally one of the eight deadly sins but was later folded into Pride (though there is some debate as to whether it is actually closer to or an originator of Envy) – and is tasked with taking down the others in order to resolve the anomalies and release the barrier.  In order to do this, the protagonist must – what else? – work together with a ragtag group of eclectic students to battle Daemons in the Metaverse Otherworld and defeat all the baddies.

Business as usual, I suppose.

Despite being themed after chess, the game’s strategy battles do not in fact take place on a grid the way most SRPGs do, instead giving characters free movement within a radius around their starting point on a given turn. Instead, the chess theming is more about the aesthetic assigned to each of the five human party members (King, Queen, Knight, Bishop and Rook) and the generic pawn-like creatures you acquire throughout the story as well as a degree of justification for each characters’ abilities and role in combat if you squint. Monark does, unfortunately, employ the annoying trope of a game over occurring when the Protagonist falls in battle no matter how many of the rest of your party are still active, and while it makes a bit more sense than usual given how he’s the King piece, I am as baffled as ever that any game designer would choose to make that a part of their game.

Overall, however, it’s a fun and almost unique battle system – in fact, the only other game I can think of that used it is Lost Dimension, a previous title by the same developers. Units have a wide range of powers available to them, though most are fairly standard RPG fare: damaging spells, stat buffs, status afflictions, etc. The protagonist does have a fairly interesting skill called “Resonance” which allows him to form connections to both allies and enemies, sharing stat buffs/debuffs, status effects, and certain skills, which can lead to some pretty busted strategies once you figure out how to use it right. The high number of skills does get a bit annoying at later levels when you have to scroll through a dozen or more to find the one you actually want to use. There is at least some reprieve in that resonating units will typically pass the apparent threshold for skills to be divided into categories based on their effects, I just wish that threshold was lower so it would apply outside of resonance. In any case, all units are able to defer to their allies who have already acted, sacrificing their own turn in order to give it to another, more powerful or better situationally suited unit. This does, however, come at the cost of driving the unit being deferred to closer to the edge of madness, a special status effect which makes them both hit and take hits harder but also acts as a confusion state and automatically knocks them out after three turns. Madness is also accrued from using certain moves, which makes deferral a powerful but risky tool for the player, and I’m always a fan of some good risk-reward game design.

Units acquire and improve skills by way of a skill tree, and each time a skill is upgraded the unit in question gains a level up to a cap of 99, which each skill tree is designed to meet perfectly. It’s a cool way of doing things, if perhaps not quite as original as the combat system itself, but its also where my big gripe with the game comes up. The experience used for skills – called SPIRIT in the parlance of the game – is shared across all units, meaning the player has to be fairly thoughtful in how they decide to strengthen their party. At least, that’s what it would mean in an ideal world, but as things actually stand it just means that the game frequently turns into a grind-ridden slog. The amount of SPIRIT granted by any one battle is nowhere near enough to make your units strong enough to survive successive story battles, meaning that progress regularly comes to a screeching halt as the player completes the same scenarios over and over again until they can move forward. Having to do a few extra fights here and there would’ve been fine, but the reality is more like an hour or two of grinding at the start of each new chapter, and at some points even more frequently than that even on reduced difficulty.

The frustration of this is further compounded by the fact that each new character joins the party at level 1, so the process of making them at all viable tacks on further grinding in later parts of the game, to say nothing of the way characters are periodically phased in and out of the party with no passive leveling whenever they return. It also doesn’t help that many of the combat maps are way too big and spread out, so fights can take longer than they need to just because you have to spend two or three turns getting all your units in range for enemies to even start moving to engage you. Frankly, if I hadn’t been so invested in the story I’m not sure I would’ve bothered sticking it out to the end before writing this review.

So let’s talk about the writing a bit; it somehow simultaneously manages to be some of the best, realest, most visceral handling of some pretty heavy, sensitive subjects I’ve ever seen while also feeling extremely melodramatic in some very specifically anime-y ways. I genuinely don’t know how to elaborate on that and yet I am positive that anyone who plays the game will very quickly understand exactly what I’m talking about. There are, among other things, a very well written autistic character (albeit one for whom the word “autism” is never explicitly used) and one of the best and possibly only handlings of a character who projects his ideal image of a dream girl onto another character I’ve ever seen. And yet, even though these things strike a chord and feel very believable, there’s just something about them that still feels over the top without negating their believability. The generally high quality of the voice acting and real breadth of emotion the talent bring to the table certainly helps, though at the same time stiff animations (in particular the MC’s lifeless expressions and soundless mouth-flaps when a dialogue “option” is selected) have a tendency to make cutscenes feel a bit awkward visually. On the other hand, each boss fight comes with a unique battle theme – all part of a collaboration album produced in tandem with KAMITSUBAKI STUDIO and all of which are absolute bangers – and they all start playing towards the end of cutscenes immediately preceding said fights, which always feels incredibly hype.

I’ll admit that my opinion of Monark has swung back towards being a bit more positive again since I beat it, as more time comes between now and when I was miserably grinding out levels just to beat the dang thing, but even so I still find myself disappointed by its wasted potential. It’s not just the poor gameplay balance and the way it ruins the pacing of the story – there are a few actual elements of the story that felt like they weren’t explored to their full extent, especially in light of how certain other things were easy to guess before the twist because of how well written and foreshadowed the plot leading up to it was. Monark certainly isn’t a bad game, it just could’ve been so much better.