Ultimately though, this all comes with one major flaw: you hardly ever need or get to use these mechanics. These mechanics build on each other in cool ways, allowing you to set up combos with a bunch of assists flying everywhere or even situations where it becomes beneficial to let a unit go mad. Using skills either drains your HP a certain amount or increases your madness, and when that madness reaches 100%, your unit becomes uncontrollable and does a bunch of damage to whoever is in his/her way.
MONARK SWITCH REVIEW FULL
You get entire skill trees per unit, the ability to outright defer your turn to any other unit, a full slate of status effects, buffs, and debuffs, and this cool madness and ascension system on top of it. It’s not as strict as your regular turn-based JRPG, but still stays true to that experience without going full action-based. Positioning is key as there are things like back attacks and assisting other units based on their proximity to a given enemy. It’s turn-based, but you have freedom of movement and can shuffle around your units as you please. Upon doing so, you select which units to deploy, where to deploy them, and then go at it in a neat mashup of different combat systems. None of it actually takes place in the school setting, instead being set entirely in this “other realm” that you have to either dial into or answer a call to. Sure, some of the ones later on are a bit more complex and maybe involve a couple more steps, but the vast majority of the “puzzles” feel more like obstacles than something I enjoy doing.
Otherwise, you simply need to solve a small puzzle to find the source of the mist for that given floor.Īnd I say puzzle, but that’s pushing it a bit given that most of the time you just need to memorize a small number or word sequence and enter it elsewhere – like the combination for a safe that you find on a sticky note in another room.
In Monark, the most exploration you get is maybe entering a classroom and picking up a healing item before moving to your actual objective. I don’t have anything against linear games, but I also like JRPGs that don’t just recycle the same pattern to completion. That’s the entirety of Monark and honestly, it’s a bit too structured for my tastes.
You get some story dialogue, search a floor of some building within the school for a phone call, answer that phone call to engage in a battle in another realm, another story dialogue to close out that section, and then repeat this process over and over. The general game loop is extremely linear and follows the same pattern all the way through. It is up to you to team up with a small group of students, explore the school, and dispel this mist to save everyone. You’re thrown into this mysterious school setting with a main character that has amnesia and a “mist” that causes other students to go insane. So the entire thing plays as a very structured turn-based JRPG. That’s because, although Monark does do some things right, I can’t really say that it excels in any one area. The connection is there, yeah, but it’s more of a marketing ploy and unfortunately one that I fell right into as a Megami Tensei fan. I feel like this is a bit misleading because from my research, it’s really just one co-writer, the composer, and a couple others listed as “scenario supervision” – all who worked together on Shin Megami Tensei If… for the Super Famicom back in 1994. So a lot of the marketing for this game seems to revolve around the fact that some members of its development team were former staff working on Shin Megami Tensei.
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