Monark PS5 Review – Monark is the newest title from the former developers of Shin Megami Tensei, who have established a brand new studio named Lancarse. Their debut titles tries to capture the basic principles of the Megami franchise, but ultimately falls short of reaching the great heights of the historic franchise.
Monark PS5 Review
An Interesting Although Confusing Story
Monark tells the story of an amnesiac boy who wakes up in a school that’s been encased in a mysterious fog, not allowing anyone to leave. It’s up to you and your friends to stop whatever is causing this mist and escape from the school.
It’s a simple premise, but boy does it get bogged down by overly complicated storytelling. The world of Monark revolves around the Seven Deady Sins: Lust, Gluttony, Pride, Envy, Greed, Wrath, and Sloth.
These sins not only represent your party members but the enemies you encounter. When you start the game, you’re given a bunch of questions to answer depending on your answers, you’ll be graded into which of the seven Sins you fall into.
You’ll receive points in all categories, but the highest score will provide you with a Sin avatar that joins you in your battles. Throughout the game, you’ll learn that each part of the school campus, such as the Athletics Building and the Library, is controlled by a student or faculty member creating the mist by feeding on the sins of the students trapped in the buildings.
The Seven Deadly Sins Are The Focal Point Of Characterization
These people represent one of the Sins, and you must stop them to free the students in its grasp and lift the mist. This is as best that I can describe the story without spoiling it.
Monark features a lot of dialogue, and thankfully most of it is voiced. Though the voice acting leaves a lot to be desired, the writing itself can be pretty solid for the majority of the cast. The only character I despised was your stuffed bunny companion from another world who constantly talks in rhymes. It’s interesting at first but gets annoying reasonably quick.
The gameplay is split into two main parts: Exploring the campus and clearing the mist through combat. Exploring the campus is quite honestly what I enjoyed doing the most in the game. As you enter the mistly areas of the school, you’ll come across students that are inflicted with the side effects of the mist.
The longer they remain in the mist, the more unhinged and violent they become. While in the mist, your sanity gets tested. The longer you linger in the mist, a MAD Meter will fill up, and if it reaches 100%, it’s game over.
Monark Features Fun Exploration And Great Puzzles
As you explore each area, you have to solve puzzles thus is where the game will either make you love puzzles or put the game down. The puzzles in Monark require you to take real-life notes if you don’t want to exit menus and restart puzzles to look for answers constantly. The puzzles here seem simple, like putting in a digital code to unlock a safe but figuring out the code is another matter.
The clues provided to solve these puzzles come from all over. Speaking to students, finding notes, reading memos and learning about students and who they are. The puzzles aren’t easy and require some serious detective work. One puzzle even had me stumped for almost two hours. Although I got distraught, the satisfaction of finally solving it was nearly as good as defeating a Souls boss.
Once you solve a central puzzle, it leads you to the battle room. When you enter combat, you must answer your phone when approaching a particular area, giving off weird frequencies. When you approach the area you’ll get a phone call and answering it you’re transported to the other world where daemons reside. These daemons look like porcelain manakins. Once defeated and the battle is won, the mist is cleared, and you move on to the next area until you reach the big boss.
Combat Is A Chore And A Grind
Combat is where the game falters for me. Though I enjoyed the turn-based tactical combat, its difficulty left me deflated, and I began to dread the next time combat would come around. Each character moves around on the battlefield to get an excellent strategic position, mainly behind the enemy to avoid counterattacks.
The actual attacks you select impact your character. Some attacks are just attacks, while some of the better skills sacrifice health points while others increase your MAD gauge.
What’s worse, every attack you take can also increase your MAD gauge. So constantly keeping an eye on your MAD gauge and your HP and what skills you use is part of the strategy, but that strategy begins to fall apart every time you complete a story arc.
Every time you defeat a significant boss, the enemies level up. Though you can participate in previous battles by dialling a phone number that you acquire after every battle, the enemies in those previous battles level up.
After every boss, the enemies level increase by at least six or seven levels. That’s significant because of how bad the actual levelling up system is. To compete in combat, you must acquire Spirit. Spirit is used to level up your characters by unlocking skills. As you buy more skills, your character gains a level increasing their stats.
The problem is that the Spirit is shared amount the entire team. It’s not a problem at first, but later on, when you have to distribute points between ten characters, it’s a massive problem.
Get Ready To Grind For Hours For Only Minutes Of Progression
The skills aren’t cheap either. You start off acquiring skills for twenty points, and then from twenty, the skills jump up to around 200 or even 800 to unlock. The other major problem is that the game forces you to do things in combat to get a better score. If you don’t, you’ll get the bare minimum of Spirit to use. At the start, it tells you to get the best rating; you need to get a specific amount of points in battle.
These requirements demand that you finish a fight in three turns, it’s horrible as sometimes it takes an entire three turns to even get near the enemies. If any of your characters die, you get docked over a hundred points. Go one turn over the goal of three and you get docked points. Every battle I participated in, I finished with a D or C rating, and that’s playing on the easiest difficulty.
Since enemies level up after each boss is defeated, you constantly fall behind the enemies, which requires grinding. Lots of grinding to the point where I would spend hours and hours doing the same fight to level up two of my characters at least three levels. It’s a major chore and took a lot of the fun out of the game.
There are plenty of skills to learn for each character, but for the most part, each character gets the same type of ability. It’s just the execution that’s different. Characters gain skills that can poison the enemies or charm them. Almost every character can learn these types of abilities. The difference comes in whether they execute the skills with a melee attack or a long-range attack.
Great JPOP Can’t Save A Bland Soundtrack And Dated Visuals
Visually the game isn’t the best looking and is reminiscent of the original Trails of Cold Steel titles. The character designs are also lacking throughout the game, and only the main characters and bosses have any memorable designs. The regular enemies you face against are always the same manikins, just with different armours equipped on them, but you’ll never really notice a significant change between them.
The soundtrack is also reasonably dull throughout the game but comes alive during the boss fights where you get some great JPOP, and it made me wonder why the rest of the soundtrack suffered so much.
Monark comes in with big ideas but fails to stand out. The brutal combat and grinding left me catatonic at times, but the fun puzzles and interesting story kept me coming back. In a way, I feel like Monark may have been a better experience if it was a visual novel or a simple adventure game.
Monark releases on PS5 and PS4 on February 22, 2022
Monark review code provided by PR.