Monark is certainly an original title. It is clearly driven, at least on a creative and design level, by experienced minds eager to experiment with various ideas: from the philosophical and religious approach on the concept of chaos and sin in the narrative, to the mix of the combat system, to the particular story progression. At the same time, these elements do not make it a broad-spectrum JRPG (not that the genre, now, is a mass-market genre except for a few exponents). Monark is a title for long-time JRPG players, with an already nice long list of other similar exponents behind them, who are looking for a certain kind of experience with a strong Oriental matrix and at the same time want to go beyond some typical stylistic features. We won't hide from you that the technical side, although it didn't promise to be incredible, really left us burning at some moments for its approximation and paucity, but if you know how to put the pieces together and focus on the sum of the parts, you may find in Monark an experience absolutely peculiar to the genre and therefore highly recommended to its most ardent fans.

7.5
The things the game does right, it does really right.
The things the game does wrong, it does really damn wrong.
Let's get the negatives out of the way:
Performance, models, and overall immersion was absolutely dogshit. Like it almost completely ruins the game. Like most JRPGs, gameplay starts off a bit slow, but it stays kinda slow for a longer than usual portion of the game.

Positives though:
Kamitsubaki Record does a phenomenal job at the boss music. Literally a saving grave. Endgame gameplay can actually be pretty fun, especially when you are able to mess around with certain builds. So-Bin does an amazing job with the portraits. I find myself looking at the portraits more than the models. Characters themselves have alot of fun personalities and interactions. The story is about average. There are several nice twists that arent anything crazy, but still enjoyable.

Whoo boy. There's a lot to get into with this game. It's got an interesting style & setup that ultimately falls flat with overly grindy gameplay, an extremely wordy story that could've done with a few more rounds of editing, and a latter half that completely falls apart. I've had to play games where you need to play the same scenario multiple times to receive different dialogue and eventually unlock the ending, but here it was just boring. The fact that enemies scale between chapters also made grinding necessary to a degree that completely killed any pacing the game had. The gameplay itself is okay, and with some tweaks would probably even be good, but gets boring after playing the same battle for grinding the 100th time. Also the game kept crashing at the worst moments.

Easily has one of the best, well-balanced, and actually challenging combat systems I've seen in a Furyu-produced title. Very solid instrumental OST by Tsukasa Masuko paired with really epic vocal tracks by the people at Kamitsubaki Studio. All of these topped off with an emotionally-moving cast of characters and a story that really kept me going despite the game's length and slightly questionable gameplay-related pacing issues.

A game that went pretty much the exact opposite of everything I expected from it but still ended up being a great time for me overall. Definitely check it out if you're interested. Ryotaro best.

Full video review: https://youtu.be/wRoXRy2AfcY

Overview and Game Loop
So the entire thing plays as a very structured turn-based JRPG. 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. The general game loop is extremely linear and follows the same pattern all the way through. 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.

That’s the entirety of Monark and honestly, it’s a bit too structured for my tastes. I don’t have anything against linear games, but I also like JRPGs that don’t just recycle the same pattern to completion.

Exploration and Puzzles
In Monark, the most exploration you get is maybe entering a classroom and picking up a healing item before moving to your actual objective. That’s it. Otherwise, you simply need to solve a small puzzle to find the source of the mist for that given floor.

And 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. The vast majority of the “puzzles” feel more like obstacles than something I enjoy doing.

Combat
None of the combat actually takes place in the school setting, instead being set entirely in this “other realm” that you have to dial into. 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. It’s turn-based, but you have freedom of movement and can shuffle around your units as you please. Positioning is key as there are things like back attacks and assisting other units based on their proximity to a given enemy.

I liked the overall approach here. It’s not as strict as your regular turn-based JRPG, but still stays true to that experience without going full action-based. And there’s a good bit of depth too. 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. 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.

Ultimately though, this all comes with one major flaw: you hardly ever need or get to use these mechanics. About 90% of fights you can finish simply by using basic attacks and a lot of the time, you have to go out of your way to actually use the more complex mechanics. Boss fights are really the only time I ever got to see units go mad, use ascension, or ever felt the need to inflict status effects and debuffs.

Difficulty and Grinding
There are two difficulties: normal and casual, with the latter simply reducing damage taken by 30% in exchange for a decreased item drop rate. Both difficulties, however, are subject to the game’s absolutely insane difficulty spikes. I thought I was doing completely fine up until the second boss, which one-shot me numerous times until I dropped the difficulty to casual, which simply made it a two-shot instead.

Monark is a game that purposely keeps you underleveled and I found myself repeatedly grinding the optional fights over and over just to stay up to par with the bosses - there are no "normal" encounters. In most JRPGs, you can get by by simply fighting all encounters you run into or even dropping the difficulty if you want to play more leisurely, but Monark throws out both of those options. What you are left with is an incredibly grindy, repetitive, and unfulfilling game loop. And the fact that skeletons are the only enemies you fight does not help either.

Story
I feel it’s important to note that the dialogue and cutscenes take up probably about 50% of the game’s playtime, so it’s pretty beefy in that regard. That unfortunately doesn’t make it good though, and that’s ultimately the impression I got here. Mainly, I couldn’t shake this feeling that the story was trying to be too much and lacked focus.

I understand what is going on, but not what the writers are trying to convey with the story. It’s like a mess of ideas all cobbled together that sounds cool on paper, but lack the depth and direction to really work. The entire first act, for example, works like a series of short stories about individual student’s psychological problems and a slight dive into each of their backgrounds. Each gets expanded on later, but I should note that the first act alone is like 15 hours of gameplay so you will be waiting a while for the story to really kick into gear.

And it’s incredibly tropey too - to the point where it was hard to tell if I was playing a parody, but no, the game is actually taking itself seriously. This is the kind of anime story I would expect to appeal to 13 or 14 year olds, with so much edge I am surprised my controller didn’t cut me.

Graphics and Music
Monark looks about what I would expect from an early PS4 or late PS3 JRPG. It’s not outright terrible, but not good either - just bland. The music though might be my second favorite thing under the combat. The vocal tracks that play during boss fights absolutely slap and the regular background music isn’t that bad either.

PC Port
You get a small set of graphical options to change and the game ran flawlessly at 1440p, 60 fps on my 1070 Ti so I guess I can’t complain. I had no issues with the controls on controller and the default keyboard and mouse layout isn’t that bad either. You do not get a cursor on screen though, so the mouse is just used for its buttons.

Overall
Monark is a bit of a mess of ideas - some good, some bad, but most leaning a bit towards the latter. You get some nice combat, but coupled with some very grindy progression and lackluster gameplay outside of that combat. You get a story with some nice themes, but little coherence between all of these themes and filled with so many anime tropes that it’s hard to take seriously. A disappointment overall as a big JRPG fan.

TL;DR I'd only recommend it if you are looking for a RPG with a depressing atmosphere and are willing to grind a lot.
The artworks and soundtrack are high-quality, but the horrendous graphics and grindy gameplay show how low budget it is. The story is interesting and rather unusual in the topics it handles and how its characters are, but it's also an edgy mess. It can be touching at times still, I cried while playing several times, which doesn't happen a lot to me. I appreciated it for being unapologetically depressing and odly philosophical at times, but it can border on being too emo to handle for some, that's for sure. I really enjoyed the quiz you take at the start of the game though, it's a nice introduction, and the way the story takes the concept of the seven deadly sins is rather cool, especially in how it's linked to the characters' respective narrative foils.
The gameplay is actually interesting and can be very gratifying if you play your cards right, but the sheer unforgiveness of it and grind being absolutely necessary to keep going brings it down a lot unfortunately.
Character-designs and artworks are done by so-bin, who worked on the LN Overlord. It's very sick and stylish, the characters sprites are very good, but the designs don't translate well to the 3D models as they are rather outdated and well. Ugly. Due to low budget issues, most likely.
I really, really loved Monark as it made me feel like I was the target audience for it a lot, but the end-game grind was a bit too much so I stopped playing it around the chapter before the actual final chapter. I'll get back to the game one day in the future to actually beat it for sure, but not today.

Very frustrating game. It has potential, but never lives up to it.
It has interesting characters and explores them quite well, and the themes are fairly interesting. But the way it portrays antagonists is really shallow, their backstory is more interesting than how they act. And the pacing is very poor, leading to the same beats getting repeated over and over. It's not story related, but with abundance of NPCs you can talk to and their dialogues getting updated every now and then, the game incentivizes you to talk to them all, except every room transition has lengthy loading screen, which adds up to impressive amount as you move between NPCs. It's not fun.

And the dark underbelly comes up, which is the gameplay. It's atrocious. The battle system is epitome of unfun slog. But how is it possible, when they literally just copy-pasted it from another FuRyu game, Lost Dimension? It's simple, they heavily restricted movement and battle arenas became really poor. Plus enemy variety is really bad as well, not that Lost Dimension was really exceptional in that department, but it wasn't this bad, and most importantly, Lost Dimension isn't nearly as long. Also, leveling system is complete crap. The leveling is done with money instead of steadily gaining experience every battle, and by trying to deviate from the norm, they completely shattered any sense of progression and fun of upgrading new skills. It doesn't help that early skillsets available to you are all incredibly lame compared to stuff you get later on. All in all, everything related to combat is just lame. If you're willing to give this game a try, just give up on combat. People complaining about Persona 2 combat have no idea that it can be much, much worse than simply slightly boring button masher.

o galera eu queria fazer esse vídeo pra só pedir desculpa mesmo eu errei a verdade é essa eu tava muito bêbado e eu fui defender uma ideia que é uma ideia que acontece em outros lugares do mundo no estados unidos por exemplo mas eu fui defender essa ideia de uma ideia de um jeito muito burro eu tava bêbado eu falei de uma forma muito insensível com a comunidade ju-judaica eee ee porra eu peço perdão ta ligado pela minha insensibilidadade mas eu peço também um pouco de compreensão são quatro horas de conversa a gente eu tava bêbado fui insensível sim errei na forma com que eu eu fui me expressei da a entender que eu tô defendendo coisas abomináveis é uma merda errei pra caralho eu não sei eu peço peço compreensão ai de vocês e peço desculpas a toda a comunidade judaica desculpa mesmo não queria ser insensível não foi a minha intenção e eu convido inclusive os maiores representantes dessa comunidade pra virem conversar comigo pra me explicarem mais sobre toda a história obrigado.

My thoughts on Monark are very mixed. While I absolutely loved certain aspects such as the characters, the atmosphere, the art, the soundtracks, and the story. Whenever I think about the things I don't like about this game for example the endless grinding you have to do in order to progress in the game, the somewhat lacking true ending, the puzzles which vary from pretty simple to atrociously difficult (if you're not relying on a guide), and the very lacking enemy variety just show me how apparent Monark's problems are. Well, I came to the conclusion that I still like the game overall despite its flaws but it definitely could have been much much better.

This sucks. Which is par for the course for FuRyu, but this is a special kind of suck, and it hurts me, because the story is alright. It had some interesting ideas, even if the "MADE BY FORMER SMT STAFF" just translates to "they copied 'SMT if' again", but the gameplay... the gameplay is easily the worst part of this game.
It actually killed any and all enjoyment I had. Every time I had to progress the story and go through an important fight, I had to get ready to waste an hour because of how bad the grind and animation speed in this game is. I don't know who decided to make the core gameplay this shit when the game is already extremely grindy by default, but I would rather they have just made it the most barebones JRPG instead. Hell, even a visual novel would be better, because maybe then I wouldn't have to waste my fucking time with shitter fights that only have ONE ENEMY MODEL for the 50-60 hours of "game".

Put it simply, imagine the average JRPG grind where you need to repeat a 2min fight 20 times. Now imagine it takes at least 20min instead, and you've got Monark's endgame.
And for what? An absolute nothingburger of an ending.
I'm glad I just watched the rest of it on Youtube instead of having to put up with that endgame grind.

Extremely Underwhelming.

CONS:
--Extremely Generic/Predictable.
--Little character customization, you have your preset character, and you see in the screenshots with his crown when he's effected by madness/etc, however if you buy the DLC and use those outfits, it doesn't show those different battle looks (at least for me).
--Little monark customization, You see enemy boss Monarks looking surprisingly cool with a mix of black and red color scheme, and unique designs/etc, however your own monarks can only be White, unless you give them colored hair, and they can eventually look pretty decent with different equipment, however they will all still be bland white, no different color options or patterns to differentiate them.
--Crazy Puzzles, I admit I'm pretty trash at puzzles, but these ones are pretty annoying/difficult IMO.
--Super edgy Story. a lot of things in here are super cringey or edgy.
-- Lot of farming, But it's an RPG so it is what it is, also not that bad if you have certain monarks (AOE) and use resonance/etc fine, but that still takes a bit.

PROS:
-- The Music for boss battles, was one of the only times i got hyped or smiled while playing this game.
-- This does touch on some darker topics or show some darker topics, where you might be surprised at what you're seeing.
-- Voice actors - I played a bit on JP and a bit on EN, and the EN voice actors/etc are pretty good, such as the MC who is voiced by Baki's VA (for the little he does talk), the VA of Michiko from Chainsaw man, VA for Thorfinn, Shigeru Chiba who voices a lotta recognizable homies, etc etc etc. [Though one VA in particular might wanna make you rip your eardrums out].
-- Vanitas