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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.