Monark

 Switch
User Score
5.5

Mixed or average reviews- based on 18 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9 out of 18
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 18
  3. Negative: 8 out of 18
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  1. Ristorante
    Mar 22, 2022
    2
    The game is a bunch of ideas mixed together without head or feet. Clearly intended for a younger audience, to an extreme.
    I couldn't play past 2 hours.
    Characters make no sense, they discover there's a completely different world out there in the first 10 minutes of the game, and 5 minutes after they already have a goal for the entire game 'Defeating all 7 Monark pact bearers' The MC has    The game is a bunch of ideas mixed together without head or feet. Clearly intended for a younger audience, to an extreme.
    I couldn't play past 2 hours.
    Characters make no sense, they discover there's a completely different world out there in the first 10 minutes of the game, and 5 minutes after they already have a goal for the entire game 'Defeating all 7 Monark pact bearers'
    The MC has amnesia but for some reason he just agrees to everything and has an extremely big superiority complex of sorts?
    Even tho defeating the pactbearers is supposed to be an important plot point they treat it like a club activity.
    The combat is okay, it has some cool ideas but uses none, you can trainwreck every fight with some healing items and basic attacks.
    The first act is supposed to be about the psych of the characters around you and their back stories. But you literally find out the 'secret' behind the first character 2 mins into de first act.    … Expand
  2. Jkosei
    Feb 24, 2022
    8
    Monark is a 2022 JRPG that was developed by a team consisting of members who created the original Shin Megami Tensei games on the Super Famicon.
    For this reason it borrows heavily from earlier SMT releases such as SMT IF which it borrows from the most.
    If i had to point towards anything negative it would be the graphical quality and the repetitive gameplay. The graphical quality is    Monark is a 2022 JRPG that was developed by a team consisting of members who created the original Shin Megami Tensei games on the Super Famicon.
    For this reason it borrows heavily from earlier SMT releases such as SMT IF which it borrows from the most.

    If i had to point towards anything negative it would be the graphical quality and the repetitive gameplay.
    The graphical quality is easily the most to be criticised because it simply isnt on the same level as other games on the Switch however it mostly shows its issues while in docked mode and is much easier on the eyes in portable mode.
    As for the repetitive gameplay... well its definitely there but i cant say its much worst than any other JRPG in the past 20 years, it just comes with the territory.

    Overall while i wont say its the best JRPG or even RPG on the switch its still a very enjoyable game and is certainly worth your time if you need a entertaining tome sink for your switch.

    Just don't go into this expecting Persona, its much more influenced by the core SMT series than that particular spinoff.    … Expand
  3. Plinfi
    Mar 6, 2022
    0
    This game is boring. Has a predictable story. Bad music. A totaly waste of money.
  4. Tortor
    Aug 9, 2023
    2
    Sometimes I felt like this game was setting goals to see how many generic lines of anime dialog it could fit into everything. It seriously was so eye-rolling bad with one line after another being so either poorly written or painfully generic.

    Th characters were difficult to enjoy anything about too. Villains felt so generically evil for the sake of being evil. Any attempts at back story    Sometimes I felt like this game was setting goals to see how many generic lines of anime dialog it could fit into everything. It seriously was so eye-rolling bad with one line after another being so either poorly written or painfully generic.

    Th characters were difficult to enjoy anything about too. Villains felt so generically evil for the sake of being evil. Any attempts at back story for the villains just wasn't ever good enough to feel worth it. There just wasn't enough build up to make any of it make sense and sometimes just felt too convenient.

    The blank slate generic amnesia Main character you play as was also cheap and went along with the rest of the generic writing. Sometimes feels like an AI could churn out this stuff if you give it direction to give me as many tropes as possible so all of them can be stuffed into this game.

    Also an annoying gameplay feature is the random extremely hard battles they are not winnable and losing will either put you back to your last save or restart you back to your starting area. You can flee or get away from it either. That was just poor gameplay design and I absolutely see no reason for it.

    Sometimes your phone rings to up tension and causes you to get chased and risk going crazy, you can answer it and get a tutorial early on that tells you that beating the battle will sometimes let the phone ringing stop. What it doesn't tell you is that sometimes those battles are the unwinnable kind to wastes your time. Why? It makes no sense. Sure make it harder but why make it a waste of time impossible fight by throwing random level 90 fights against my level 5 character that the first move ends the match. Such a weird choice to include that in this game, did no one tell the developers that it makes no sense and isn't fun?

    The combat get tired too. Just doesn't feel very high on variety enough to make many of the fights be very distinguishable.

    I can deal with bad gameplay if a story is good enough or if characters are enjoyable enough to be around. The premise of the game is just poorly written and made this feel like a disjointed mess that it felt like only an edgy young teenager may mistake this for deep.

    The look of this game also could have used more work. I don't mind graphics like this but the outfits and design were still boring and the character portraits felt generic and lifeless.

    I dont recommend this game though, it's painfully skippable and made me feel sad how much time I wasted even if I bought it on sale.    … Expand
  5. pmasterfunk
    Mar 28, 2022
    4
    It's catharsis time, boys and girls.

    I tried hard to like Monark, and to be fair it has some things going for it. The illustration work is great, and the main cast' s designs are good. There's an anime style intro movie that is super hype. I like finding hints lying around that hold solutions to puzzles. Some tracks are catchy, but some kinda stink. The UI looks good. That's about all I    It's catharsis time, boys and girls.

    I tried hard to like Monark, and to be fair it has some things going for it. The illustration work is great, and the main cast' s designs are good. There's an anime style intro movie that is super hype. I like finding hints lying around that hold solutions to puzzles. Some tracks are catchy, but some kinda stink. The UI looks good. That's about all I like about it.

    The 3D graphics are pretty rough. Enemy designs are bland and forgettable, character models look strange and lifeless, and environments are uninteresting with flat lighting. The camera is also very limited in its movement. When picking a dialogue option, the main character will randomly flap his lips for about 5 seconds while gesticulating, which is one of the strangest, most disturbing, and unintentionally hilarious things I've ever experienced.

    All boss levels have J-Pop tracks with vocals which feels a bit out of place. They are very well produced, and sound professional at least. The voice acting is mostly... *checks notes* ...bad, yeah it's bad. On some level, the voice actors never really had a chance because the dialog is awful. It's so bad it made me laugh out loud on many occasions.

    Gameplay is mostly split into two parts: exploration and battles.

    Exploration mostly involves going into an area that is full of "mist" to look for its source and snuff it out. Obstacles involve the "MAD Gauge" that slowly fills up, easily avoidable "insta-death" NPCs that try to block the way, and stray phone calls that start random battles. Individually, these ideas aren't so bad, but the way they are implemented is poor. The "insta-death" is basically a quick-travel trip to the infirmary, which isn't all that inconvenient, and the stray phone calls can just be ignored - which they should be because they're unwinnable battles. So there's no real tension to the exploration, just mild annoyance.

    No random battles sounds nice, but story battles don't provide enough EXP to progress so grinding becomes necessary anyway. Winnable stray-phone call battles that reduce the MAD Gauge while giving decent EXP would have been a much better use of these ideas, giving the player time to actually, you know, explore, while reducing the need to grind.

    Finding the source of the mist usually means solving small puzzles. Many of these involve talking to students to add them to a database which may contain information relevant to said puzzles. This is kind of interesting, but it ends up being really frustrating to sift through the database. At some point I realized that the students were sorted by class level first, and JAPANESE KANA ORDER second - Nice localization job, NIS. Non-Japanese names being sorted by their first name instead of their last name just adds to the confusion.

    The battles stick to pretty standard TRPG stuff, and try to center around the MC's "Resonance" skill, which shares skills, buffs, but also ailments between resonating characters. It's a novel idea that probably allows for all sorts of different tactics... right?

    Sorta, at best. It's terribly implemented, because early on, when the MC is the main damage dealer and buff skills are rare, Resonance is basically useless. The game kinda forces the player to not use it, and by the 70% mark it's suddenly super OP and the rest of the game is a breeze. In the last battle of the game, one lone, sad enemy unit attacked, once. I did not see what the final boss could do, because I managed to kill it in one turn using this one Resonance gimmick, as I had done with every other enemy in the game once I'd found this trick.

    And then there's the story. You guessed it, it's bad, but the script is so anus-clenchingly cringe that the story seems epic in comparison. Each boss character is supposed to have thought-provoking motivations, but their actions are so unambiguously bad it doesn't make them relatable or redeemable. Late-game clichés involve warped memories, Ayanami clones, the third impact, a mummudrai, time travel, ridiculous leaps of logic, and one of the least surprising reveals of all time. The seven sins angle doesn't really do anything thematically, and there isn't much social commentary. Character development is basically one big exposition dump per secondary character near the end-game, which doesn't really recontextualize any of their previous actions. The pacing is terrible, too; some randos die truly horrific deaths, but as soon as those cutscenes end, we never see or hear of these events again. No one pauses for the tragedy, no one pauses to reflect, we're just off to the next battle.

    Ultimately, I can't recommend this game to anyone, really. There's no real redeeming value to be found that could offset all the frustrations in the story, dialog, gameplay, and exploration.    … Expand
  6. onehitok
    Jun 24, 2022
    10
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Good game, kokoro best girl.
    The ones who voted negative are unloved by their parents and never had a girlfriend.    … Expand
  7. Tem_warlord
    Jul 2, 2022
    8
    There's definitely alot wrong with the game but I can't help but enjoy it

    The story is bland and yes the charecter lines aren't very good, but I haven't had this much fun with a JRPG sense my first play though of persona five you can't really compare the two one is definitely better but I enjoy the battles in this game so much

Awards & Rankings

77
#77 Most Discussed Switch Game of 2022

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
62

Mixed or average reviews - based on 16 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 16
  2. Mixed: 12 out of 16
  3. Negative: 2 out of 16
  1. Starbit
    Aug 12, 2022
    60
    Thanks to an exquisite art style, a challenging combat system, a very interesting mind-based plot and a very well implemented and flexible character development model, Monark boasts elements that are worth highlighting. Where Monark does less well is on its execution, though, as well as on its simplistic and repetitive puzzles, but it's the game's laggy performance that often harms the experience and makes it difficult to enjoy to anyone beyond a core of RPG fans.
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  2. Nintenduo
    Apr 19, 2022
    68
    Monark has good ideas. However, it falls short in what it tries to achieve. This is a niche JRPG that, while it can be entertaining, has other shortcomings that prevent us from recommending it to everyone. Still, hardcore fans of the genre will find something to enjoy here.
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  3. PLAY! Zine
    Mar 4, 2022
    70
    Monark brings many innovations to the table, yet ultimately feels unfinished and unpolished. Many of the traditional and obsolete aspects of the JRPG genre are present, yet if you are willing to look past them in order to reach some quality – it could truly shine up your experience. Interesting characters, mechanics and setting, may not feel enough for some, but to those that just need a long game and new ways to play, Monark is a great recommendation.
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