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 IIt'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
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