Getting a ‘perfect turn,’ where your whole party hits Enlightened status and goes wild on the enemy, feels great. There were certainly a few times I accidentally went Mad or didn’t set my deferrals up quite right, but when it’s humming, Monark battles feel like a good mix of predetermined strategy and on-the-fly adaptations. What’s nice is that Monark‘s many systems don’t feel too overbearing.
On top of that there’s Resonance, your own protagonist’s ability which can share buffs and states across units including Madness, Awakening, and Enlightened, which only turns on if you hit 100% on the former two at the same time. Balancing this out is Awakening, a meter you can charge up to reach an ascended state, providing stat buffs, access to special moves, and wiping the Madness slate clean. Hit 100% Madness, and a character will go berserk they’ll get increased stats, but you’ll lose control and have to watch them hit anything (friend or foe) until they eventually pass out. Deferrals are crucial, as they provide you with extra turns, letting you heap on damage and rack up multiple hits if units are nearby to toss in follow-up attacks.ĭeferrals also rack up Madness, which can also be driven up by using your Authority powers. They don’t just act as representations of your own answers, but their gameplay matches their vices Gluttony is adept at stealing buffs for itself, and Lust could Charm enemies to my side.īattles are tactical, with each of your characters moving and then acting, waiting, or deferring their action to another unit. Throughout the story I’d accumulate Pride, Sloth, Lust, and Wrath too. Personality quizzes interspersed throughout the story and around the campus basically Myers-Briggs your own desires onto a chart, graphing your attunement to the seven deadly sins.īecause my first test revealed a desire for power, and wanting to claim it for my own, I was given a familiar of Gluttony. Your party is made up of you, whichever human companion is accompanying you on this excursion, and fiends that embody your own desires. The actual combat of Monark is very interesting. When you’re not exploring the mist, you’re battling, and that’s one of the main drawbacks of Monark. But as a contained setting for an RPG, it feels like it serves its function to the story well. It doesn’t help much that the hallways are all pretty same-y, and the school grounds are limited in scope. There’s a new horror around every corner at Shin Mikado, and gradually dispelling the mist and restoring the halls and its students to normal feels good. Breaking the Pactbearers means going into the mist to find points where your cell phone can connect to their Ideals in the Otherworld, all the while avoiding maddened students and watching your own sanity drip away, tick by tick. While an RPG set in a school might not be novel, the mist and Pactbearers-who can use their Authorities to change the real world-make for a creepy, horror-tinged world to explore.
Monark‘s setting is one of its biggest strengths. Everything settles down after you slay some demons, but then the dean of the school arrives and reveals the facts: to erase the mist and return everything to normal, you’ll need to defeat the other Pactbearers-and eventually, yourself. In a last-ditch effort to save some friends you’ve just made, you make a Pact with the demon Vanitas, becoming the Pactbearer of Vanity. You awake as an amnesiac student and are plunged into the Otherworld, an alternate dimension where demons manifest. It’s a bad time to be a normal, everyday student at Shin Mikado. Amid a lot of horror are Pactbearers, individuals who’ve made a deal with the patron deity of one of the seven deadly sins to see their wish fulfilled. It’s got the vibe of an SMT game Shin Mikado Academy has been cut off from the outside world by a magical dome barrier, and inside, a mysterious mist is flooding the grounds, driving students mad. Monark is a new RPG from Lancarse and FuRyu, with some help from a few former Shin Megami Tensei developers. It’s the hours of necessary grind, repetitive environments, and narrative stumbles just can’t keep pace. It has some real great moments, like big boss battles with tailored tracks, surprising story twists, and a fairly deep and interesting combat system. The disappointing part of Monark is that it struggles to keep that initial luster over the course of its run. Within about ten or so minutes, you’re already battling, already meeting major characters, and already seeing some dark story developments. Monark starts off with very little preamble.
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