Monark Is Not SMT - 80 Hours With The Full Game | Review

so i purchased monarch the latest jrpg from fudu and long chris back in october of last year but i finally did get around to actually playing through the game recently on stream what initially drew me to pick up and try monarch was the fact that they advertised having former smt developers on the development team and their influence is definitely visible at least within the battle system now i will be breaking this review down into sections first i will give you a brief overview of the game including a small introduction to the story and its setting before moving on to explain the game's core mechanics gameplay loop battle system and more this part of the review will not contain my opinions or commentary and will instead serve as a general explanation of what monarch is after that i will dedicate a section to my thoughts and opinions on monarch but fair warning that section will be quite negative so without the way let's begin monarch takes place in sheen mikado academy a high school that is currently enclosed within a barrier that prevents anyone from entering or leaving all while a strange madness inducing missed is enveloping parts of the school the story begins when you find yourself awoken in a misfilled school hallway by the former student council president the head nurse of the school and your little sister only to find out that you have lost all of your memories as the four of you move to escape the mist your little sister's phone starts ringing mysteriously and upon answering it all of you are transported to the other world wherein you are almost immediately attacked by skeletal demons with your sister passed out and the head nurse injured from trying to protect everyone you enlist the help of the mysterious yet friendly demon vanitas who helps you acquire the authority of vanity and the ability to wield its power allowing you to save everyone and escape back to the real world finally out of the other world the four of you escape the misfilled hallway and after a series of events find yourself getting the rundown on what is actually going on from the school's principal jingu sora she explains that the mist appears whenever someone who has formed a pact with a demon of the highest rank known as a monarch uses the powers they acquired from this pact in the real world she also explains that until all of these packed bearers as they're called have had their packs severed the barrier enveloping the school will not disappear having knowledge of the situation at hand and your newfound powers sora tasks you with seeking out and stopping the 7 pact bearers before it's too late to do this you will need to venture into mist-filled areas and seek out the three crystals that represent each of the packed bearer's egos and destroy them thereby severing the pact they share with their monarch gameplay-wise this involves you going to different parts of the school where the mist is present and searching for a specific area in which a pile of phones are ringing representing a link to the other world where the packed bear's crystal resides to actually find these phones you will need to solve a puzzle this could be something as simple as figuring out how to convince someone to move out of the way so that you can get past them or it could be figuring out a code to a locked safe in order to get a key to a door regardless of what you need to do though it all generally boils down to something is blocking your path and you need to figure out how to remove that something in order to actually solve these puzzles you will need to speak with and listen to the various students who are also trapped within the mist as well as read the notes and memos scattered throughout the area and then use that information to gain access to where the phones are ringing while you are doing this though you will slowly be going mad this is represented by an increasing madness gauge in the lower right hand side of the screen if this gauge ever hits 100 you will immediately be transported back to the nurse's office once you finally do gain access to the phones you will need to answer them in order to be transported to the other world where you will fight a bunch of demons so that you can destroy the pact bears crystal repeat this entire process of solving a puzzle in a misfilled area and then fighting demons to destroy a crystal three times in order to sever a pact bears pact with their monarch speaking of fighting demons the battle system in monarch uses a turn-based free movement battle system with some elements of tactical rpgs thrown in you take turns moving around the battlefield using regular attacks authority attacks which increase your madness gauge and skills that use your hp for increased damage or other beneficial effects when you begin a battle you'll be given a screen in which you can see an overview of the battlefield map from here you can select which party members to bring though 99 of the time you will have the exact number needed for each battle and you can see where your party members are in relation to enemy positions once in battle you take control of each of your characters one at a time moving them around the map the distance they can travel in a given turn is indicated by a circle the diameter of which is determined by the character's movement stat when you've moved your character into position you can then choose to use your arts which are abilities and attacks that cost hp in order to execute or use authorities which are abilities and attacks that increase your madness level in order to execute arts tend to be physical in nature while authority tend to be magical in nature with healing buffs and debuffs falling under this category you also have the option to use the reorder command when it's one of your characters turns this command lets you give that character's turn to another character on your team who has already taken an action that turn doing this will increase the madness of the character being reordered by an ever increasing amount so it does have its limits additionally you can choose to use items for healing purposes or select standby in order to pass a character's turn doing this will heal them for a small portion of their hp once all of your party members have taken their actions for your turn it will then become the enemies turned act it should also be noted that occasionally there will be both beneficial and detrimental traps on the battlefield these can have effects such as healing anyone in range or applying nasty status elements at the end of each turn finally i should explain exactly what the mad and awake gauges are in the lower right hand part of the screen you can see a character's mad percent and for human characters you can also see their awake percent if a character's mad reaches 100 percent they will gain a massive increase to most of their stats however you will also lose control of them for three turns and they will begin to attack indiscriminately this also applies to enemies as well after three turns that character will die if a human character's awake reaches 100 they will also gain a massive buff to all of their stats reset their mad percent to zero become immune to all madness gains for the duration of the awake buff and gain access to their special ability as stated before madness increases from using authority abilities awake on the other hand increases when a human character is attacked in battle or if you use their special skill that increases their weight gauge once the battle is over you will be graded on how you did and receive an amount of spirit based on your performance spirit is an important resource as it is not only the currency needed to purchase restorative items but it's also the resource you use to actually level up your characters at any time when not in battle you can open up your menu select your characters and spend your spirit to level up various skills which are laid out in a simple skill tree purchasing the skill will then not only give the character access to said skill it will also increase their level by one and as you progress further through the skill tree the amount of spirit necessary to purchase skills will start to increase drastically with early skills costing less than 100 spirit and later ones costing thousands or even tens of thousands this system is especially important for your human characters as unlike your non-human characters your demon familiars human characters have no actual gear that can help augment their stats what this means is that the only way to increase the stats of a human character is by leveling them up and to level up you must purchase new skills for them with spirit now before i move on to my thoughts and opinions on monarch there are a few miscellaneous things i wish to touch on as you explore the school grounds and the misfilled areas you will be collecting a lot of books and reading materials these are important for solving the game's puzzles but they also provide more information on the actual story and provide you with phone numbers these phone numbers can then be called in order to go into the other world yourself and fight battles when you aren't exploring misfilled areas another thing to mention is that you will be able to talk to many many students throughout the school talking to them will give you a profile on them and in some cases spawn what is called an alter ego somewhere in the school finding and collecting these alter egos will provide small but permanent stat boosts to all of your party members okay so with that explanation of the game and its story and mechanics out of the way let's finally move on to my thoughts and opinions on monarch so i'm gonna be completely blunt here i don't like monarch and i don't think it's a good game it has some interesting ideas some genuinely fun moments and a main story that while predictable is overall decent however monarch is ultimately dragged down by terrible characters balance and pacing issues performance issues and more for starters let's talk about some of the things i liked though such as the voice acting which was actually quite good now i can't speak for the english voice acting because i've only played the game with japanese voiceovers but at least the japanese voice acting was very very good i also liked the premise of the game's battle system as it was also quite interesting managing your hp your madness gauge your buffs your debuffs and character positioning created a nice balance between risk and reward i also liked the game's boss battle music as each boss has its own unique track with some of those tracks being absolute bangers finally as i briefly mentioned at the beginning of this section the overall story was decent and along with wanting to hear each of the game's unique boss tracks was the primary driving force that kept me playing monarch unfortunately though that is where my praise for the game ends you see while the story is decent the characters just aren't ranging anywhere from meh on the high end all the way down to completely insufferable on the low end they are also overly dramatic to the point of annoyance one npc for example asks you and your party member for help after his girlfriend breaks up with him only for him to then turn around and call your party member a murderer when she has the goal to say let's not jump to conclusions this same npc is then seen later charging at the target of his hatred with a knife in hand then there are the fact that basically every character your party members included seem to have been written with the same character blueprint in mind that being the world is unfair and everyone and everything in it has something against me and only me in fact your party members are especially annoying about this as they take every opportunity to remind you how unfair they think the world is how much they hate themselves and how much they don't want you to get involved with them at least some of the scenes in which they are bickering to you are somewhat humorous due to the game's graphical quality or lack thereof you see while the character splash art that pops up when characters are talking is very good the in-game models tend to be not so much often showing little to no expression in some cases like those mentioned above it can be funny to see a character model with no expression being incredibly expressful in the actual voice dialogue in other cases though it's just downright jarring with the few intense and interesting scenes almost being ruined by it this lack of detail also extends to the rest of the game's graphics as well as much of the school lacks detail uses a similar color palette throughout and just has an overall samey feel to it the same you feel also applies to battles in monarch with battlefields all looking relatively the same minus a change in the dominant color used for the battlefield's background enemy model variety is also lacking as all enemy models look largely the same for the entirety of the game the one and only exception being boss enemies and none of this is helped by the game's soundtrack now while i did praise the boss battle music which does have some absolute bangers in it the rest of the soundtrack is very bland and forgettable it doesn't necessarily detract from the game but it doesn't help it either however perhaps the biggest contributing factor alongside the terrible characters as to why i feel monarch is a bad game is its pacing an issue that is multifaceted so let's break it down first there are the puzzle solving sections in which you explore misfilled areas of the school and solve a puzzle to progress the game in concept these are an interesting idea in practice however they don't really contribute anything to the game and can potentially detract from it while exploring these areas your madness level will constantly be rising something i assume was there to elicit a sense of urgency in the player the problem is though there is literally no downside to letting your gauge hit 100 if it does all that happens is your screen blacks out and you wake up in the nurse's office from there you can simply fast travel back to the misfield area you were in and continue working your way through it to where you left off you can even leave a mistfield area at any time without losing progress to go back to the nervous office on your own accord just to reduce your madness back to zero then there is the fact that none of the puzzles are particularly challenging and this lack of challenge in the puzzles combined with the madness gauge a core mechanic of the game mind you being basically irrelevant means that these misfilled puzzle sections only last a few minutes at most now this does mean you are getting back into battles quickly but at the same time it also means you're getting back into battles quickly something that is unfortunately not really all that fun for starters battles are very slow paced depending on how the enemies are spread out on a given map you can end up spending the majority of a battle just moving your characters around the battlefield so they can simply be in range to attack rather than actually engaging in combat with them and battles can be very very long early on the average battle may be anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes in length but this quickly ramps up as you progress through the game i'd say overall the average battle length is probably around 20-30 minutes however late game battles can last upwards of an hour or more this battle length quickly makes combat and monarch feel like a slog filled chore rather than something to look forward to doing a feeling that is exacerbated by the obscene amount of grinding necessary in this game you see when following the game's main story going through mist-filled areas to break crystals that represent a packed bear's ego you are only forced into three battles with a further three being somewhat optional and since each time you complete a section of the game a section being whenever you successfully stop a packed bearer and break their pact with a monarch these subsequent sections have their enemy levels increased the problem is the experience or spirit gained from doing the main story is nowhere near sufficient to meet this level increase necessitating the need to grind a lot in the 80 hours i spent to get the true ending i would say and i'm going to be generous here that at least 40 hours of that was just grinding though realistically it's probably closer to 60 hours of grinding it doesn't help that you will basically need to be near max level for the final boss as even at max level it can one shot your main character and if your main character dies it's game over something that really sucks if it's at the end of a battle you already spent an hour on i mean you know a game is designed for you to be grinding for hours on end when there are literal combat maps named spirit farming garden one two three etc the nail in the coffin so to say though that basically solidified my distaste for monarchs pacing was when it required me to complete the same chapter four times in a row simply to progress with the main story the real kicker is that because of how it makes you do this it's not like you can just do the chapter which includes all the puzzle sections battles and level grinding to keep up and then take those levels and breeze through that same chapter three more times the game counts each time you do this particular chapter as a continuation of the game which means that each time the enemy levels increase which means even more grinding finally a couple more things that are concerning first the game crashed on me multiple times luckily i saved frequently so i didn't lose much progress when this happened but these crashes did happen enough for it to be a real concern and unfortunately these crashes also did happen after the game had been patched multiple times so it's unlikely more patches will come out to address them the last thing that i wanted to mention which wasn't really an issue for me but could be for others is that if you do want to see the game's true ending you are basically required to use online resources so basically if you're someone who refuses to use guides or walkthroughs online i'd prepare for literally hundreds of hours of grinding because seeing the true ending requires obtaining 10 extremely rare drops so rare in fact that the game literally has a tutorial telling the player to go online and see if someone else has gotten that drop and shared its contents online so yeah i don't like monarch and i don't think it's a good game there are some good ideas in it sure but the negatives unfortunately outweigh the positives by such a degree that i simply can't recommend buying this game at all in fact i almost wanted to revive a rating system that an anime podcast i used to listen to used just for this review the system they used was a four tiered system with buy it now being the top rating i don't remember the tiers completely though so i kind of forgot the middle two i think one of them was along the lines of watch it on netflix or something like that but the bottom tier was even if you receive it as a gift burn it and piss on the ashes allah i'll let you use your imagination as to where you think i'd put monarch but that's it if you enjoyed the video or found it helpful please be sure to leave a like comment and consider subscribing to the channel if you haven't already and if you have any questions about this video monarch or any other games that i've covered you can always hit me up over on twitch at twitch.tv roslingaming or my discord server both of which are linked in the video description below until next time take care

Channel: Rozalin

Views: 68,858

Keywords: Monark, Shin Megami Tensei, SMT, Review, Preview, Gameplay, Impressions, Before You Buy, Everything to Know, Everything You Need to Know, Battle System, Exploration, Combat, Monark Combat, Monark Battles, Monark Battle System, PS4, PS5, Switch, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Nintendo Switch, NIS, NISA, NIS America, Steam, PC, FuRyu, Nozomi, Nozomi Hinata, Shinya, Shinya Yuda, Kokoro, Kokoro Surugadai, Ryotaro, Ryotaro Date, Vanitas, Fiends, Ego, Spoiler Free, No Spoiler, Pactbearer, Monark Review

Id: Ct-_2rrOizc

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 09 2022