![]() ![]() Wandering the dark halls and viewing the crazy students can be pretty chilling, especially with a decent amount of haunting audio cues. Whether you take the hard battles or the simpler ones, you’ll eventually work your way to a Pactbearer and its “ideals.” These must be shattered in order to completely clear out the mist and free the students from its induced madness. That’s mostly a bad thing it leads to battles that are difficult to win, but you can avoid them through an odd system of phoning your way into the Otherworld. ![]() The longer you’re in the mist, the higher your madness level becomes. New areas of the Shin Mikado Academy are opened by the plot, and you’ll need to wander the mist-filled hallways to clear them out, finding notes to learn more about your fellow students as you progress. But before we get there, let’s talk about exploration. Skills, as you’d expect, are important to Monark’s battle system. This comes at a penalty, however, so you’ll want to try to get it right the first time. The skill tree does allow you to backtrack if you want to try something else. You’ll use these trees to level your companions up according to how you prefer to use them. Party members and fiends all have skill trees to manage as you progress. Monark quizzes you at the beginning and provides you with a fiend that matches your “ego.” This odd skeleton/cyborg/demon mash-up appears during battles and can be used like your standard party members in JRPGs. You’ll also meet your sister, some faculty members, and a quirky/cute demon that’s reluctant to be helping you, but only Nozomi goes into combat with you at the start. You’re quickly paired with another student, Nozomi, who knows who you are and seems to be pretty level-headed about (if not terribly frightened by) the situation. Good thing, too, because whatever it was that “killed” you early on has also robbed you of your memory. ![]() What’s his goal? Well, figure out what’s going on and you’re sure to figure that out, too, right?Īs you’d expect from a turn-based SRPG, you’re not alone in your quest. In fact, there’s a (disputed) student council president who has seemingly been using the mist to create his own little cult of followers. Some people do have a vague idea of what’s going on, but not everyone wants to help. So, you can’t leave, and you’ll lose your mind if you stay. This mist somehow prevents everyone from leaving the premises. There’s already a mist causing your fellow students of Shin Mikado Academy to go mad. The game kicks into gear immediately with a battle you can’t win, and only after you “die” does it bother to explain things. And as you’d expect from a team composed of developers from the early entries of Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei and Persona franchises, there’s plenty of style throughout. Once you get past the visual presentation you’ll see quite a few cool elements hidden beneath the murk. There’s an appropriate eeriness about them, but this could’ve been much more effective if the characters and environments weren’t so flat and lifeless. The environments are drab and lack the type of detail we’ve come to expect on the Switch. The graphics in Monark wouldn’t have looked good on the Wii U-possibly even the Wii. In fact, I’ll start with that so I can get my only major complaint out of the way. Perhaps it’s the visuals that initially clouded my expectations. This turn-based SRPG is published by NIS America, after all, and they tend to focus on games that sit outside the fringes of their defined genre. I’m somewhat embarrassed that Monark caught me so off guard. And you thought YOUR high school was rough. ![]()
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