As you can only team up with one person at a time, your allies are given few chances to interact with each other, something that hurts their characterisation. Each pactbearer that joins up embodies one of the seven qualities of the ego, but there’s not always much to their personality beyond that. It was difficult to relate to Monark’s cast due to how frequently they fell back on high school anime archetypes and comedy clichés. The strange characterization does suit the surreal setting, but I kept wondering how many decades it had been since the writers actually set foot in a high school. Because of the game’s ego-centric nature, the characters are self-obsessed to extremes, to the point where they appear unfazed by other students being stabbed in front of them. Everyone ends up spelling out exactly how they feel, often sounding more like a philosophy textbook than an actual teen. High school is a time of heightened emotions, but the the cast of Monark are overly melodramatic.
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A story about a suicidal student trying to get revenge on his tormenters should be daring stuff, but it’s tough to take seriously when he comes back from the dead as some kind of cross-dressing electrical ghost. Monark attempts to deal with sensitive topics (bullying, suicide and incest, just to name a few), but it often fumbles the execution and uses them for mere shock value. What’s more, the more fantastical elements often distract from the very real issues the game tries to tackle. With these similarities, Monark seemed poised to be a more modern take on some of Shin Megami Tensei If’s concepts. Monark also happens to start off with a personality quiz, one that determines the shape of your ego and which of the seven sins you tend towards. Like that game, Monark takes place in a Japanese high school that finds itself in a sort of spiritual quarantine, leaving the staff and students to deal with all kinds of paranormal phenomena.
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Much has been made of the game’s rather tenuous connection to the Shin Megami Tensei series. Several former Atlus staff members such as planner Ryutaro Ito and composer Tsukasa Masuko worked on Monark, and the end result is somewhat reminiscent of their previous work, particularly 1994’s Shin Megami Tensei If. Parts of the campus have been corrupted by other egomaniacs, so it’s up to the “new student council” to track down these rival pactbearers and shatter their ideals that, this being a JRPG, are represented as glowing crystals. Together they explore the school and find shrines of smartphones that transport the team to another dimension for tactical battles. The protagonist is helped by other “pactbearers” with strong egos and the power to wield them in combat. They’re the same as the seven deadly sins, but Monark makes it clear that these aren’t entirely negative qualities, just something necessary for players to define their personality. These allow players to draw on the power of their ego, which is pulled in seven different directions towards characteristics like lust, greed and gluttony. To do this, they’re granted powers by Vanitas, a strange doll resembling a bunny in bondage who speaks entirely in rhyming verse (an oddly endearing localisation choice). Filling the shoes of an amnesiac teenager who no-one seems to recognise, players use their phones to fight off fiends and help the struggling students. Monark takes place in Shin Mikado Academy, a high school that’s been cut off from the outside world and shrouded in a mysterious fog that drives everyone mad. Monark is an RPG that seems to have a lot to say, but its messages are often muddled by a strangely tedious structure and maddening enemy encounters. Most notably, Monark draws from Freud’s idea of the ego, with the characters using their inner power to process reality, occasionally manifesting it as a kind of Persona-like phantom assistant.
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There’s no shortage of JRPGs set in high schools, but this latest strategy RPG by Furyu and developer Lancarse has a darker edge, mixing a familiar setting with a philosophical and psychoanalytical bent. Looks like school is back in session again.