There are a few new releases to look at today, and on top of the usual summaries I have reviews of two of them. It gets old eventually, especially if you need to grind a lot to tackle a difficult boss.Hello gentle readers, and welcome to the SwitchArcade Round-Up for February 22nd, 2022. It’s a very efficient and convenient way to set up grinding – but it is still grinding. So you can pretty much go straight from fight to fight without any unnecessary menus. The best part is that once you clear a battle, the game lets you immediately restart the fight after you clear it. You can dial them any time you want, so you don’t have to wander around waiting for random fights to grind out levels. You receive special numbers to dial from your smartphone/main menu. Luckily, grinding is fairly easy there are no random battles. The solution is to grind – but grinding to an appropriate level pretty much negates the need to achieve the enlightened state to begin with. Boss battles have pretty huge difficulty spikes, which is a nice change of pace, but if you’re under-leveled, you’re really not going to be able to survive long enough to achieve enlightenment. Non-boss battles are just too easy to spend the extra turns filling the meters. In most battles, it’s just not worth the trouble to power up both of those meters. The whole enlightenment deal is pretty cool in concept, but in practice it’s fairly impractical. If your madness and awakening both hit 100%, you become enlightened, and unlock your strongest abilities. Attacks can also affect your madness level if a unit’s madness hits 100% you lose control of that unit, but it gets insanely strong. If your awakening meter hits 100%, you enter an awakened state where your attacks are stronger and you have access to special abilities. You can also choose to wait, which heals a small amount of health, or resolve, which increases your awakening level.
Units move around within a movement radius, and can attack any enemy unit within the radius of their attacks. Combat is turn-based – first you go, then the enemy, and so on until the enemy is out of units or the protagonist falls. In concept, the combat has a lot of interesting possibilities. I’m not talking about locked rooms with bonus treasure inside I’m talking about main rooms that aren’t even locked but can’t be opened anyway. Overall exploration is fairly satisfying, but some arbitrarily gated rooms stifle the satisfaction of exploring the school slightly. You can also collect crystals called alter egos after meeting the student or faculty member connected to it, and documents to find that fill in the game world’s lore and backstory.
#MONARK ESHOP HOW TO#
You’ll have to figure out how to convince mist-crazed students to move, find keys, or solve puzzles to find your hidden objective. Each floor has an objective to smash to get you one step closer to one of the Pactbearers, which is usually hidden behind a blocked door. Being in the mist increases your madness level – if it reaches 100%, you fall unconscious and return to the school’s infirmary. You wander around the different floors of the school’s many buildings, trying to avoid staying in the mist too long. Exploration is pretty stragithforward, for the most part.
The actual gameplay is split between exploring Shin Mikado Academy and combat. Engaging interplay between characters is one of the main attractions of a great JRPG, and by limiting your party members Monark limits its ability to create those interactions. Monark features great characters with relatable, interesting arcs, but unfortunately because of the way the game sets up its party organization, you can only bring one partner with you at a time. I mean, sure, it generally follows the established JRPG formula of teens fighting the ultimate evil while discovering the power of friendship, but it’s a good formula. While the story does have some striking thematic similarities to the Megami Tensei series, it does manage to establish its own identity. The Monarks have made Pacts with seven Pactbearers in the real world, and it is the protagonist’s job to break those pacts, clear the mysterious mists, and reconnect Shin Mikado with the real world. Using his newfound powers, he is drawn into a struggle with the seven Monarks of the Underworld, each named for one of the seven deadly sins. He discovers he has the ability to travel to the Otherworld via his smartphone and don Imagigear to combat the skeleton monsters he finds there. The game’s protagonist gets pulled into the Otherworld, where he is immediately slain and then wakes up with amnesia. Many of its buildings are filled with supernatural mist which drive anyone who has too much exposure insane. Shin Mikado Academy is covered by a giant, supernatural dome.
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