YMMV / Monark

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Yoru's feelings on the Vice-President. On the one hand, she won't hesitate to try and kill him if he goes against her, and she created him in a way that he can't exist outside the Barrier and will vanish once Sora is dead. On the other hand, in "Dark Abundance", she diverts her attack at the last second when the Vice-President moves to protect Yugo. Does she genuinely love her "son", albeit in a twisted way? Does she see him as a useful tool to fulfill her plans? Or is it a mix of both?
  • In "Woeful Execution," Sora refuses to acknowledge the existence of a Gate within the Otherworld or the possibility that there may be a higher being far greater than the likes of Daemons. Given the revelations in "Deepest Reaches", it becomes uncertain as to whether Tristia denied such knowledge because Yoru screwed with her memories or pretended to be ignorant and deny the Gate and the Outer God's existence because of her Sanity Slippage.
• Awesome Music: One near-universally lauded point for the game is that the music is incredible, especially the boss themes with their vocal tracks. Take a listen to Pleiades as an example.
• Character Tiers: Inevitably in such a complex JRPG, trying to make the classes and Pactbearers feel different with all manner of specializations leads to some of them being far more useful than others. As an example, Lust Fiends. From the start of the game all the way to post-game, they are amazing allies, having low-cost, high-damage Authority spells that scale of Psi, Herd Hitting Attacks where most characters are stuck with single target attacks, and with prodigious use of buffs to their Psi stat, they can wipe out entire fields or One-Hit KO bosses, even just using their most basic spell. This is why walkthroughs encourage you to try and answer the starting 15 questions to get Lust, even just their basic ranged attacks earn their keep in the earliest stages.
• Creepy Cute: Vanitas is very disturbing-looking, being a black bunny rabbit doll whose feet are bound, is missing an eye and has a gaping red hole of some kind in its place, and the mouth on the bottom of his chin is blood red with teeth and a tongue (which is thankfully hidden thanks to a zipper). Despite this, his tendency to Rhymes on a Dime and Added Alliterative Appeal has endeared him to some fans. In-Universe, Chiyo finds him utterly adorable and glomps him whenever given the chance.
• Difficulty Spike: Despite the game being Early Game Hell during the first chapter, it's still manageable, and if you take the time to grind your characters, you'll be able to steamroll through most of your opposition with little trouble. Act 2, however, ramps up the difficult significantly to the point you will have to actually start planning your moves ahead of time and keep careful track of how many enemies are on the map and where they're positioned, as well as what types they are.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The game's story received a great deal of praise in regards to its dark and dreary worldbuilding and its excellent cast of characters. The gameplay is more contentious in that while it is somewhat unique as players have to keep track of their MAD gauge, it is also very grindy.
• Game-Breaker: In their early levels, the Lust Fiend is powerful, but not game breaking, a great wizard with early-game Herd Hitting Attacks who remains consistently useful for burst damage with single targets and dealing with crowds both. Then, you get their capstone skill Purgatorial Furnace and then things get ridiculous. Though it hits the entire screen and friend and foe alike, you can easily just Resonate with the whole party, give everyone evasion to minimize the damage, then just use Defer so Lust can keep blasting the entire screen in hellfire, clearing entire hordes of enemies in seconds with barely any effort. The Legions of Sloth are likely feeling envious at such efficient, low-effort combat.
• Genius Bonus: Some puzzles require some real-world knowledge to be solved without the help of a walkthrough, or are easier if you already had that knowledge.
  • The puzzle for 2nd Year Building - Rooftop involves figuring out where the portal to the Otherworld is, using portraits of composers as landmarks. Your clue is that it's between the composers for two specific pieces of music. Knowing who they are and what they're most famous for can help you narrow down the list of potential locations dramatically.
  • The Mathematics Club has a mysterious memo, which turns out to be a 9 digit sequence of the value of Pi, and acts as a phone number for Fertile Ground III.
  • One of the Club Building's puzzles involves giving an Unsettled student the names of her "children", all based on famous Japanese swords. Though Shinya provides helpful hints by mentioning whether the clues around the area were a sword or a person, once you have all the list of potential names you don't have to risk angering her or could just brute force it through memory, since the game logs right attempts.
• Hype Backlash: Monark garnered a great deal of attention from MegaTen fans due to the game being made by several former SMT developers. While the game is good and has an atmosphere that wouldn't be out of place in a Shin Megami Tensei title, many felt the game failed to live up to the hype.
• Porting Disaster: Not as bad as most examples, but playing the game on a base Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch will have you witness horrendous stutters and subpar framerate (only if you play for a while, the game runs fine up until that point, see below for explanation why). This also persists on a PS4 Pro, but nowhere near as bad. There are no such stutters or framerate dips when playing the game on PC or on PS5 and is otherwise the recommended platforms to play the game, if able.
• Rooting for the Empire: While his callous murder of some of the first-year students who are otherwise uninvolved in the bullying and/or simply trying to escape is unforgivable, Subaru had plenty of fans for his vicious abuse of his former bullies, especially since said bullies are completely unrepentant and believe they've done nothing wrong and blame Subaru for just being there and taking the abuse.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The leveling system, where you use the main currency, Spirit, to both unlock abilities and raise that character's stats. Some players and reviewers complain that it makes battles more tedious and the game as a whole more grindy, with how it's a shared resource across all the party, the difficulty spikes with each cleared area, and how new characters ALWAYS start at level 1 and require serious investment to even be useful by mid to late game.
  • As with other JRPG, the protagonist's death is an automatic game over even if the other members of your party are still alive, with many wishing they could have automatic revival items and such. This is also something of a case of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character involving the Fiends, who tying into the Chess Motif involving the True Student Council, are the "pawns" that could potentially be sacrificed to save the major characters.
• So Okay, It's Average: It's generally agreed by many that, while the game is not bad by any means, most critics and reviews agree that it's not a standout JRPG that shakes up the formula in any meaningful way.
• Tear Jerker: So, so many it has its own page. For all the game's supernatural elements, the story revolves around a lot of broken people with terrifyingly mundane and realistic problems.
• That One Boss:
  • During Chapter 1, ally with Shinya and take on the Pactbearer of Lust first at your own peril. Not only are there two boss battles with a Pactbearer in Akane and Sumire at different times, the both of them and their Monark, Luxuria, have access to and will not hesitate to constantly use devastating Herd Hitting Attacks or just outright Charm you or your allies, depriving you of an action and a Disillusionment Agent at best, or causing your team to murder each other at worst. Add the Charm Hazards and the narrow fighting arena making it difficult to space your team around while still sustaining the assault, and anyone that hasn't invested or farmed Psy-heavy gear, recovery items, or useful, high-damage abilities to burst them down quickly is in for a bad time.
  • The boss(es) of "Flagbearer of Faith": Ryotaro and the Monark of Gluttony, Gula. Not only does Ryotaro have insane amounts of burst damage at range, he also has True Resolve which lets him frequently use his Awakening art and cause absurd amounts of AoE damage to several characters. Gula will also gleefully use her Authority to steal all of your buffs, so you could accidentally make her basically untargetable or a massive force of destruction the first go around. It's not uncommon for you to get into either of their aggro range and for Gula to devour all of your buffs and make herself an unstoppable force, if Ryotaro doesn't blast you all to hell first.
• That One Level: The Greed levels. Hope you like thinking with portals, because you'll have to reckon with your enemies and your characters constantly getting ported back and forth between the islands, potentially opening them to be ganged up on by enemies or for said enemies to quickly recover all the damage you had done to them.
• That One Puzzle:
  • The Memorial Garden is widely considered to be the worst puzzle in the game, and for good reason. You have to backtrack to a previous area, find a computer (which in itself is already a major pain in the ass since you have to input the correct username and password with the corresponding computer), and enter the right username and password if you even realize that's what you're supposed to do in the first place.
  • The Old Dorm's "Know The Time" puzzle. Instead of a useful, glowing indicator of a clue, you have to navigate the environment and hope your platform of choice has enough visual fidelity for you to see the solutions amid the midst. Also, the clues can be quite obtuse for a player to figure out.
  • "The Gate", where you have to find a mysterious Sign that will allow you to meet the God of the Otherworld. As it turns out, it's a phone number that appears on the top of your menu screen, but even then, the numbers and symbols are written in a way that makes them difficult to notice as such at first.
  • By far the worst mystery in the game is how to reach the Brutal Bonus Level of the game as noted in Guide Dang It! over on the pain page. Without going too deep into spoiler territory, you have to defeat nine optional bosses, all of which are Level 99, and every other enemy on the map is also near max level. Just getting the numbers necessary to get to those Throne Bosses is a pain in of itself, as you have to go out of your way to find the phone numbers by repeating the Abyss stages, which are already brutally difficult, for rare, RNG-based drops that were intentionally designed to be worked on by the entire community via sharing online and SNS. Hope you have a photographic memory and/or a LOT of convenient recording instruments because your Final Boss phone number is unique to your playthrough and can't be brute-forced!
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Pactbearers are all agreed to be excellently well-written. What players find disappointing are their Monarks, who are viewed in-story as Greater Scope Villains by the Jingu family and the reason the Pactbearers exist, don't get much in the way of characterization with the exception of Vanitas. Unlike him, all the others barely have any sort of characterization and are more-or-less just another enemy in the level you have to beat.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Just the entirety of Act 2 is likely to put you through the goddamn wringer with how bleak and depressing things get for the TSC. All four chapters put the chosen partners through the goddamn wringer and leave them a miserable wreck, and Nozomi's and Shinya's just barely qualify for being bittersweet because everyone in Shin Mikado except them gets a happy ending. Ryotaro and Kokoro (especially Kokoro, good lord)'s are straight up Downer Endings as all their Character Development ends up shooting themselves in the foot when neither is able to save the Vice-President from Cessation of Existence. If you manage to push through the bleakness and fight to get the ending, then you, good troper, are more dedicated than most. The game itself encourages this: when Dr. Kakeru says that this isn't a happy ending and suggests that maybe the Vice-President should be satisfied with things as they are, the player's only two choices are to say that he still isn't satisfied with what happened.

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