8/3/2023 0 Comments Monark video gameIt has been designed, deliberately, to be an endless gauntlet, until you want it to end, and then you’re given the freedom to move back to the world and narrative of Monark. That being said, there’s also no downside to doing poorly, as your team is healed up immediately on the commencement of the next battle. Each individual battle gives you a letter grade, which corresponds to how quickly and effectively you’ve dispatched opponents, and it’s worth trying to get the higher grades as it means more experience. So you’ll need to make careful use of those abilities, while also understanding that you’ll need them and exploiting them is core to Monark’s tactics.īecause you’ve got complete control over when you fight, you can choose to string these battles together, one after another, and accumulate a lot of experience points quickly. If that gets all the way to 100 per cent (remembering that wandering around in the mist also accumulates MAD points), then the character goes berserk and it’s back to the infirmary with them. In addition to the standard range of attacks and special abilities, there’s also a number of additional capabilities that you have access to, such as the ability to give another character another turn, and those have a cost that will add to that character’s MAD percentage bar. Each battle takes place on a small tactical stage, where you square off against opponents in a turn-based manner. In fact, though it may well be the most conventional part of this deeply strange game, it’s still quite interesting. I should clarify at this point that Monark doesn’t have a bad combat system by any means. Monark’s combat is so partitioned off from everything else in the game that it feels dropped in, whereas with most JRPGs developers work hard to try to make the enemies and combat system a consistent and integrated part of the rest of the experience. All of this might sound like an abstract difference to the standard JRPG, but you do really feel it in action. Once you start the combat, you can continually replay battles until you’ve had enough, meaning that you never need to return to the “real world” until you’re done grinding. Then, just before the boss, I spend a short while (never too long) fighting enemy after enemy by dialling into this otherworld. I found my preferred approach was to simply ignore all combat as I explored an area, solved its puzzles and followed along with the narrative. If you’re not levelled enough that battle is going to be overwhelming, but again, it’s entirely up to you when you do this, and it takes place in an entirely distinct space from the rest of the game. Here, too, the boss battles happen in an entirely different realm, and involves reaching the end of a dungeon area, finding a modem-like phone, and then dialling it using your own phone. Of course, you will need to level up, because eventually, you are going to have to fight a boss battle to progress the narrative. So, for the most part, assuming you can avoid your pursuers, then there’s no pressing urgency to whisk yourself over to a battle scene that looks like it came from a completely different game. If they catch you, you simply get knocked out. If you prompt them to accept the call, then they’re whisked away to a battle in a very different dimension that doesn’t even remotely resemble the “real world.” If you don’t answer the call, the people that roam the mist-enshrouded halls will go berserk and chase you… but even if they catch you, they don’t attack, and you don’t fight them. Instead, there are times when your avatar’s mobile phone will ring. There are no random battles, or even enemies on the map, as you might expect from a JRPG. What I mean by this is that the combat is almost completely separate and modular to the rest of the game. It’s there, but it also feels like it was dropped in deep into development, and only after someone high up realised that without it they were selling something that was going to be as appealing to the gaming audience as a video recording of the recital of Freud would be to the cinema audience. I’m not entirely sure the combat was planned for Monark at all. Related reading: Our interview with the creative mind behind Monark.
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