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Prove that you live by your own rules. note 
If you wish to be your own person, to have your own Ego, then don't give in to what others call normal.
Only you can defend your will and desires. Your beliefs and morals.
Because in this unjust world formed of incomprehensible thoughts, your Ego is what makes you who you are.
Should the world deny your Ego and refuse to accept it...
Then prove to the world that you live by your own rules.

Monark is a tactical JRPG developed by Lancarse Studios and published by FuRyu and NIS America. The game released on October 14th, 2021 in Japan and on February 22nd, 2022 in the West for Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Nintendo Switch and Steam. A free demo of the game was released on January 25, 2022, which consists of the entire first chapter of the game.

A bizarre series of paranormal events begin to occur in Shin Mikado Academy. Worse still, the school has been cut-off from the outside world, trapped within a mysterious fog driving the student body insane. The protagonist, who awakens inside the school with no memories, is tasked with solving the anomalies within the school as the Vice-President of the "True Student Council" after awakening to his Ego and "Authority of Vanity" upon encountering the demon Vanitas.

Notably, the game garnered immediate interest from fans as Suzuki Kazunari and Masuko Tsukasa, the scenerist of Megami Tensei and Megami Tensei II, Shin Megami Tensei I and Shin Megami Tensei II and the composer of numerous 80s Namco titles (among which was Digital Devil Story Megami Tensei) respectively are part of the game's development. The developers state that the game was primarily inspired by Shin Megami Tensei if..., which similarly led to to the creation of its Spiritual Successor Persona. The artwork of the game is done by So Bin.

Trailers: Announcement Trailer, Allies Trailer, Adversaries Trailer, Demo Trailer, Launch Trailer

Japanese Trailers: PV01 PV02


This game contains the following tropes:

  • Absurdly Low Level Cap: The demo caps you at Level 20. Even if you have enough SPIRIT to gain a new Skill or level one up, the demo won't allow you to go any further.
  • Academy of Adventure: Albeit not by choice, as the school was cut off from the outside world and is surrounded by the Mist that drives the students mad. Act 2 reveals that Shin Mikado accepted students who had the highest potential of becoming Pactbearers and eliminating those that do succeed in making a pact.
  • Action Prologue: The game opens up with the Vice-President being asked by an unknown entity to "show [her] your Ego" and pits him against two Legions. As the Vice-President doesn't have his Imagigear at this point, he's swiftly killed by the Legions and labeled a disappointment by Yoru.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • Though the best solution would have been for the game to be less grindy from the ground up, the developers did put in the Fertile Ground series of optional battlegrounds, which provide predictably leveled and powered enemies and have generous Spirit bonuses upon clearing it.
    • After "Intermission: Dusk", you need to convince one of the four former members of the TSC to ally with you. You have to speak to them and choosing a wrong answer that disappoints or angers them will reset the dialog. However, the game puts check marks on what options have worked in the past and there's only a 50-50 chance you'll get it wrong, just blindly picking.
    • If you have a new Legion starting from level 1 or don't want to think too hard about picking and choosing the right skills, the game has an Auto-Spend system that will invest in the recommended track of skills and get your characters up to speed at a fraction of the time.
    • If you're unhappy with how you invested in a character's skills, you can refund most of the spent Spirit to be spent again or on another character you want to invest in more.
    • In most puzzles, once you discover enough clues, the right answer will oftentimes appear as a 3rd option in what used to just be 2 options.
  • Arc Words: "Cruel, irrational world" is stated by numerous characters several times, often used to justify their actions or their actions being in defiance regarding the world.
  • Bittersweet Ending: "Dark Abundance" and "Unhinged Darkness" end this way. Shinya and Nozomi's Act 2 chapters end with most of the students making it out alive and no worse for wear, but both are left traumatized by the Vice-President's death and their inability to save him. It's worse for Shinya since "Unhinged Darkness" starts with Yoru killing Sora and Yugo, leaving him an orphan.
  • Boring, but Practical: Status Resistance Skills. Aside from the stat boost and the level up it gives you, most status effects tend to be minor inconveniences and are easy to heal up using one character, and even easier with the Defer mechanic. But, once you start using Area Resonance and sharing stats and effects with your whole team, you'll be glad to never experience one character being Charmed and your whole team suddenly violently turning on each other, starting a downhill slide that will both tank your score and likely lose you the encounter.
  • Bragging Rights Reward: Passing the Brutal Bonus Level gives you one of four possible rewards, two of which probably won't matter all that much as by this point you're in the post-game. Said rewards are either an absurd amount of SPIRIT or raising your Ego values to the highest limit. Not only does the Brutal Bonus Level require the best possible equipment and every character at Max Level to have so much as a chance at beating, but your Ego values will already be close to max after the tons of hours you no doubt spent grinding just to beat the level in the first place.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: One aspect of Kurama's Biokinesis isn't just the control of a person's bodily functions, but also their mind. He uses his Authority to turn the students under his control into mindless thrall, all in order to keep the peace. He tries to use it on the Vice-President, but it doesn't stick due to the latter's Authority of Vanity.
  • Brilliant, but Lazy: Those of the Sloth Authority tend to be highly intelligent, analytical, and have an impeccable sense of strategy...which they use to defeat their opponents in the fastest way possible with the least amount of moves, because they don't want to spend any more energy or time than strictly necessary. In-game, this is represented by their having high critical and evasion chance.
  • But Thou Must!: The game offers up choices from time to time, where you have to select one to proceed. However, oftentimes, there will only be 1 choice as doing anything else would prevent you from proceeding in the game, such as when Kurama uses his Authority on the Vice-President and orders him to capture Nozomi. There are three dialogue options, all of which are "No." The choices start becoming more linear and the same as the game progresses, representing the Vice-President growing as a character and developing more defined emotions unlike how he and his "siblings" start out.
  • Cast from Hit Points: Arts take off a percentage of your health in order to be used.
  • Cast from Sanity: Using Authorities increases your MAD Gauge, which will put your characters at risk of entering Madness.
  • Character Class: Legions from a specific Authority trend towards certain weapons, fighting styles, and status effects. For some examples:
    • Pride Legions favor pole weapons and specialize in Poison, Healing, and Sleep. They make great all-around frontline fighters, capable of taking on multiple enemies at once and supporting allies, but lack burst damage, relying on others to pick up the slack.
    • Sloth Legions, ironically, are incredibly evasive and have high critical rates. Presumably, this is because they want to do the least amount of work possible in combat, emphasized by their favoring ranged weapons. Now they don't have to walk right up to their opponents to fight and with any luck, they'll walk into range themselves.
    • Lust Legions favor ranged weapons, the Charm effect that turns enemies against their allies, and Fire-based projectile attacks and AoE spells—"burning passion", if you will.
  • Chess Motifs: Especially prominent in combat, the player characters and friendly minions are all White while all enemies and hostile forces are Black. Their combat armor also resembles chess pieces, with the Vice-President being based off the King and Nozomi being based off the Knight, for example.
  • Dark Is Evil: The Daemons the TSC come across appear as menacing dark-colored skeletons wielding an assortment of wicked-looking weaponry. The Pactbearers themselves are adorned in jet-black Imagigear, contrasting with the Vice-President and the TSC's white-colored Imagigear.
  • Dem Bones: Daemons and Fiends, the respective enemy and allied NPCs in the game, are skeletal-like monsters. Fittingly they are color-coded, with Daemons being black and Fiends white.
  • Developer's Foresight: Since Act 1's Pactbearers can be tackled in any order, the difficulty will scale in accordance to whatever order you face them. The first Pactbearer you fight after Kurama will be the weakest while the last one you need to deal with will be significantly higher than if you went after them first. This also applies in the Act 2 chapters.
  • Downer Ending: The TSC Pactbearer Act 2 chapters do not end happily. While Sora is defeated, her breakdown causes her to either absorb or kill the students in Shin Mikado, leaving hardly anyone left in her wake. "Birth of a New World" is easily the most gut-wrenching, the Vice-President ends up Taking the Bullet for her after they've defeated Sora, and he disappears before Kokoro can finish giving him an Anguished Declaration of Love. Worse still, Yoru is still out there and is free to do what she wishes now that the Barrier is gone.
  • Driven to Madness: The Unsettled are students who have stayed in the Mist for varying periods of time. Exactly how insane they've been driven varies, but to give you an example of how seriously it fucked up the students, a teacher and a group of students jump off the roof as part of their "graduation ceremony".
  • Early Game Hell: The game hampers you in several ways in the first few hours:
    • You only have access to the Vice-President and Nozomi, and though the latter will eventually become an impressive tank, she's extremely fragile starting out.
    • You only have one Fiend of one Authority, whose usefulness is entirely dependent on whether you knew how to answer the beginning psych test or not.
    • You only have access to 3 unit slots and cannot create new Fiends. You have only a small handful of recovery items to choose from.
    • You barely do much damage while your enemies are oftentimes taking huge chunks out of yours, even without criticals.
    • And don't even think about getting consistent S ranks, without many of the abilities and set-ups required to chain Resonances, Critical Hits, and follow-ups, much more the raw damage output to finish within par number of turns.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: And holy shit do you have to work for it. The entirety of Act 2 involves the Vice-President dying in each of the TSC members' chapters, and in two of them, almost the entire student body and faculty are killed in the wake of Sora's rampage. It's only thanks to Kakeru rewinding time after each chapter that the Vice-President can cultivate his Animakinesis and restoring everyone's memories of their respective routes that the TSC is reformed and search for a way for the Vice-President to continue existing without Yoru. And if you want to make the ending sweeter, be prepared to fight all nine Monarks at their strongest and go through round 2 with the Final Boss with only your Fiends as your only back-up. Defeating Yog-Sothoth a second time will let net you one more wish, which you can use for a Bragging Rights Reward or revive either Kakeru or Sora Jingu.
  • Elaborate University High: Shin Mikado is a very rich, prestigious academic institution, with no less than 3 multi-floor buildings for the 3 years of Japanese high school, a massive club building and sports facilities for extra-curricular activities, a library with the largest collection of books in the country, a massive memorial garden with a now-defunct dormitory that used to be used for students outside of the city, and middle school facilities, though the last one is never explored in the game. Documents about the academy say that the school relies on generous support and donations from its alumni, among which are countless powerful businessmen and politicians. It's also an Academy of Adventure, albeit with a sinister twist: If any student is discovered as having a powerful Ego with knowledge of the Otherworld, they'll be potentially murdered to prevent them from becoming a Pactbearer. Those that do are killed on the spot.
  • Elevator School: Shin Mikado takes both middle school and high school students, with separate buildings meant for their respective years and students, though the high school portion of the campus is the main focus.
  • Everyone Is a Super: Downplayed. According to Sora, everyone in Shin Mikado possesses a powerful Ego and therefore has the potential of making a pact with a Monark. This is also why the Jingu family is in charge of the academy, so they can eliminate anyone who does make a pact. It's also noted by Cromwell that most adolescents and youths have strong Egos, meaning seven times out of ten, a teen will become a Pactbearer. Sure enough, with the exception of Kakeru, Yugo, and Hayate, every other Pactbearer in the academy is a teenager.
  • Exact Words: On the roof of the 1st Year Building, one of the Unsettled students will not let you pass to the boss unless you say "Password". After deciphering the cryptic, science-themed clues with Kokoro's help, then cracking the cryptogram, the answer is literally "Password".
  • Failure Is the Only Option: It's impossible to win the fight against the Legions at the very start of the game. Not only does the Vice-President not have access to his Authorities or Arts at this time, but he'll also die in a couple of hits. Even if you somehow survive long enough to enter an Awakened State, it won't do you much good.
  • Fog of Doom: The Mist, which appeared at the same time the barrier entrapped Shin Mikado Academy and separated it from the rest of the world. No one knows where it came from or what's causing it, but just being in the mist causes people to go crazy and become Unsettled. Generally, any area with Mist is connected to the Otherworld, which then leads to you getting a phone call that will drag you into the Otherworld.
  • Gameplay and Story Integration: The Mist causes everyone in it to go insane. In terms of gameplay, your MAD gauge rises while you are in the Mist. Hitting 100% lands you back in the infirmary outside of battle, but in battle, the characters enter a superpowered state and go berserk, not unlike the Berserk status effect in Shadow Hearts.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: Thanks to the Vice-President having no Canon Name, players can name him however they want, which confuses Nozomi since he and Chiyo have different family names. She still says this even if the Vice-President's family name is Aikawa.
  • Gameplay Grading: Combat encounters are graded, with S being the highest. Aside from the bragging rewards and achievements, having a higher grade will award you with more Spirit, currency for upgrading your characters and buying consumable items. Players can increase their score by clearing an encounter at or below a par number of turns, causing critical hits and follow-up attacks, Resonating with allies, and avoiding getting your characters KO'd. Additionally, the Vice-President's Ego stats are increased by defeating Daemons with the corresponding sins.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • Want to start with a Legion of a specific Authority and many points in the other Authorities, to make the Early Game Hell easier with some useful buffs and weapon types, like ranged attacks? Good luck figuring out how the answers to the 15 question psych test are weighted and what series of answers for the "psych tests" will get you the results you want!
    • Want to skip the grind of defeating specific types of enemies to raise your Desires through the one-time use psych tests handed out by NPC? Hope you're familiar with the original versions or have someone who recorded what each answer will raise.
    • Any puzzle that involves logging into a computer. Hope you have some recording instrument handy, to remember the long, numerical strings of student IDs, then type the passwords exactly as they are supposed to be written.
    • Some puzzles have incredibly obtuse clues, requiring the player to either consult a guide or start running around the campus, using memory and brute force to try and figure out the answer. The Memorial Garden's memorial puzzle stands out, as you have to backtrack to a previous era, find a computer, and enter the right username and password if you even realize that's what you're supposed to do in the first place.
    • Some phone numbers and puzzles need real-world and academic knowledge, though thankfully that can be easily resolved with a Google search. For example, the puzzle for the 2nd Year Building, Rooftop, involves figuring out where the portal is using portraits of famous classical music composers, your hint being who composed what music. Another is the number for Fertile Ground III, which is one of the sets of the value of Pi, as found in the Mathematics Club Room.
    • Want to challenge the Final Boss again so you can another wish granted, like reviving Kakeru or Sora? Get ready to start dialing random Abyss numbers, because the only way you're getting the Signs needed to reach the Brutal Bonus Level is by battling and winning Abyss battles. While this is already a challenge as you're fighting enemies at max Level, there's also the fact that the Abyss battles change depending on the last digit you input, and even if you win, there's no real guarantee you'll get the phone number need. You also can't brute force your way to challenging the Final Boss again by looking at somebody else's walkthrough because the Sign you get is unique to your playthrough.
  • Interface Screw: When you accumulate Madness, your UI will start to glitch out, though the severity depends on how high your MAD gauge is.
  • Kill Steal: In the Pactbearer of Wrath arc, Subaru has two main targets in the massacre he inflicts on the first-year class — Hidefumi and Yasunori, the ringleaders of his bullying campaign. Yasunori eventually snaps and kills Hidefumi, believing that it will get Subaru to let him go, but it does nothing except enrage him and ensure Yasunori dies a slow, agonizing death off-screen.
  • Limit Break: "Enlightenment" gives characters a massive stat boosts and zero skill cost, making them extraordinarily powerful and useful in a pinch. Achieving this requires you to keep careful management of your Resolve and MAD gauges and maxing both out, either by entering Madness and taking enough damage for your Resolve gauge to max out or abusing the Vice-President's resonance ability and achieving Enlightenment easily.
  • Meaningful Name: According to Ryotaro, "Shin Mikado" means "Divine Gate". This, tied with "Jingu" meaning "shrine", foreshadows the existence of the Gate and the Outer God who resides behind it.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: At the rooftop of the High School Building, you're unable to reach the 3rd and the last Ideal needed to dispel the Mist because a student is insistent on keeping the access door shut from the outside, while you're surrounded by Unsettled professors and students both that are desperate to "graduate". The solution for this puzzle is to call the student holding the door shut about his envy at not being able to graduate. He relents and lets the group proceed. You later learn why he was so hellbent on preventing them graduate as you witness his classmates and professor jumping off the roof as part of the "ceremony".
  • Nothing Is Scarier: When you reach the second floor, you'll come across a girl talking to a storage locker like it's her best friend. Once you manage to get the girl to leave, Nozomi notices there's a disgusting smell coming from it. You can't see what's inside the locker, and once you clear the Mist on the second floor, the locker is gone. It's worth noting that there were memos scattered around the floor conveying a conversation between a pair of girls, one of whom refuses to let go of her friend's hand and the latter is dying of dehydration. Make of that what you will.
  • Our Demons Are Different: The supernatural forces in the game are known as Daemons, which are divided into three classes. The lowliest Daemons are known as Legions and are otherwise foot soldiers. Above them are the Nobles, and higher still are the Monarks, who all preside over the Seven Deadly Sins. One thing all Daemons share in common is that they subsist off the Ego and Desire of humans by dragging them into the Otherworld.
  • Peninsula of Power Leveling: The "Fertile Ground" series of optional battlefields offer predictably leveled opponents and extremely generous Spirit bonuses upon clearing, which makes leveling up your characters incredibly easy. If you play on casual mode and abuse certain skills and synergies, you can even take on opponents 10-20 levels higher than your party and reap the rewards of blazing up to the level cap.
  • Sanity Meter: The MAD gauge. Using certain skills increases the gauge and boosts your abilities, but if it hits max, the characters will go berserk and cannot be controlled. The exception would be reaching both 100% Resolve and MAD at the same time, which will give you access to "Enlightenment", giving you the stat boosts of Madness and Resolve and the zero skill costs at no loss of control. Good luck managing them both and keeping one from spilling over prematurely, though!
  • Seven Deadly Sins: The main antagonists of the game are the seven Daemons known as the Monarks, each of whom are in a pact with someone in Shin Mikado and bestow upon them an Authority correlating to one of the seven sins. The Vice-President's sin, Vanity, is noted by Sora to be an aberrant, although it is associated with the deadly sin of Pride. Act 2 also reveals the sin of Woe, another aberrant like Vanity.
  • Shoo Out the Clowns: Act 2 is kicked off by Chiyo's death and Sora disbanding the True Student Council. After that, the little humor in the story is as good as gone.
  • The Stinger: The game ends with the Vice-President leaving Shin Mikado academy with Chiyo, presumably to fulfill their promise and visit some cafés. As they leave, a phone lying on the ground starts ringing...
  • Timey-Wimey Ball: Shin Mikado has been caught in one since the Barrier went up when the anomalies began to occur. Kakeru's Authority of Greed allows him to rewind time to a certain extent, which he uses whenever things get hairy for him as he uses it in a vain attempt to heal his injuries after Yoru blindsided him. A conversation with an NPC in the first-year building implies Kakeru's rewinded time over seventy times by the time the Vice-President shows up.
  • Truth in Television:
    • "Wrath from Beyond" involves the Pactbearer of Wrath being the victim of a vicious bullying campaign who made a pact with a Monark to get revenge. As you learn more about Subaru and his circumstances, the party discovers someone tried to report the bullying to a teacher, but Subaru denied he was ever being bullied in the first place and got angry when he found out who reported it to the teacher. This is actually something that occurs in real life as well and is especially prominent in a hostile work environment.
    • "Irreversible Fidelity", the Pactbearer of Lust arc, has a scene where Haruka, Shin Mikado's resident heartbreaker, is confronted by one of his exes at knifepoint who wants to know why he dumped her. After the situation is resolved, Haruka explains he knows his habit of ghosting and dumping girlfriends is very bad, but he can't help but do it because it's what his first girlfriend did to him. In real life, this is a common occurrence for victims of abuse to replicate and continue the cycle of abuse they themselves went through.
    • Shinya's incredible drive to "prove" himself worthy of love, his extreme attachment to his adoptive parents, and acerbic, snarky personality are all common behaviors of a child abuse survivor. Shinya even tries to justify the traumatic emotional, physical, and psychological abuse that his birth parents heaped on him as their still "loving" him and having had a reason to torture and hurt him, until the Vice-President points out it was just abuse, and Shinya can no longer reconcile the cognitive dissonance and breaks down.
  • The Unreveal: Certain characters' profiles are partially censored until you get their Alter Ego, which reveals the censored bits. The sole exception to this is Reiko Inze from the first-year building, who's profile is filled with nonsensical gibberish that only seems to expand when you find her Alter Ego. That might have to do with the fact that she's actually dead, as her name is inscribed on the Memorial Stone in the Memorial Garden near the Old Dormitories.
  • Wham Episode:
    • "Recurring Twilight", and following it, "Intermission: Dusk". Not only is Kakeru, the school doctor, revealed to be a Pactbearer himself, but he reveals the existence of a ninth Pactbearer; Sora Jingu, whose Essokinesis is keeping the Barrier up. The Intermission ramps it up further with the TSC being formally disbanded by Sora, the members going their separate ways, and Chiyo dying after being dragged into the Otherworld as a result of the intensified distortions in the academy.
    • Act 2 in general sets up a huge whammy. While the chapters are more or less the same regardless of who you choose to partner with (you will have to deal with Ryotaro or Kokoro and defeat Sora or Yoru), they reveal more information about the ninth Pactbearer. Destroying Sora's Ideals reveal that the Pactbearer is not her, but Yugo; "Birth of a New World" and "Woeful Execution" reveals that Sora is actually his Monark, with the former chapter having Yoru stating Sora Jingu has been Dead All Along and "Sora" has been impersonating her and wiping Yugo's memories all this time.
  • Wham Line:
    • In Act 2, Sora's discussion with the Vice-President and their chosen partner reveals a rather curious bit about the Vice-President.
      Sora: You're special. You realized something was off, didn't you? There's no Mist associated with you.
    • In "Deepest Reaches", the TSC enters the Gate, only to find it empty. The group is confused and asks Vanitas for answers when he shows up.
      Ryotaro: If this god really is here, why don't you tell it to show up already?
      Vanitas: Gehe. Gehehehehehe. The god with whom you seek to fraternize has always been right here, before your eyes.
  • Wham Shot: In Act 2, the Vice-President and his chosen partner search the basements of Shin Mikado, looking for Sora/Yoru's Mist and Ideals, only to discover a familiar face lying on the ground. It's the Vice-President himself, with the same empty gray eyes he had in the beginning of the game. The confrontation with Yoru/Sora expands on this revelation: the Vice-President is a "Vanity project"; an Artificial Human created by Yoru.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?:
    • Kokoro is off-handedly mentioned to be no longer a problem during "Flagbearer of Faith". You learn in other chapters that Sora convinced her to seal herself off in the Otherworld, thus removing her influence and Mist from the academy at the cost of forever being isolated.
    • In Shinya and Ryotaro's Act 2 chapters, Nozomi is never mentioned and is implied to have sequestered herself inside the Student Council room, no doubt because of her feelings of worthlessness and the Wham Episode that was "Recurring Twilight" and Chiyo's death in "Intermission: Dusk".

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