Monark: Beginner Tips

With the seven deadly sins, a high school trapped inside a mysterious barrier, and an overabundance of pop psychology, Monark is an interesting game that gets you invested within minutes of booting it up. It’s certainly one that requires your attention as you play through it if you want to know what’s going on.

As an RPG with a heavy focus on strategy, Monark also requires some forethought if you wish to be successful in combat. Overall, it’s a complex game with a lot to offer if you’re willing to delve into the nooks and crannies. Here’s how to make the most of it.

Keep Your MAD Down

An easy way to mess up when you’re just starting out is to let your MAD gauge hit 100 percent. This will do one of two things depending on the situation:

• In battles, it will make your character uncontrollable. After three turns of this status effect, the character will die – if this is your protagonist, it’s game over.
• In the overworld, reaching 100 percent MAD will send you right back to the infirmary. This can be very frustrating, especially when it interrupts you in solving a puzzle.

To avoid your MAD reaching 100, you’ll need to ration your use of Authorities and Deferrals during battle and make sure you have a healthy supply of Mental Stabilizers at all times. These can only be acquired from the infirmary, and only up to five at a time.

In addition, simply talking to Dr. Kakeru at the infirmary will reduce your MAD to zero, so visit him often. Every time you finish a grinding session or a story battle is a good rule of thumb. It’s a pain, but quite necessary.

Optional Battles Are The Key To Survival

It’s vital, in this game, to spend your Spirit on abilities to improve your stats. The thing is, the Spirit you’ll receive from Precipice battles and calls to the Otherworld just won’t cut it and before long you’ll be fighting enemies far stronger than you.

The solution to this is grinding. This might be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you like in an RPG. Luckily, Monark’s combat system is a fun one.

Using the Call function on your cell phone menu, you can manually enter numbers to call, with many addresses leading to great battlefields for the purposes of grinding Spirit or Vessels. As you play through the game, you’ll pick up Memos that can be viewed from the Materials menu – these will tell you the numbers you have to call.

We're compiling a list of useful phone numbers in the game, watch this space!

Know Your Fiends

Throughout the game, you will recruit a total of seven Fiends to your party, in addition to your human friends – one for each of the seven deadly sins. These units are unique in their stats and abilities, and it’s important to know what their strengths and weaknesses are.

For example, take Lust and Sloth. They are both ranged attackers, but they have different ability sets – so you should equip them differently. Lust has powerful Psychic Power attacks and so should be given the headgear with the most PSY, while Sloth is a physical attacker, so give it body gear with high ATK.

Inspect your Fiends’ ability trees thoroughly and formulate plans based on them. This way, you can be sure that the only thing stopping you is lower stats if you ever hit a wall.

Take Psychology Tests

There are three students in the game who will administer psychological tests when you talk to them. They are:

• Tensi Matsushima, who can be found in the Main Building.
• Miho Sonobe, who can be found in the First Year Building.
• Nobutaka Iyama, who can be found in the Second Year Building.

Taking a psychological test will improve one of your Egos by a decent amount, depending on your answers. You can take a new test after fighting one battle, so it’s possible to grind out every psychological test once you have access to these students by completing a battle, taking a test, and then repeating the process.

Even when you have access to these buildings, the students may not be available depending on your progress in the story. Just progress a little bit and you’ll end up at a stage where the students have returned.

Acquire Alter Egos

Quite early in the game, you’re likely to come across Alter Egos. These look like small floating crystals will dark, red auras. Interacting with them will increase one of your stats by a certain amount, and this will affect every unit in the game – even units you have yet to encounter.

Alter Egos require a certain level of Ego to obtain. None of them require an Ego above 500, and it’s always worth hunting for them to get those tasty stat boosts. Try to make a note of any that you find but cannot acquire yet.

Achievement Hunting

Achievements in this game fulfill two purposes. The first is to provide you with cosmetic items that you can apply to the Fiends in your party – hairstyles and colors, and even voices that they’ll use in battle. It’s a nice way to vary the look of your combat party if you feel so inclined.

The other purpose is to provide big boosts of Spirit. There are fewer achievements of this variety, but they’re useful to acquire as soon as it’s possible. The following achievements will provide Spirit upon completion.

Don’t Ignore Materials

As you progress through the game, you’ll pick up plenty of Materials that may be read in the Library menu. There are two types of Material: Academy and Otherworld.

Academy Materials relate to Shin Mikado Academy and will tell you things about its history, its clubs, and various tidbits of gossip. At first, these won’t seem very important, but quite a lot of these Materials contain hints at the solutions to puzzles both mandatory and optional.

The Otherworld Materials are similar. Many of them will give you lore about the world of Monark and the history of various characters, but the solutions to puzzles may also be contained within. The Memos, which are located at the bottom of the list, will tell you the phone numbers of certain battlefields in the game. The Fertile Ground battles in particular are very useful for grinding Spirit.

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