This is perhaps the most 5/10 game Experience has ever made.
Nothing about the basic concept is fundamentally bad. It's built on the same framework as most of their titles, and it's a tried and true formula at this point. But Mon-Yu offers very little beyond that basic skeleton, and a lot of the new ideas it DOES implement are simply bad.
The biggest point in the game's favour is the fantastic quality of life. You can fully respec your party whenever you want - class, stats, skills, even portraits. You get an infinite-use escape-the-dungeon item that even works during combat against bosses. There's an infinite supply of store items that negate floor damage and poison swamps. Generally very nice stuff in that regard.
Unfortunately, my compliments for Mon-Yu end just about there. Everything else in this game feels very phoned in and lazy.
- The character graphics are contentious at best. It's clear they didn't have a lot of enemy sprites to work with, because you start seeing palette swaps before the first dungeon is even over.
- Because the entire dungeon is in one tower, the environments are agonisingly repetitive. It doesn't help that every dungeon area uses [i]the exact same BGM[/i] but with the pitch getting lower the further you go. Experience is known for re-using content, but this is ridiculous.
- The story (as of the 6th dungeon) is almost nonexistent. You're thrown in with a very basic 'go defeat the demon kings who took our country's treasures!' and get almost nothing beyond that. There are only two NPCs to interact with and they have very little of interest to say. Maybe this was intentional to try and capture the vibe of old-school Wizardry, but compared to Undernauts it gave me no drive to actually do my job.
All of that's aesthetic stuff, but the combat has its own problems.
- Loot odds are garbage. Six dungeons in I still frequently get item drops that would have been obsolete in the first hour. And this is WITH the evaluation buff.
- Speaking of evaluation, we have to talk about the level cap. I've been playing on Type B, so it's not AS brutal as it could be, but you will enter every new area woefully underleveled and undergeared until you do a LOT of grinding to bring yourself up to speed.
- Boss fights in particular will heavily favour certain class builds. For example, one mid-game boss spends half the fight immune to physical damage and the other half immune to magical damage. If your team's slanted too far in either direction the fight becomes a real slog, so you're really incentivised to switch up as needed. Which runs into this game's worst sin:
[h3]EQUIPMENT FARMING.[/h3]
Most Experience Inc games have some sort of system to upgrade your equipment. Demon Gaze, for example, lets you break down excess weapons you've collected into Ether, which can be spent on upgrading weapons and armour. It's a perfectly functional system that means you can use extra loot drops for something that isn't just a pittance of cash at the shop.
Mon-Yu throws that system away and replaces it with something much much worse. Now your equipment is upgraded while you fight, based on the amount of XP you obtain. Better weapons have higher ranks, which means they can be upgraded further but ALSO require more XP per rank.
This looks innocent enough on the surface, but consider what happens when you find a new piece of equipment. Even if it's statistically better than your current gear, it's going to take a lot of grinding to bring it even with what you had before, never mind improve on it.
This also turns loot that you aren't going to equip into vendor trash that just clogs your inventory space and sells for disappointingly low amounts.
And remember how I was talking about bosses expecting you to switch your classes around? Well, that also means you need to grind loot drops until you've got appropriate gear for them, and then grind MORE to get that gear suitably upgraded!
Between the constant level gating and this upgrade system, the grinding in this game is constant and unsatisfying. Maybe this is a deliberate move to pad out the game, because the dungeons themselves have been very short and simple (the first three dungeons have only had one floor!). It really doesn't feel like there was any love or affection put into this, and it was just shoved out to make a quick buck based on the name being funny.
Unless you are physically addicted to DRPGs and have squeezed every drop from any other title on the market, I cannot in good faith recommend Mon-Yu to anyone. I've invested 15 hours at this point so I'm going to at least try to push through to the end, but I wouldn't do it again given the chance.
If you want to see what Experience can do when they actually try, go play Undernauts instead. Better system, better aesthetic, better story, better map design, better everything.
[b]EDIT:[/b] Having now completed the game (all achievements, all S-Ranks on Type B), I can now say with confidence that I stand by my previous assessment. They do try to work in a few plot points near the end of the game to tie in with the general Experience lore, but it involves [spoiler]a horribly forced twist with almost zero foreshadowing.[/spoiler] The game wears its Dragon Quest inspiration on its sleeve a little too openly, to the point of recycling famous plot points from that series rather than coming up with anything of its own.
The worst gimmick they steal from Dragon Quest is the 'But Thou Must!' routine. Every single 'choice' the game offers you is fake - if you don't pick the option the game wants it'll either refuse to progress until you do or act like you did want you wanted it to do anyway. I [i]hate[/i] this trope with a passion; if you've already decided how the player character is going to react, what's the point of even offering me a choice? [spoiler]You can't even take the offer to share half the world with the Devil King at the end, because if you try the game insists it was all a nightmare and 'true heroes would never give in to the temptation of darkness!'[/spoiler]
[h2]Just play Undernauts instead. I'm begging you.[/h2]
