For anyone that doesn’t, first person dungeon games are a test of patience and resilience. Making a tactical error or two or being lazy about menu selections can slaughter your party in a single combat and most games in this genre require a methodical approach and a fairly high degree of patience. In recent years, developers have been adding lower difficulty modes for accessibility as well, making the genre more approachable, especially for people with limited time to play who enjoy the genre. Recently, the first 3 Etrian Odyssey games (review here) were remastered in this way with lower difficulty and it made a big difference to gameplay.
The latest Experience Inc. experience (I had to) is published by Aksys and has one of the longest titles of any video game ever. Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armor. You May Be Defeated, But Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King is a game where the title essentially explains the key gameplay both of itself and the entire genre. As you might guess though, we’ll be calling it ‘Mon-Yu’ for the remainder of this review.
In Mon-Yu, you are creating a party of six adventurers to take on the Devil Kings to retrieve stolen treasure for Queen Eternia, the fairy queen. Doing so will save the land and you are controlling the otherworldly adventurers that she has convinced to join up. It’s a pretty basic plot that feels like one of those fluffy ‘I woke up in another world’ mangas or animes but without all the requisite character development and inevitable lascivious situations. In point of fact, Mon-Yu suffers from a distinct lack of plot that makes even some of the other major plot-light dungeon RPGs feel like Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
There’s just not a lot to work with here. Aside from a talking treasure chest that gives you tips in the dungeon, a talking pig that runs the shop, and the fairy queen herself, there are no other characters in the game. On top of that, each one of them only has a handful of lines that change when you trigger certain events. There’s simply not a lot to work with here in terms of storyline. That’s a weird tonal shift from other games like Stranger of Sword City and Saviors of Sapphire Wings which both had noticeable focuses on plot as well as complex dungeon crawling.
What you will get with Mon-Yu is dungeon crawling, and a lot of it. The entire game consists of exploring more and more complex dungeons and getting obliterated over and over, hence the title. That’s pretty standard for the genre but Mon-Yu is also something of a throwback to an earlier style of design. Each dungeon is filled with a variety of enemies which are actively patrolling its halls. Enemies are visible in the dungeon as burning skulls of various colors and also on the map with small colored sword icons. Orange skulls mean the enemy is stationary, green means they move randomly, blue means they will run away from you unless you can corner them, and purple means that they will actively hunt you and are more powerful. Horned skulls indicate mini-bosses and full bosses so be prepared for battle if you see them.
Just because enemies aren’t moving around or actively chasing you all the time doesn’t mean things will be easy for your party though. You’ll quickly find in Mon-Yu that your characters are wildly underpowered and likely to get slaughtered within a couple of encounters, especially in the early game. The weapons you are provided with, coupled with your low hit point levels and strength mean that death is all but inevitable. If you want to survive, you can use the warp crystal that the queen has provided you with, but really, you’re supposed to fail.
It’s right there in the title of course. “You may be defeated but don’t give up.” Mon-Yu is specifically designed for you to die over and over again. When you do, much like those animes where characters find themselves in another world, you don’t die. More accurately, you die but are resurrected with full health by the Queen and sent back on your merry way to get slaughtered again. Death sucks so the queen gives you a slight permanent boost to HP and MP in order to give you a very slightly better chance next time. You also get to keep all your items and if there’s extra XP floating on your characters, it converts to a minimal amount of gold as well.
That’s not to say that you’ll do well by just dying and going back to the queen over and over again. The boost is definitely minimal and it doesn’t affect your stats at all. A few extra HP are not going to help you much in Mon-Yu. That’s definitely a missed opportunity in terms of the game design and loop on the part of Experience. Level completion is graded by Queen Eternia and you can S-Rank levels b y finding all the pathways and secrets, keeping your levels low, and beating the Devil Kings quickly. The game actually rewards low-level characters and levelling up is optional. There’s also a level down system, something that’s unique to Mon-Yu.
Queen Eternia sets level caps for adventurers, slowly raising them as you progress through the dungeons of the game. She also sets soft caps to achieve maximum score per dungeon. For example, on level 2, the level cap is 10, but the soft cap to S-Rank the stage is Level 6. This means you can voluntarily make the game harder for some long term benefits but it also makes every level a struggle and more than a bit of a grind. Manage to S-Rank a stage and all the treasure you find from enemies afterwards upgrades by a full level. You’ll need that gear to survive too, since enemies drop very little money and gear is outrageously expensive in the only store in the game. Hey, they’ve got a monopoly, right?
When you check in at the store, you’ll find out very quickly that the most powerful weapons and armor available are locked up with exorbitant costs. A good weapon, one that might help you survive, might cost 1500 gold. Unfortunately, multiple runs through a dungeon might net you 300-400 gold on a good run and there are no random encounters here. Leaving the dungeon and coming back heals your characters and resets the enemies, allowing you to gather more gold but it’s definitely a slow process. Once you finally scrape together enough cash for one upgrade, it will definitely make a difference in how your party performs, but your grind isn’t over because the rest of your party will need those upgrades too and the treasure you receive from defeating enemies just won’t cut it.
Eventually, you’ll cobble together enough gear to survive and even beat enemies in a dungeon with ease but that’s not enough to really excel in Mon-Yu. You’ll also have to upgrade character skills. There are eight character classes, meaning you’ll have to be picky about what combinations of characters you select for your party. As you build characters up they gain skill points that can be applied to various skills in order to obtain special abilities and attacks. Stronger skills are only available once you level up to the appropriate level and most skills have multiple tiers of strength as well. Fighting enough enemies eventually yields skill points but it’s a slow process. Of course, when you level down in order to fight a boss for an S-Ranking, you ‘forget’ all the skills you have learned that are above level, leaving you weaker and making the fight that much more difficult. It’s definitely a balancing act between levels and skills but if you want that S ranking, you’ll definitely have to work for it.
Mon-Yu has an interesting visual style as well. Experience has a penchant for painted artwork that gives a unique handcrafted look to their games. Vanillaware does something similar but the look of Experience titles such as Stranger of Sword City and now Mon-Yu is more akin to stylishly painted work than anything else. While the backgrounds are traditional 3D models, the enemy artwork is interesting and unique with bold strokes and no outlines to pull the eye away from the creativity of the characters. It’s has look that’s both organic and cartoonish at the same time and the style is both interesting and refreshing. Enemies are reused with palette and size swaps, a traditional approach in both JRPGs and dungeon RPGs. Dungeon designs are intentionally repetitive to confuse players but the backgrounds are interesting and switching from level to level in the Devil King dungeons adds additional tiles and new designs. The UI is well designed as well with smooth transitions and careful attention to aesthetics. Between dungeon designs, character portraits (including a few from other Experience games) and enemies, Mon-Yu is an excellent looking game across the board.
Moving to the audio, things take a bit of a turn though. There is no voice acting in the minimal dialogue provided through the game and the tracks in the rather lengthy dungeons tend to become fairly repetitive quickly. That’s not to say that they’re bad tracks but once you’ve heard the same music a few hundred times during combat and walking around, it starts to become a bit tedious, especially with am game that requires as much grinding as Mon-Yu. The lack of variety of tracks helps contribute to the overall repetitive feel of the gameplay as you laboriously work your way through the dungeons as well, making progress feel slower.
There are certainly a few flaws with Mon-Yu, from the challenging grind on every level of difficulty to the limited story elements. Even the UI has a few strange aspects. It’s confusing to select automatic combat options and additional button presses are required when definitely not necessary. When you do use accelerated combat, it’s so fast that you can’t even see what’s happened, forcing you to waste time looking at your states to ensure you don’t abruptly get slaughtered. You can choose in the menu whether or not the UI remembers your selections but whatever you opt for still feels like it’s not really working as well as it should and it’s easy to blow through MP when you don’t intend to or die abruptly because all of your selections were taking too long and you got impatient.
Despite those flaws, Mon-Yu is more entertaining than it has any right to be and the whole of the game still works to a fair degree. You’re getting the quintessential vintage dungeon experience here and that’s not a bad thing, it’s just that some of us are spoiled by all the quality-of-life updates that this genre has received and it’s weird not to have any of that included here. Mon-Yu is a solid game that will challenge even the best of first person dungeon crawler fans. It’s certainly not an experience for everyone but there’s really one way to explain the game. After all, what you’re really getting here is easy to sum up: Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armor. You May Be Defeated, But Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King. After all, sometimes it’s all in the name, right?
This review is based on a digital copy of Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armor. You May Be Defeated, But Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armor. You May Be Defeated, But Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King is also available on PS5 and PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.