Mon-Yu Switch Review

There are some games that have rather silly titles, but “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” would have to be the most ridiculous. From here on, let’s just call it Mon-Yu. Mon-Yu is created by “Experience, Inc.” – a seasoned Dungeon Crawler developer with some impressive (and shorter) titles under their belt. What’s it Like? Decide on your party, stock up on potions, and prepare to be annihilated a lot as we review Mon-Yu for Nintendo Switch.

Mon-Yu is a rather bare-bones story about the land of Tir Na Balc, a land of fairies. There’s a giant Dragon King tower that looms over the town, and your heroes are charged with retrieving treasures that can restore peace to the world after they have been stolen by 7 devil kings, who turned the tower into an evil dungeon. That dungeon is where the majority of the game will be set after you choose one of 3 play styles  A, B, or C, that determine your level growth and map functions. Type A is Carefree, Type B is Standard, and Type C is Challenging. Choose Wisely, as you cannot change after starting the game.

Outside of this dungeon, the game only consists of a few screens, one being the Queen’s Chambers, where you will resurrect, and the other being the Heroes Guild. The Heroes guild allows you to create and re-spec your team which turns out to have a few pitfalls which I will cover later. Firstly, there are a lot of classes and portraits, yet surprisingly, there are only 2 spellcasting classes. Once you have assembled your team you arrange their formation with warriors and melee characters to the front, and ranged to the back, and then venture forth into the dungeon.

All of this seems fairly standard if you have played any dungeon crawlers, your party moves as one across a tileset to battle enemies, recover treasures, and hunt down keys to unlock new areas before taking on the Devil King on each level. If you die (or are Annihaliated as they say in the game) you are resurrected in the Queen’s chamber, who offers you a small HP and MP boost and sends you back on your merry way. Defeating enemies levels up your character, and your gear. The rarer the gear, the higher it can go. While on paper it seems like an interesting concept, it essentially boils down to a tedious grind as dungeon progress and enemies reset after you die. The game also feels wildly unbalanced, with some enemies decimating your team, while others are defeated within the first turn of combat. You can auto-battle, manually select options, or rapidly deploy your last moveset, unfortunately, the rapid auto-battle doesn’t have much success, making grinding even more tedious.

I found in my experience with the game, that while it offers you freedom of choice for your party makeup, it certainly won’t work out for you in the end and I found myself re-speccing my party after the first hour to make things easier. Except it didn’t, as I then had to either purchase or obtain weaponry from within the dungeon and level it up again, and loot isn’t party-specific so I had an inordinate amount of daggers and fist weapons which sold for a few gold coins in order to try to buy new gear.

Graphically, Mon-Yu is actually quite nice with the 2D-drawn enemies and cast, but relies heavily on recycling said enemies, and since the entire game is set in the same tower, the environments aren’t very varied. Effects are kept to a minimum, and because of that, it runs fine. For my vision-impaired Dungeon Divers, Mon-Yu utilizes bright and contrasting colours, and a bright UI so despite there being no accessible options, it should be easier to play than something like Legend of Grimrock. The game will take approximately 28 hours to finish for accomplished dungeon crawlers, so there is a lot of game there for people who don’t mind the grind.

While I enjoyed similar Dungeon Crawlers like Legend of Grimrock, I personally had an awful experience with the game. It’s unbalanced and the freedom it offers you is an illusion, forcing you to either repetitively grind the same areas until you die over and over again. I dislike writing reviews like this as Mon-Yu doesn’t do anything overtly offensive, it just simply feels like a bare-bones dungeon crawler that lacks fun. At almost $70 AUD, there are much better Dungeon Crawlers out there for a fraction of the price. For this gamer, Mon-Yu is a battle I’m glad to be able to run from.

So What’s it Like? Mon-Yu is like Etrian Odyssey crossed with Legend of Grimrock.

I award it a 56/100