This difficult, old-school RPG has the longest name I’ve ever seen for a video game

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SHOULD I PLAY MON-YU?

Let me start with a warning: despite the intriguing name and the cutesy character art, Mon-Yu is a hardcore dungeon crawler, something along the same lines as the Etrian Odyssey series. I know I’m not alone in loving that stuff, but I also know it’s not for everyone. If you are someone who also enjoys slowly filling in each square of a grid-based map, and carefully choosing your actions each turn, Mon-Yu packs a lot of challenging adventure into its mouthful of a title.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve spent around four hours spelunking through the first dungeon in Mon-Yu’s Dragon King’s Tower. That was enough time to put together a crew of six adventurers, level all of them to the initial cap of level 4, and then raise that cap by defeating the first of seven Devil Kings. I also took my first nervous steps into the second dungeon and tested out my new ability to knock down some walls.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT MON-YU?

• That name. The full title of the game is *deep breath*: 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.

*EXHALE*

That four-sentence, thirty-three-word name is clearly inspired by absurd light novel titles, and I love it. It also conveys the overall tone of the game’s story, which stays lighthearted and fun despite the overall hardcore vibes of the gameplay.

• Old-school but still approachable. Like I’ve said, Mon-Yu is unapologetically hardcore in its roots, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossibly difficult. In fact, getting defeated is barely even a setback! When my party was wiped out—which happened more than a few times—they were resurrected back in the hub area with only a small amount of gold taken from my wallet as a price. Even better, the fairy princess that resurrected also granted my party members permanently increased HP and MP. In other words, death in Mon-Yu is just a part of character growth, so I never felt discouraged when I failed.

• Old-school but still fast-paced. Like most first-person dungeon-crawlers, the turn-based battles in Mon-Yu can move pretty slow. But thankfully there’s a built-in solution for when I wanted to move faster. After selecting attacks and spells for my six party members, I could choose for the turn to play out as “Normal Battle” or “Rapid Battle.” When I chose the latter, both my moves and enemy attacks would be dealt in super-fast fashion, finishing up a whole round in a matter of seconds. I ended up using Normal Battle when trying to learn about a new enemy type’s abilities, but otherwise I default to Rapid Battle, which kept things moving along smoothly.

• Old-school but no random encounters. One of the more modern elements of Mon-Yu is that it does not use random encounters. Instead, enemies are visible in the dungeon as floating skulls, with the color and details of the skull providing information on how whether they’ll pursue your character or run away, how powerful they are, and so on. These skulls are always in the same spot when you restart the dungeon too, which really turns exploration into a sort of puzzle in the best way.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT MON-YU?

• Tons of character but little personality. The beautiful illustrations used for Mon-Yu’s characters—both NPCs and party members—kind of go to waste given how little the game has in the way of actual dialogue or characterization. It’s not that this surprised me; old-school dungeon crawler RPGs have never been about deep, complex stories, after all. But I really enjoyed the brief flashes of more personality, like the pig shopkeeper named Chuck who first greets you when the game starts. It made me wish this art style was being put to more use with fun NPCs and lighthearted writing.

• Strange map limitations. Each level of the dungeon in Mon-Yu places a strange restriction on your ability to map things out: Namely, you have to make enough progress through that area to even unlock the ability to view the map. This restriction is removed on the easier difficulty, but I couldn’t really fathom why it’s there in the first place. I don’t feel like the game gained anything by making me memorize the dungeon layout on my own for the first hour or so.

• Lots of backtracking. This goes without saying in a dungeon crawler, but if you play Mon-Yu, you’re likely to spend a lot of time retracing your steps, returning to town to sell stuff and upgrade your armor, and re-exploring old areas to try to find secrets or new paths forward. The game does at least provide a way to warp back to town as long as you’re outside of battle, and once the map is unlocked, you can use auto-pathing to quickly return to a specific location. Still, if backtracking annoys you, this may not be your type of game.

💬 Are you ready to take up weapons and try to defeat the devil kings in Mon-Yu, or is this one too old-school for? Let me know what you think below!