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. Review (LaTerry)
Mon-Yu is a dungeon crawling RPG similar to games like Etrian Odyssey or other titles by the same developer Experience. If you've enjoyed their past titles, you'll probably also like this one.
There is a simple premise that serves to get you exploring the dungeon as fast as possible. The land of fairies is in trouble because a bunch of devil kings stole their treasure, so they isekai'd you and your team to help them recover their treasure. Now go explore the dungeon and fight the demons.
Your characters are customizable with no pre-determined back story. You choose their names, appearances (from a lot of portraits, including characters from past Experience games), and their class. The portraits and class don't have to match, if you like the portrait for a warrior, but want a knight in your party, for example.
Dungeon crawling is first person on a grid. A map will fill out as you explore (depending on your difficulty/play style, you may need to meet certain requirements to actually unlock the map.) The enemies are static encounters that respawn every time you enter a dungeon. The moment you leave a dungeon, you are fully healed, and if you wipe in a dungeon, your characters will get some extra HP and MP to better survive next time at the cost of some gold.
The interesting thing about this dungeon crawler is how experience works. Obviously your characters will level up, but there is also a level cap that raises as you explore. I think you can grow past this level cap, but it will reduce your rewards. Once you have enough exp, you have to manually level up your characters, so you can stay within the level cap if you so choose. You also get skill point experience that is separate from level experience. As your characters level up, they will gain access to more skills, and as you gain skill experience you can then learn those skills. So even if you stay in the level cap of a dungeon, you can gain a bunch of skill points if you feel like grinding.
Equipment also gets experience points. A piece of equipment can only level up as high as its rank, so even if you have leveled gear, if you find something that has a higher rank, you might want to switch it out so you can get this new gear even higher. Equipment with the same name can have different ranks, so while all starting equipment is rank 1, you'll eventually find equipment in the dungeon with the same name but a higher rank, and different stats. I've found two knives that are both rank three, but have different Hit % stats for example.
After every battle you will get a treasure chest that will have new equipment or items in it. Due to all of the above, it really seems like this game wants you to do a lot of fights, find the best equipment, level it up instead of your character, and then after you are ready, go fight the next boss. There are a lot of things to level up and grind for.
The music and sound is standard Experience fare, I'm pretty sure I've heard some of these songs before, and the sound effects are all familiar. The art style on this one is very different, and most things are in a chibi style. The character portraits for the game are all trying to be cute, and most of the returning characters have been redone in the games style. There are a few of them that look way out of place, but if you don't like that they clash, you don't have to use them, there is a lot of character artwork available to choose from.
I'm still super early in the game, but I'm having a good time with it so far. I'd recommend it if you like dungeon crawlers like this. I'll update my review as I play more if anything changes or the late game becomes a slog.