Osaki OS-Monarch Massage Chair Review 2023

Are you tired of making periodic appointments with your local chiropractor to help deal with your aching back? Has that frustration sent you on a quest for a reasonably priced massage chair so you can enjoy the benefits of a massage from the comfort of your own home?

Suppose you answered yes to either of those questions and you’re considering the Monarch. In that case, we’re very glad that you’re here because once you read this, our Osaki Monarch massage chair review, we cannot, in good conscience, recommend this model, except in one fairly specific case.

Osaki is one of the most respected companies in the industry, and most of their products are amazing.

The Monarch, however, is a swing and a miss.

It’s a decent chair with some good capabilities, but Osaki itself offers much better chairs for not much more money. If you look beyond Osaki at some of the other respected names in the industry, you’ll find no shortage of options that offer a better value than you’ll find here.

It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with the model. As we said, it’s a pretty good chair, and it earned a pretty good overall ranking from us, but as you’ll see, there are some flaws that just make it inferior to most of its peers.

In the following sections, we’ll step through everything this machine can do and where we feel it comes up short. That way, you’ll have all the information you need to decide for yourself. If that sounds good to you, let’s take a closer look.

An Overview of the Osaki OS Monarch Massage Chair

The Monarch has a similar look and feel to most of the chairs Osaki makes. It doesn’t try to hide what it is. 

They’re not ugly chairs, but they certainly don’t mesh easily with most home décor schemes. If you decide you want one of these, you can order yours in either black, brown, or taupe—neutral colors that will at least allow you to color match.

You should also be aware that the Monarch is a sizeable piece of furniture, measuring 60” L (73” L when fully reclined) x 42” W x 50.5” H. That’s big enough that it will fill up just about any room you put it in. If you live in a smaller apartment or a tiny home, it may simply be too big to be useful.

In addition to being physically large, it’s also a pretty heavy piece of furniture, weighing in at a cool 200 pounds.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t support as much weight as we’d like. If you weigh more than 260 pounds, you simply won’t be able to use it at all.

Most chairs on the market today (regardless of type) support 300 pounds of user weight or more. As you can see, this one doesn’t quite rise to that level, though it supports more weight than some of Osaki’s other models.

That, of course, is fine if you weigh less than the supported limit. But the simple truth is that Osaki’s massage chairs support less than 300 pounds of user weight, so they cater to smaller and more lightly built people.

One final point before we leave this section of our Osaki Monarch massage chair review: the upholstery is PU. That’s pretty standard. Almost all of the massage chairs on the market today rely on PU because it looks and feels like leather but is incredibly inexpensive.

Unfortunately, PU doesn’t last very long and will start showing its age after no more than two years, no matter how careful you are.

Honestly, we wish the Monarch used something else, even if it raised the price. And with that, let’s take a look at the actual capabilities of the Monarch.

L-Track & Quad Rollers

Although we started off by saying that we can’t recommend this model, we have to admit that it’s got the basics well covered. It sports cutting-edge technology that includes a 3D L-Track. What that means to you as the person sitting in the chair is that the track is long enough to allow the rollers to move under the seat and massage the glutes and the backs of your thighs.

The 3D designation means that the track has dimensionality that allows the rollers to move up and down, left and right, and along the Z-axis (in and out), applying more or less pressure depending on your needs.

It gets better because Osaki offers a wide range of customization options, including three levels of speed and four levels of roller intensity.

3D Body Scan

While the long massage track and quad rollers do a lot to improve the quality of the massage that the Osaki OS Monarch massage chair can render, the body scan is another key component, and Osaki employs truly exceptional body scanning routines.

In practice, any Osaki chair you buy will get it right about 95% of the time, quietly moving the rollers to the perfect positions before your massage begins.

Even better, if the rollers happen to get it wrong, Osaki makes sure to provide tools via the remote that allows you to tweak the position of the rollers to taste manually.

The combination of the auto scan and the manual adjustment means that you can always guarantee the best massage the machine is capable of delivering, and that’s awesome.

So far then, you may be wondering why we can’t recommend this machine. After all, we’ve given it a pretty glowing report thus far, but keep reading, and we’ll get to that.

An Underwhelming Number of Massage Options

This, in our view, is probably the most important portion of our Osaki OS Monarch chair review. 

Quad rollers and good body scanning tech are excellent starts, but it’s the number of techniques and, in the case of Osaki, in particular, the number of pre-programmed massage options that really tell the tale.

In terms of techniques, the Monarch offers:

That’s about as bare-bones as it gets because just about every chair on the market today offers these.

This is considered the bare minimum for a “serious” massage chair.

There are two basic paradigms in the world of massage chairs: Make a fiddly chair that gives you all sorts of customization options or make a simple chair that offers lots of pre-programmed options.

Osaki prefers simple chairs, and some of the models they offer come sporting about two dozen pre-programmed massage routines.

This isn’t one of those.

It only has four pre-programmed options, which are:

While we like the memory slot, the simple truth is that with only a few basic massage techniques on offer and not much in the way of pre-programmed options, you’re almost certain to “outgrow” this chair sooner rather than later. It will simply leave you wanting more.

It Offers a Very Good Airbag Massage

Most of Osaki’s Monarch chairs come sporting 24-second generation airbags, and this one is no exception.

The Monarch can render a very good full-body airbag massage that you can customize via three different intensity levels. This aspect of the chair’s design is on par with significantly more expensive models but, by itself, isn’t enough to elevate the Monarch to “must-have” status.

Generous Lumbar Heat

Heat is a powerful therapeutic feature, and we love it any time we see heat offered. The heat here is limited to the lumbar region only, but the heating elements are oversized. In practice, that means you get heat over most of your back, which is fantastic.

If the Monarch had more customization options and an additional advanced technique or two — those things, combined with the generously sized heated area, would make this model a wonder. Even without those things, the large heated area is definitely one of the standout aspects of this design.

An Exceptional Calf & Foot Massage

Osaki has put a lot of effort into delivering a superb calf and foot massage. The foot massage is rendered by a trio of rollers in each footwell that utilize a technology the company refers to as “Reflexology,” while airbags render the calf massage. Both the airbags and the foot rollers can be adjusted for intensity via three levels.

The result is amazing, and honestly, the quality of the foot massage is the standout feature of this design.

If you have a job that sees you spending several hours a day on your feet and you’re specifically looking for a relatively inexpensive chair that’s capable of giving you a great foot massage, this is probably the chair you want and is the one circumstance where we’d give the Monarch a glowing recommendation.

In pretty much any other circumstance, though, you can get more bang for your buck with some other model.

A Few Finishing Touches

Our Osaki OS Monarch review wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t highlight the extras and finishing touches this model brings to the table, and there are a few, including:

Curiously absent here is any sort of massage timer. All of the Monarch’s massages last a default 20 minutes. Most of Osaki’s other models have a timer, which leaves us feeling a twinge of disappointment here.

Pros & Cons of Osaki Monarch

Make no mistake, the Osaki Monarch really does have a lot going for it. It also sports a number of features that are incredibly well implemented. In our view, the most important of these are:

The body stretch might even be considered an honorable mention here because although it’s not best in class and isn’t as well implemented on the Monarch as it is on some of Osaki’s other models, it’s still not bad. Also, it does represent a second therapeutic feature on a modestly priced chair.

Unfortunately, the Monarch is also saddled with a relatively modest maximum supported user weight limit, few massage techniques, and only a handful of pre-programmed routines. So if you want something other than a basic massage or a foot massage, this one is probably going to leave you wanting more.

Osaki Monarch Massage Chair Review Conclusion

We tried hard to love this model, but we just couldn’t at the end of the day.

If you were to stumble across the Monarch early in your search for the perfect massage chair and you didn’t look at too many other models besides this one, you’d probably not hesitate to pull the trigger and spend the money.

If you did, you’d be reasonably happy with your purchase, but the moment you start comparing the Monarch to comparably priced models, you realize that there are any number of better deals out there, and that’s the real problem.

As mentioned in the previous section here in our Osaki Monarch massage chair review, the model is certainly not an awful chair. If your needs are basic and you’re mostly looking for a chair that can make your feet quit aching and maybe do a little something extra besides, it’s a great choice. 

However, in the grand scheme of things, plenty of other models simply do a better job and offer more value. In light of that, we can only give this one a provisional recommendation.

Other Options to Consider

If this one turns out not to be a good fit for you, here are a couple of other options you can consider:

This is the chair the Monarch tries to be. This one offers you more of just about everything. You get more options, more pre-programmed routines, and just a better all-around chair. You also get it for not much more money. It would be totally worth delaying your purchase for a bit to save the extra money to get this model instead.

This chair is flat-out amazing. It’s one of the best values in the massage chair ecosystem today. Packed with features and offered by a company that’s every bit as well-respected as Osaki, the 6800 is a technological wonder filled with features you’ll love.

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Official Manufacturer Support

References & Resources:

• Osaki Massage Chair, Official Brand Website.
• Osaki OS-Monarch Massage Chair User Manual.
• Effects of a Full-Body Massage on Pain Intensity, Anxiety, and Physiological Relaxation in Taiwanese Patients with Metastatic Bone Pain: A Pilot Study, National Center for Biotechnology Information.
• My Back Went Out. What Do I Do?, WebMD.
• Sore After Massage: Why This Happens and What To Do, Healthline.