A long time ago when I had a PSP, my two favorite games on it were Burnout Legends and some version of Monster Hunter. Unfortunately I was never able to get very far with the latter no matter how much I loved the concept as I found the controls very difficult on a handheld platform, particularly as there was no lock-on feature and you needed to manually control the camera while controlling your character at the same time. Anyway that’s why through the years I kept an eye on the series and of course I eventually bought it when an English version finally made its way to the PC.
This version of the game actually counts as a multiplayer-centric online game but as usual I just played it solo. As the title says, this is all about hunting monsters so you can think of it as game that only consists of fighting boss-type enemies. There’s a complete story in here with cutscenes and everything about how you’re part of a commission tasked with researching the ecosystem that supports all these huge creatures. In particular you’re supposed to follow a massive Elder Dragon that is crossing the ocean to find out what it is doing. Since your main character is the silent type, you even have a female handler to participate in the dialogue and so that you can rescue her when she invariably gets into trouble. But that’s just a cute eco-friendly spin on the fact that the central gameplay loop is about hunting monsters, harvesting their body parts to make better weapons and armors, then using the improved equipment to hunt even bigger monsters and repeat. In between missions, there’s a central hub in which you can craft your gear, eat food to get bonuses, buy and sell stuff and do some other optional activities that effectively lets you harvest extra resources.
My first impression on loading this up was: wow, this sure is one pretty game! I mean, sure, I usually play games that are a year or two old by the time I get to them so my expectations are lowered but I honestly found this to be a striking vibrant game world. The central hub alone is jaw-dropping in how awesome it looks. My second impression was: holy shit, there are so many systems in here, how am I ever going to learn all this? To be fair, there is nowhere near as much stuff as in a fully-fledged MMORPG, but it does make for a daunting mass of complexity compared to most single-player games. There are fourteen different weapon types in the game, each with its own moveset and unique mechanics. The first thing you’d probably want to do is experiment with them and decide which one you want to learn to be your primary weapon. Then there are all the consumables you can use, the materials you can gather and use for crafting and the systems for upgrading weapons and armor. And you need to figure how missions work. The game doesn’t exactly hold your hand in telling you the differences between expeditions, assignments, events and investigations.
But in the end, everything still comes down to fighting monsters. There’s no exploration of a coherent game world for example. The base game comes with five maps each representing a different biome and you’re return again and again to the same maps to fight different monsters. Though there are small monsters populating these maps, they’re so weak that they’re not worth considering. You’re there to fight the large monsters though be warned other large monsters can and will interfere. Rather than having a battle on a fixed stage, you’re essentially free to range across the whole map to fight them. You start by tracking them down and you’re need to chase them down and reengage them when they flee after some combat. Alternatively you can also break off yourself to heal, prepare traps or try to lure the monster to fight in a location more advantageous to you. You can use a height advantage to jump down on top of them, you can try to catch them under falling boulders or you can even try to weaken them by having two large monsters fight one another.
Compare to something like the Dark Souls series, the combat model here feels loose and forgiving. Still the enemies are big and have huge health pools and don’t have health bars so you have to visually assess their health yourself. All of them are proper monsters with many looking like variations of dinosaurs, so there are no humanoid bosses to fight but the animations and models are superb, and they have a wide range of behaviors. You’re supposed to learn their weak points and move sets under different conditions, for example they fight differently when engaged or when exhausted and they’ll even limp when heavily injured. Combined with the drive to keep making ever better weapons and armor, this being the only way to make your character more powerful as there are no character progression apart from equipment, it’s easy to appreciate why this simple gameplay loop can be so addictive. It can also be frustrating as there is an element of chance to what loot drops so be prepared to kill each monster multiple times if you want to forge a full set of the weapons and armor that can be made from one of them.
The hunt for the Elder Dragon Zorah Magdaros takes you all the way to the end of normal mode but as the fans will say that’s only where the game really starts. After that the game seamlessly transitions to High Rank where you get to fight much harder versions of all of the monsters and be rewarded with appropriately updated gear. It’s not just about giving them higher damage and health stats either as they also become more aggressive and have expanded movesets. Plus one of the maps, Elder’s Recess only becomes accessible in High Rank and there are completely new monsters, such as the endgame Elder Dragons, so it’s not like the New Game Plus modes of other titles. Personally I don’t expect to make it all the way to the very end however. It’s getting annoying having to kill the Odogaron so many times to try to farm his gem to complete his armor set for example and I found Elder’s Recess to be a very boring map, little more than a bare rock arena for fighting against the endgame monsters. By contrast the first three maps are amazing in having complex topologies and so many hidden nooks and crannies.
For my part while I enjoyed the basic gameplay loop, I find that what I’ve played is quite enough for me and I don’t feel the need to press on to kill the High Rank version of every monster, let alone buy the expansion which includes even harder versions of the same monsters. Plus, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t find it particularly compelling to try to get good at this combat model. I dislike how it ignores input when you’re in an animation and while true one-hit kills are quite rare, a hit that stuns you so that you can’t do anything and a follow up hit that kills you is quite common. Compared to a game like Dark Souls, the monsters mostly move very slowly, but they can be frustrating to fight because of their variety of powers that briefly stagger you so that you lose your momentum. This includes their roars, buffeting you with wind, causing a ground tremor, turning so that your blow hits an armored part that leads to your hit bouncing off etc. Learning to read the monsters’ moveset always helps of course but it’s also important to bring the correct consumables to weaken the monster and create opportunities to attack. This really is a game of item management.
Anyway I’m still keeping this in rotation to give some of the Elder’s Recess monsters a go once in a while. It does feel awesome to finally be able to kill a monster like the Azure Rathalos but it does require a degree of patience and dedication that I’m not sure that I can sustain for long these days. Plus of course this game is practically endless with ever more difficult versions of monsters for you to kill. In the end, just chasing the kill for better gear all the time isn’t enough of a draw for me but I really do want more story and real exploration. I am very happy that I finally did manage to play a Monster Hunter game for real and it really is amazing how this game captures the cinematic, epic feeling of fighting a monster many times larger than yourself, but having played it, I also feel like this is enough for me.
