The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!
Let’s discuss the Monster Hunter series. What is your favorite game? What aspects do you like about it? What doesn’t work for you? Are there games that gave you a similar experience? Feel free to share any thoughts that come up, or react to other peoples comments. Let’s get the conversation going!
If you have any recommendations for games or series for the next post(s), please feel free to DM me or add it in a comment here (no guarantees of course).
Previous entries: Persona, Monkey Island, 8 Bit Era, Animal Crossing, Age of Empires, Super Mario, Deus Ex, Stardew Valley, The Sims, Half-Life, Earthbound / Mother, Mass Effect, Metroid, Journey, Resident Evil, Polybius, Tetris, Telltale Games, Kirby, LEGO Games, DOOM, Ori, Metal Gear, Slay the Spire
I started with World, and put hundreds of hours into that and Rise, plus their expansions. I tried the GU demo on Switch, but it felt too clunky.
The thing that hooked me was the first large monster you hunt, Great Jagras. He’s a pushover for any hunter with even a slight amount of experience, but for me as a new player, it was an epic battle and I certainly didn’t expect that much intensity that early in the game. I also liked how even after you had a monster on “farm status” a hunt could still easily go from good to bad if you weren’t careful. It emphasized that these monsters were incredibly dangerous, and even seasoned hunters could be in trouble if they get too cocky. It also helped keep farming more interesting as you needed to pay attention if you wanted to be successful.
Overall, I like the… world, in World more, but the gameplay mechanics and combat more in Rise. In World, the maps were larger, with more detail and felt more alive. I also liked the tracking aspect, and was disappointed that aspect didn’t make it to Rise. It felt like you were actually hunting your target, instead of just sprinting to their location on your doggo friend and beating them up like in Rise.
I’m definitely looking forward to Wilds releasing next year.
I liked world most too. It has several things rise is lacking. One of which is a serious threat imo. Like, the first time my party ran into anjanath. It just exploded out of some shrubbery and most of his attacks were insta kill. Just having this random threat helped with the world building, suspense on hunts and also gave a clear milestone when you finally get the hunt to take him down. Then there was blood puppy or bazelgeuse, they are all super memorable because of how much of a passive sorta threat they were.
Ive put hundreds of hours into monster hunter portable 3rd with the english patch. Also played a decent amount of Rise and will be playings Wild when it comes out
I’ve never played these games. It all just feels extremely overwhelming with the large amount of menus and systems. I’m also unable to focus on long games (I also have issues with long open world games like Breath of the Wild for example), so that is another thing that pushes me away. But the idea of a cosy grind while listening to podcasts does interest me.
However, I have seen the film: an absolute masterpiece in the “bad film genre”. Just beautifully brainless action, similar to the amazing Resident Evil films of the same creator.
I’ve only played a bit of 4 and lots of worlds. I really loved the additional stuff to do in worlds. I was enthralled by the exploration and little collectible stuff as much as the actual combat. I do feel like it’s a lot of fun with friends. Playing with Randoms feels scary lol.
I’ve been trying to finish iceborne at some point but I hit a brick wall at frostfang barioth for a long time and then got distracted with other games. I’ve been meaning to go back and finish but u have a feeling the next title will come out before then. I haven’t even gotten around to rise yet lol!
A single play session isn’t actually all that long, as others have said. It’s about 25-50 minutes depending on how familiar you are with the monster. You also don’t have to interact with all the systems at once initially, pick one thing and try it out. There’s no real penalty for failing besides having to re-do the mission that you failed.
I started with 3rd and I completely agree with you. It’s so confusing and shit to get into, I technically started with the first PSP game but I played for like 40 minutes. Then I met a friend who became be first friend and he taught me how to play, and I ended up LOVING the games. They’re all some of my favorite games now. GU is my favorite. World is second. 4u is third.
That’s totally fair, Monster Hunter is infamous for its utterly terrible onboarding process. If you ever decide that you want to really figure out Monster Hunter, there’s two options I always recommend.
The first is incredibly simple: get someone who knows the game to play with you. They can walk you through what does and doesn’t matter, and help you get used to the game with someone there to keep you engaged.
The second option, if you don’t have a MH friend or don’t want to play with other people, is a simple process you can follow which I’ve found tends to work for getting people through the early game confusion:
First, ignore the constant tutorial popups. They’ll be there in the hunter notes in your menu at any time, and most of them don’t matter until after you figured out how to literally play the game at all.
Second, find your weapon. Every weapon type in Monster Hunter plays very differently. The weapon that sounds the best to you might not be the weapon that feels the best to you. Once you unlock the training area (I think it happens before your first quest even) just go in there and pick a weapon from your box and start slapping shit. If you don’t like that weapon, pick a different one and rinse and repeat until you’ve found the one that speaks to you.
Finally, just start playing! I find things make way more sense when you actually experience them rather than just reading about them or watching someone else experience them. Just start playing and eventually all those complicated systems will click and you’ll wonder why you ever had a problem!
A common joke in the Monster Hunter community is that everyone loves monster hunter, they just haven’t played it long enough to realize it yet! I hope you give the series another chance someday because it’s really something special!
Regarding the movie, as a terrible movie fan I agree, it was a fantastic watch! As a Monster Hunter fan however, ohhhhhh boy was I screaming at my TV! WHY did they give gore magala a beard?!?!?
I just started playing Stories yesterday in order to learn Japanese. It’s wild how different some of the names are. Hopefully the language barrier will keep me occupied until Wilds is released.
I’ve been playing since Freedom 2 and have played almost all of them to at least village completion. Exceptions are Tri and Frontier(s?). Def my favorite series by far and even if they have had their failed experiments, I’m glad they tried them.
I’ve tried fair share of clones as well but they usually don’t hit the mark.
One of my best friends introduced me to this series back in MH4U for the 3DS.
As someone mentioned in other comment, these games are definitely not newbie friendly haha. I started it and left it after a few missions, I don’t remember what rank I was, but definitely the starting village.
Afterwards we finally got time to play and he mocked me since my character had less armor than his palico :D
We played more often and he helped me reach higher ranks until G-rank.
Each game has had a different kind of end game.
For MH4U were the guild quests which were randomly generated, I loved this, it made the game not feel like a total grind, but it only made it feel like that, because it really was a grind to both get the correct quest and level it up to get the relics you wanted.
The one I enjoyed the least was MHGen/MHGU because there’s no end game loop, once you reach G-rank the game doesn’t have anything else to offer, so you can just grind the same missions you already have. Of course this can be considered an end game loop since maxing your armor and weapons takes a long time (and IIRC some older fans mentioned this was ad-hoc with the theme of remembering old games since they where like that).
For MHW were the investigations which felt a bit like MH4U guild questions but without the random map.
The only downside of this game and the Iceborn expansion was the game as a service aspect, you could only access some quests on some days of the week, you had to connect to the internet to get them, and also one of the last bosses is tied to multiplayer, which if you have bad internet or only time for a single quest is impossible to properly finish.
I’ve bought each game. Around 200 minimum in each one. IIRC 450+ in MH4U and around 500 in MHW (mostly because it’s harder to pause in PS4). MHRise/Sunbreak
MHRise is one of the most relaxing ones with the sunbreak expansion since you can take NCPs on all missions, they help a lot to de-aggro the monsters and enjoy the hunt.
I was with some friends from work when the trailer for MHW released and we literally screamed when we realized it was an MH game haha.
The only change they’ve made between games that I found really annoying was to the hunting horn. It was really fun to have to adapt your hunt to each horn’s songs and keep track of what buffs were active and which ones you needed to re-apply (in reality you always rotated your songs over and over so you never ran out of your buffs).
But in Rise each song now is X -> X, A -> A, and X+A -> X+A, there’s no combinations.
Every hunting horn only has 3 songs, previously some horns could have up to 5.
When you play a song twice the buff applied goes up a level, well, in Rise they made it a single attack to play all your songs twice.
It feels like they tried to simplify the weapon but two teams got in charge of providing ideas and they implemented both solutions, which made the weapon have no depth at all.
Also, previously you felt like the super support playing hunting horn, each time you applied a buff a messages appeared showing the buff you applied. Yeah, it was kind of spammy, but it felt nice having a hunting horn on the hunt.
In Rise they decided to only display a message the first time you apply the buff and that’s it, so if you re-apply it there’s nothing, even when you keep buffing your team. Ah, but if you use bow the arc shot does spam the buff message, so you feel less than a support than the bow :/
Due to work I haven’t followed all the news of MHWilds, but I’ll definitely buy it.
For the next posts my recommendations would be the series Sniper elite, Mario and Luigi, Pokemon mystery dungeon, and Disgaea.
(Maybe also another theme of posts could be genre/mechanic, like tactics games or colony management in general)
