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 played the 3DS one (unless there more) as one of my first 3DS games, and I just couldn’t get into it. To put it simply, it wasn’t clear what I should be doing, even when I understood and did the objective.
People have tried to get me into Monster Hunter several times, with little success. There’s just a lot of work involved.
Lots of crafting and farming, and once you’re ready, the fight itself is a lot of work. It takes a long time due to large HP pools.
There are a zillion builds, and the story isn’t exactly deep enough to engage me despite the shortcomings. To me, it’s basically Elden Ring, but with the aspects I don’t like turned to 11.
I’ve only played World so far but I really enjoy it. At its core, it has some of the funnest combat of any game I’ve played. However, it’s one of those games that tries its hardest to keep the fun part away from you, at least in the first ~15 hours.
They cover up the actual gameplay with convoluted, stereotypical RPG-ness to the point where it feels like a parody of RPGs. Constant crafting and item gathering with inventory management, overly busy and clunky UI, an unskippable videogame story (genuinely this describes the entire story, there is nothing more to say about it than that it is a videogame story).
I know everyone compares these games to Dark Souls, but I have to admit the multiplayer is like Dark Souls’ in the sense that it is also extremely bad. You can’t play with your friends during those missions in the first 15 hours until you ALL solo run to the monster and watch a cutscene first after starting the mission. Why? This has made playing with my friends so miserable and I feel embarrassed explaining the system to them.
It also has microtransactions to change your character appearance and get some skins which is ridiculous and should always be made fun of. If Street Fighter 6 is any indication of how awful the microtransactions in Wilds will be I may just have to skip it.
I push through all this because when you do finally get to just do the monster hunting part, it’s incredibly well done. The maps are beautiful and fun to explore, the weapon combos have crazy depth and all sorts of hidden mechanics to learn, and the monsters themselves have great animations. But it’s exhausting to push through it sometimes.
monhun could be so good if they made it a little more soulslike instead of instanced fights and menus
lets goooooo, my favourite franchise of all time! Techbically, my first monster hunter game was tri on thr wii, when I was a wee bab. I say technically because I was a tiny idiot and I did not know how to do quests so I just spent hours wandering around moga woods in free roam, just hanging out. I still had an absolute blast doing it though!
The game that really got me into the franchise though, and my favourite game, would be world! I just love the incredible attention to detail, and the clear love that went into designing everything! I have more hours in rise because that’s the game my friends all play, and it’s a phenomenal game no doubt, but I always find myself creeping back to World.
The next game, Wilds, is looking like it will far surpass World for me though, the 2025 wait is killing me! The gamescom previews really showed that they have been listening to thr community, and are making the monster hunter game we’ve all dreamed of.
That’s one of my favourite things about the monster hunter teams in fact, that they clearly know how to learn from their previous works! I would readily argue that every generation has been an overall massive improvement over the previous one. I say generation rather than game, because comparing Rise and World is rather unfair. They’re two different games made by different teams for different hardware with different goals in mind, and if you ask me they both achieved their goals spectacularly, no matter what some nerds will say about Rise… Grouping them both into 5th gen and looking at the series by generation, each one has so far been an improvement in nearly every aspect, and I think that’s an amazing track record. That is why I am willing to put my wholehearted trust in the monster hunter teams that they will absolutely deliver with Wilds and any games after that.
