There is a curious disparity between the “professional” reviews of Monster Hunter games and the player scores for the same. Generally, the pro review scores settle in at around 6.5 out of 10; the player reviews are almost three points higher, at 9.1.
What gives?
The fans suspect that the pro reviewers are giving the games short shrift because….well, they’re giving them short shrift: they play the game for a limited time, perhaps 10 hours or so, and then pronounce their verdict. The Monster Hunter games certainly don’t lend themselves to such “cursory” views. To acquit himself well, a player must become familiar with more than just the introduction to the game; getting to the “middle game” of a Monster Hunter title can easily take up to 150 to 300 hours, while a typical “endgame” can require 500 hours or more; at 10 hours, a pro reviewer has examined 1/50th of the game. We begin to see where a possible reason for the disparity of scoring may lie…
Surely, no one would review World of Warcraft after a measly 10 hours of play. So what is to be done? Well, as a proud Northern Geek, I selflessly offer my services.
My credentials? I’ve taught game design, programming and animation to people who helped make some great games over the years. Games you might have heard of, like Prince of Persia, Rainbow Six Vegas, Bioshock…you get the idea. My profession gives me an excuse to play…I mean, “research” games more than most grown men, and I’ve been unashamedly doing so since the first Pong arcade machine landed in New Brunswick and my father plunked that fateful quarter into it. And, most importantly, I’ve played over 300 hours of Monster Hunter Freedom 2, not to mention further sacrificing my sanity upon the alter of the almighty gaming gods by playing the made-for-Asia-only import of Monster Hunter Portable 2G! Verily, I have sacrificed. Let my toil not be in vain, read on, I implore you, READ ON!
The game gets off to a momentarily great start: the animated intro videos are very nice, character creation is straightforward and offers a reasonable level of customization, and once the game actually starts, the real-time game graphics are as lush as those a PSP is capable of delivering. The story is minimalistic, but sufficient to set the stage and continue on.
And then we hit the rough bit. Well, part one of the rough bit; the “What do I do now?” part. I’ve known multiple people to quit playing at this point because they literally can’t figure out what to do next. Oh, they talk to the villagers with the hard-to-miss yellow speech bubbles floating over their heads, and they glean the knowledge that they are supposed to head off to the training school, but they fumble around in the menus once they get there. They can’t seem to figure out that they’re meant to go into the one marked “Basic Practice” and complete all of the quests therein, and then go to the menu labeled “Weapons Usage” and complete all of the sub-quests to learn how combat actually works. Invariably, people read the first bit of info that the trainer offers, and then leave the school. At that point, the village elder will happily send them off to their doom on real quests, and although she warns them along the lines of “if it gets too hard, go back to the training school”, there is a severe problem with this. See, the first time you go to the school, the only menu option is “Beginner Training”, and so it’s at the top of the list. But thereafter, whenever you enter the school, “Solo Training” is at the top of the list, and “Beginner Training” is third, after “Group Training”. So naturally, you see this list, and the top item draws your eye, and “Solo Training” sounds like what you need, so inevitably, it’s where you wind up. To make matters worse, it confuses you further by offering up multiple menus with question marks for names, because, alas, this is not where you are supposed to be. Indeed, “Solo Training” quests don’t open up until much later, after you have defeated some boss monsters (which should be a clue as to the potential depth of the game). All of this is too much confusion for many gamers, who get frustrated trying to figure out what they need to do to start having fun, and eventually, they decide to go play some other game. The pro reviewers, clever buggers that they are, realize that failure to kill at least ONE monster is not an option before they can pound out a real review, so they slog on and at least manage to do some sort of training quest…we hope. It’s such a silly bit of bad interface design. Just put “Beginner Training” at the top of the list, and slide “Solo Training” and “Group Training” under a heading/menu entitled “Advanced Training”, and there you have it!
During the training phase, players come up against part two of the rough bit: the camera controls. The PSP Monster Hunter games face a game design conundrum; how do we pack in the controls for combat, inventory management and item usage, actions, and camera controls, all on a small handheld with limited buttons? Capcom’s answer is to relegate the third-person camera control to the D-pad and the left bumper button. The left bumper orients the camera in the direction the player character is facing while the D-pad moves the camera freely with regards to pitch and yaw. There is no lock-on system. The problem for novice monster hunters is that these features are all on the left-hand side. The thumb thus becomes overloaded as it is simultaneously responsible for controlling the camera angles and the player character’s movement via the analog thumbstick. Some advanced players resort to running the camera with their index finger whilst using their middle finger for the bumper; I have occasionally found myself crossing my right hand over to manipulate the D-pad, as running and looking can sometimes be preferable to running and fighting/dodging. Most of the time I find myself simply using the left bumper a lot to swing the camera around, and rolling to give myself a potentially life-saving bit of breathing space if I need to stop running to shift my thumb and look around. This is an action-oriented combat game; getting used to operating the camera whilst fighting is vitally important, and given the control mappings, this is not exactly “dead easy”. It will come, with sufficient practice,but many folks will give up before the “sufficient practice” bit. Many beginners long for a lock-on mechanism, but I feel that this could negatively impact the game mechanics. The sweet spot of this game revolves around the way the combat works, and a lock-on system would substantially alter that. Yes, it would make the game easier to play, but is that what we truly desire? Read on.
Now for the third rough part; the learning curve. Parts one and two, the possible confusion during training and the initial awkwardness of the camera, contribute to this, and the third part of the equation comes in the form of the monsters themselves. The various minions are insufficient preparation for the pure ownage of your first encounter with a “true” monster. Yes, I know ownage isn’t in the dictionary, but if it was, it would have a picture of the supposedly “lowly” Kut-Ku or Khezu next to it. Monster hunters call this the “Kut-Ku wall”, and there is no getting around it; most beginning players are going to get thrashed HARD by their first battle or three with these small boss monsters.
Welcome to Monster Hunter.
The game is HARD. I will explain in a moment why this frustrating fact actually becomes a keystone to hold up the gameplay over hundreds of hours of deliciously fantastic monster hunting; for now, realize that getting there requires sucking it up and getting pummeled a lot. Once you get beyond the baby minions and start fighting the true monsters of the game the basic gameplay cycle will become as follows:
1.Fight new monster.
2.Take damage from an assortment of varied attacks, each deadlier than the last.
3.Die three times (and thus fail the quest), after inflicting some minimal damage.
4.Hopefully learn from what you observed during the battle, formulate some strategies to deal with this new monster’s set of moves, and fight him again.
5.Live slightly longer than the last attempt, but still die three times.
6.Refine strategies (and die), chuck them entirely and try new weapons (and die), refight old foes to gather items to forge specific armour to counter the enemy’s strengths…and eventually beat him!
7.Refine your strategies even further, farm him repeatedly for cool items to craft cool new weapons and armour.
8.Go back to step 1, against a new nemesis.
In other words, playing this game will involve equal parts of being beaten and being the beater. No way around it, oh Mighty Hunter, you are going to lose a lot of fights. Sounds bad, eh? Not much fun, losing, eh?
But here comes the absolutely, amazingly fun part of the game: beating a truly tough opponent is, in any game, the sort of thing that makes you stand up and dance around the room shouting “BOO YA!!!” at the television. Nothing feels like it. That first time you beat a Kut-ku, a Khezu, a Tigrex…it’s pure magic. And, if the luster fades a little with the repeated defeats you hand them as you farm these previously invincible monsters again and again, it still carries a sheen, a glow that sustains your gamer heart long after the true challenge has faded. You may have mastered them, but you know them for the worthy foe they are. It gives you a yardstick to measure your progress as a hunter, and it is extremely satisfying. And…there’s always another monster just around the corner waiting to kick a little humility into your sorry ass.
If we change the formula, by say adding a lock-on system, we also remove something; we take away a bit of the action in this action-oriented combat RPG. We remove some of the cut-and-thrust attacking that requires deep skills. The same thing happens if we make the left and right shoulder buttons rotate the camera, and simultaneously pressing on them snap the view forward; we lose the combat mechanics of the right bumper, forcing the simplification of the combat system, and we also lose our run button, forcing the simplification of the movement system. Now, I have to tell you that generally speaking, I don’t care for overly difficult games; if a game frustrates me, I’ll gladly drop down to an easier difficulty level, or just chuck it all together and play something less annoying. For me, though, Monster Hunter wasn’t annoyingly hard, it was hard because it required deep skills to bring down a monster. You needed to gather knowledge by observation; prepare and plan; craft and experiment; practice and learn to beat a monster. It shared the need for thinking your way through a battle with your typical deep turn-based RPG, but added the action-based skills on top of that. That’s why millions of Japanese gamers worship this franchise; it may appear to be a simplistic, shallow action game, but it has beautiful mechanics that run deep below the surface. Every mechanic gives the feeling of being carefully tuned and balanced, so that they will interact just so with the rest of the game system.
Take, for example, inventory management. You have a large inventory box available in the town, where you can store pages of items, and another large box for pages of equipment. These boxes allow the accumulation of so much stuff that an auto-arranging function is pretty much required in order to sort everything out; thankfully, one is provided, along with the ability to customize your inventory by managing things manually. When you go out into the world to battle monsters, however, you have a much more limited inventory system; you can only take one set of armour, one weapon, and a few items with you, and you can’t change the skills on you armour by resetting gems in the field. This forces the player to make some very hard choices about what is absolutely required to bring down the next monster. You must form a strategy, and arm yourself according to that plan. Item slots can only hold so many of a given item, and you can’t take more than the maximum of any one item that will fit in a slot. If you take the maximum number of health potions that fit in a slot (10), you can’t take a second helping of them along. What you could do is take some herbs as well, although they aren’t at good at healing as the potions. On the other hand, you could take herbs and some blue mushrooms as well, which, after you have depleted the first batch of potions, could be combined to make some new health potions. If you decide that you may wish to do a lot of combining in the field, you could raise the chances of a successful combination by taking along some books on alchemy…at the expense of some item slots. A player can spend a significant amount of time deciding what weapon, armour, decorations (gems, as I like to call them) and items will be best crafted and outfitted for the coming battle. Every item and gem slot is tactically valuable. Hunters agonize over the proper balance of attack, defense, and restorative powers. Will I need to sharpen my blade, and thus require a slot for some whetstones, or would I be better off using the slot for a power-enhancing drug and taking a less powerful sword that has better sharpness and won’t dull as fast? The inventory system forces the player to make tough, smart choices in order to be successful, and yet offers enough personal carrying space to allow for complex and rich strategies to be devised.
Weapons themselves offer the hunter a wealth of choice; there are the Sword and Shield class, Dual Swords, Greatswords, Longswords, Lances, Gunlances, Hammers, Hunting Horns, Light Bowguns, Heavy Bowguns, and Bows. Every weapon class is distinctly different, and controls a little differently than the other classes. Attacking is done through various combinations of the triangle, circle, and right bumper buttons, with some chaining combos thrown in depending on the weapon class. This can get much more involved than it sounds; complex enough that it would take many pages to describe all of the weapon classes in detail…and that’s without examining the differences between various weapons within a class. Weapons do basic damage, but they also can have sharpness ratings, affinity ratings (chance of critical hit, which can even be negative), decoration slots, abilities, ammo restrictions, and elemental damage attributes like fire or poison. Some weapons can be crafted from scratch, and many are upgrades that require another weapon as part of the crafting process. Most of the parts you require in order to craft a weapon are carved from defeated monsters, and stronger monsters lead to better weapons (and armour).
Armour is yet another “choice-rich” area for the hunter to dive into. I’m not exactly sure how many individual pieces of armour there are in the game, but there are hundreds, making the number of possible full armour sets too many to contemplate. Each piece of armour has a raw defensive rating, as well as optional elemental defense and they almost always have some ability bonuses. They can also have up to three decoration slots, where ability gems can be attached. All of this means that armouring you hunter is almost a game of its own, encompassing almost limitless numbers of outfits.
Choice is good.
All of these choices…what weapon to equip, what armour to wear, what gems to put on, what items to bring…all of them are important. All of them are meaningful to the game mechanics. I, for one, found them to be interesting choices. All of this, and there’s still the action-oriented decisions to be considered whilst actually fighting the monsters! There’s still the fact that you can hire cats (choosing amongst many with their own, very important stat differences) to cook up foodstuffs that grant bonuses to your hunter (if you play the sequel game, MHF2G, you can also hire Felyne hunters that will fight alongside you). It’s this wealth of decisions that gives the Monster Hunter games their depth.
What would I like to see changed, besides a North American/European release of MHF2G and the already-mentioned Basic Training menu redesign? Well, Internet play would be a wonderful addition, as multiplayer is currently restricted to ad-hoc mode, so everyone has to be in the same room to play. There are various small interface touches that have already been added to MHF2G, like “gather to item box” when farming, that would have been nice in MHP2. Other than that…I wouldn’t change a thing. I just hope that the Wii game, Monster Hunter 3, can be as good as it’s smaller PSP siblings. I give MHP2 a 4.5/5; with a few very minor touches it would achieve gaming perfection. It is not for everybody, but no game is. With a little marketing push, and by getting off of the PSP and onto some larger home consoles, Capcom could very well manage to bring this exciting franchise into homes all over the world. I wish them well.
