Monster Hunter World

Monster Hunter is a long running series and this titles release has been awesome for Capcom and fans. The concept is simple. You are a hunter and you hunt monsters in the world.

Undoubtedly your Monster Hunter experience will be improved radically with friends. Whilst Monster Hunter isn’t an RPG, if you like RPG’s, action games, fantasy themes, boss battles then you’ll enjoy this.

Getting The Small Misconception Out of the Way First!

It’s more Monster Killer than Monster Hunter. If you watch any trailer or hear folk talk about the game there becomes an assumption in your mind that there is a tracking element. Whilst there is some tracking it is significantly less than how it is portrayed. It’s not much of a “World” either and entering into the series you might have expected an open world. Not necessarily a large one. Instead you get 5 relatively small open levels.

Tracking

The best tracking in the game is at the start since you receive no feedback. You are looking around for footprints, scratch marks, feathers, any sign of monsters. As you collect these tracks a giant glowing beam of bugs picks up the scent and it becomes a matter of following the line. I think they should have abandoned these bugs and made it a skill to track monsters or just have some items that help with tracking. locating, luring or baiting monsters. .

Combat - The Weapons

There are 14 weapon types in the game.  The 2 handed sword has 96 weapons total although 74 of these are just part of the process to upgrading it to its final form. So there are actually 22 unique 2 handed swords in the base game and occasionally that increases.

The main difference between these weapons is their elemental damage. There’s more than just physical, fire, thunder, water, ice and dragon. There are some status inflicting effects such as paralysis, sleep, blast and poison.

Annoyingly for elemental damage you won’t see the damage numbers. Elemental weapons look like they do less damage because only the physical damage number is displayed when hitting a monster. With little feedback from the monsters, since they don’t show physical signs of distress when hit with one element over another, you rely on the numbers to be accurate and instead they are misleading.

The faster attacking weapons weapons are easy to use because they allow you to respond quickly. However the slower type weapons are clunky and inconsiderate of the players actions. The Heavy Bow Gun, which works like a gun basically, is the perfect example. Here’s a list of issues!

• When unsheathing the Heavy Bow Gun and the ammo isn’t full it will reload unless you unsheath using the ‘fire’ key/button. So even if you have fired one shot. You will reload so it’s full again. Locking you into a reload animation that is potentially lethal situations.
• When the player is knocked down on the ground. It sheathes the weapon. Which feeds back into the problem above.
• There are 20 ammo types. Changing your loadout means you have to rearrange these ammo types in your list.

Building Your Character

Monster Hunter has a lot of weapons, armor and nifty gems to alter your characters stats and perks. However there aren’t a lot of build options. Certain monsters will leave you desiring certain perks so you tend to build based on what you are fighting rather than a general playstyle that suits you.

Whilst you could creates some custom builds that work well enough against any monsters and swap a few pieces in and out. To do so will require hundreds of hours of grinding the same monsters over and over again to get the RNG to drop those precious gem stones to slot into your armor.

Combat - The Monsters

The game being divided into two parts where the Low Rank mode monsters at the start of the game reappear but stronger along with recolours, along with some new monsters.

Unlocking High Rank mode you’ll find gear overrides raw combat skill. The skill is in the art of preparation. Farm the right monsters. Get the right gear. Bring the right weapon and you turn the bosses one shot kills into three shots, becoming much easier.

The monsters hit box for attacks are very poor. You learn to fight the game more so than the monsters. Monsters can move and attack extremely fast with zero momentum. Going into fights without previous knowledge will probably envoke a “what the hell” because it is extremely unbelievable the way monsters move. This makes the monsters feel weightless and their attacks that kill you in one hit but without that feeling of impact.

Mounting is random and once anyone has mounted the monster it becomes unmountable for a few minutes. Mounting doesn’t take much skill. If you are an inch of the ground and do an air attack you will teleport on to the monster. If you jump 100 feet of the ground and hit a flying monster, which has yet to be mounted, then you won’t necessarily mount it. Not only this but height doesn’t alter the damage. So even with a very satisfying high drop air attack you will still only hit for the same amount as if you hit it from a low drop.

Mounting and Air Attacks

You are also going to get hit from things which don’t hit you, often for a ton of damage. For a lot of unreasonable damage. Some of those hits are going to stun you or teleport you, rendering you unable to do anything whilst the monster gets in 2 or 3 more fatal attacks. It’s not just the hit registry that’s the problem but as previously mentioned monsters can perform almost instant-transmission like speeds for their attacks.

But when things do fall into place the game feels special. Here’s a quick preview of failed hit detection and when it does work. These were quick example recordings,  it can get better and it can also get much worse.

When it comes to mounting monsters “Dragons Dogma” (2012) does it best. In Monster Hunter there are 2 or 3 points on the monster you hook on to and you can just flick between them once you’ve mounted. In Dragon’s Dogma you can climb all over the monsters freely. Course in both games the monsters will try to shake you off. 

Multiplayer Best Player

One of the perks of Monster Hunter is there is a lot you can be doing whilst your friends are offline. There is plenty to farm without progressing the main story. During the story or even once the story is done, farming alone doesn’t create awkward power differences. You know those moments where your friend decides to play without you and the next time you see them they look like some kind of hyper lord prime.

Japan and Multiplayer is strange. First you join your friends session, then you join your friends quest and then you deploy into your friends mission. To do any of that though, for the story at least, the player who creates the mission (the host) has to have seen all of the cutscenes before the mission.

To get to the cutscene you have to track the monster for the first time. This means that any gamer looking to co-op the Monster Hunter experience will have to wait for the host to have completed the tracking and watching the cutscene before being able to join.

At least it isn’t Dark Souls where you have to replay the mission for each co-op friend. Chances are though you’ll likely hunt the same things over and over again though to grind what each friend wants to get, which is a big part of what the game is about.

Unfortunately you can’t trade material items to assist with crafting, likely to stop players power leveling friends. You can trade consumable items with friends but you won’t use this much, if at all, and most won’t even know they can do this anyway.

Playing with randoms is easy, if you ever need help with a mission you can most likely get it by simply firing an SOS flare from the menu. More often than not playing with others makes the mission extremely easy but for the more resilient monsters the random helpers can quickly become a hindrance as respwans are shared. One player can drag the whole team down by consuming all the teams respawns and causing the mission to fail

Overall Thoughts

Monster Hunter is certainly worth it. You are going to enjoy it and 30 hours in you’ll probably hit a desire to grind gear despite a frustration for the moments where the game works against you. 60 hours in and you’ll either find the flaws and repetitive monster hunts a reason to stop playing or you’ll be lusting for upgrades.