For Cory
This review was completed and scheduled prior to the unfortunate passing of our friend Cory “OniWalker”, and while the decision as to whether to still post was not one made lightly, he always worked hard on everything he did and would rather his work not go unseen.
Introduction
Monster Hunter Stories is an RPG spin-off of the series that was developed and published by Capcom. It was released on Nintendo 3DS in Japan in October 2016, before it saw a worldwide release in September 2017. It then saw a mobile port in December 2017 for Japan, and a release in September 2018 worldwide.
Review
In the world, there are Hunters. They hunt monsters to keep the lands safe and protected. But alongside them, there are also people known as Riders, who befriend monsters and help keep the lands safe. Unfortunately Hunters believe monsters can’t be friends, and Riders don’t think monsters should be hunted. Unfortunately when the land is covered in the black shroud and makes monsters go crazy, they have to team up and work together before everything is destroyed.
The story for the game starts off a little slow, before slowly building to get into a decent groove. The dialogue was funny in spots but it’s also very serious. It’s definitely very different from what a normal Monster Hunter is. I wouldn’t say it’s anything too amazing, considering this is the first time a big story has really been considered, but for what it does it is alright. I did have a few issues with the pacing now and again though, considering there were some storylines that happened in the game that I felt really didn’t need to be worried about, considering the looming threat at hand.
By the time the end of the game rolled around, I’ll be honest, I felt the story had been very dragged out by then. Blowing through the story as fast as I could, took me almost 50 hours to do, and I really feel like it could’ve been cut down by 20 hours at least. Heck one of the acts has you just revisiting old dungeons, that just so happened to get magically bigger! All for the sake of building up the final battle, but I feel like that could’ve been done in a better way.
When it comes to how the game is played, I actually didn’t mind it at first, but later in the game, I had nothing but contempt for it. As you travel around the map, you can find little caves, which you go into, find monster eggs, and steal one. You then go back to a town and hatch these eggs to get new monsters. It’s fun to see what kind of monsters you may get, but the terrible thing is, they always start at level one. So why would I grind up a new monster ¾ of the way through the game, and lose out on a lot of power in my party? There was a mechanic known as “gene transferring”, which would let you move specific buffs from one monster to another, but it never felt useful as I was going through the game, and it would’ve required an insane amount of grinding on top of all the other grinding I had done.
Now the basic elements of Monster Hunter are still here, even though this is a turn based RPG, and by that, I mean material grinding. You still have to grind certain materials, from certain monsters, to make and upgrade certain pieces of equipment. You also have to constantly have more than one armour set made, just in case you run into a boss that kills you fast because your armour has bad fire resistance. It was fun, but also a pain that I couldn’t just stick with one armour set. I never had an issue with the weapons, but I’m sure I would’ve had a bit of an easier time if I had multiple weapons crafted.
Some monsters can’t even be hunted unless you do a specific side quest that makes them start spawning in the world. So I guess there is a reason for doing some side quests, but for the most part they all felt useless. But at the same time, they are the best way to get money, so I found myself doing some when I needed to upgrade my gear, but there were no exciting side quest storylines. They were mostly just “get this item, or kill this monster please!”.
Now the biggest annoyance is the battle system. It’s nothing but a luck based snooze fest. The turn based gameplay is set up as essentially rock/paper/scissors. Power attacks beat technical attacks, technical attacks beat speed attacks, speed attacks beat power attacks. Some enemies had a sort of set move they’d use more often than not, but when it came to bosses, they would use a lot of anything, so again, it came down to an extreme amount of luck. If you happened to win the attack move, you’d do more damage, and get more power to be able to ride your monster. Win while riding your monster, and you get a more powerful super move. When you aren’t riding your monster, they do all their attacks themselves. You can’t choose the kind of attack they do or even what they attack, unless you use power to select a specific skill to use. It was aggravating and made me lose boss fights so much because they wouldn’t do what I wanted unless I used these points, which meant I couldn’t ride them and use a power move!
Now when it comes to some bosses, they start getting different pieces on them, like a head, or tail, or even both! Usually you have to destroy these to stop the boss from using specific attacks, or even worse, attacking twice in one move. If they attack twice in one move, you can only win rock/paper/scissors once. The other attack is an automatic damage. There were a few times when I’d break a part, the game would say “the boss can’t use power attacks anymore!”, and they’d still use a power attack. Make this make sense, because it doesn’t! Screw all the bosses in this game.
Rating
Pros:
- It’s Fun Stealing Eggs
- Riding Monsters Is Different
Cons:
- Story Drags On
- Combat Is Luck Based Nonsense
- Game Doesn’t Always Follow Its Own Rules
Summary
This was an interesting little take on Monster Hunter and was decent enough for a first time RPG story. But when it came to the gameplay it was awful and I wish it all had been done differently. Makes me wonder how refined the second game is in this series.
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Game & Developer Information
Developer/Publisher Website: Capcom
Developer/Publisher Socials: Twitter
Images – https://www.igdb.com/
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