I’ve always wanted to get into the series since I was younger, but never really found a good way to start until World caught my attention. After one hundred and thirty hours of playing through the game by myself and with an incredibly important friend of mine, my thoughts on the game are as vast and in-depth as the game itself. For this particular review, I’m actually going to be splitting it in half by reviewing both the base game, and its DLC: Iceborne since I find the two different enough to warrant discussions on, as well as my thoughts being long enough to also justify doing two reviews. This will be the first part of the review, Iceborne’s will be soon after. With that out of the way, let’s jump into the world of Monster Hunter.
Monster Hunter World creates a strong impression right away with the beautiful graphics, the presentation, and the first few cutscenes. While graphical fidelity isn’t necessarily Monster Hunter’s selling point, I must admit this game looked rather gorgeous, though the colors are a bit muted which seems to be a departure from other Monster Hunter games, but Rise seems to have gone back to the original artstyle. You create your character, you create your loyal Palico comrade, and are treated to some cutscenes. This is where we run into our first problem with this game, is the unskippable cutscenes. While I don’t skip cutscenes for my first playthrough, if I were to play Monster Hunter World again, I’d also have to sit through these cutscenes again as well, and they’re not necessarily short ones either. This normally wouldn’t be a big issue for me if the story was good, which we’ll get to, but the fact you cannot skip cutscenes is a minor blemish all things considered, but still odd.
The story of Monster Hunter World has some promise at the beginning, but never really does much with it really. A lot of the “story” is just to give you a reason to be fighting a specific monster, which works, but since these cutscenes are unskippable and typically uninteresting and long, they certainly don’t do much to hook or captivate the player as far as the plot goes. With that said, the cutscenes do a phenomenal job at introducing us to a new monster, as well as tease some of their capabilities when you actually fight them, which I really liked. Had Monster Hunter World focused entirely on the monsters themselves, and not the reason why you’re fighting them, I think it'd have benefited greatly from it, because any cutscene not involving a Monster introduction I found little to no reason to fully pay attention to since all it’s really doing is stringing things together for another encounter. I suppose that’s the point, but characters and dialogue in general are just bland to me, I’d rather just skip them to play the game instead. Except for the Huntsman, the Huntsman was alright.
Monster Hunter World’s gameplay is incredibly complicated with tons of moving parts, I find it both great and bad in a lot of cases, let’s get into it. I’m going to address my positives with the gameplay first, and then the negatives.
Monster Hunter World has a fantastic selection of weapons that each have their own playstyle, strengths, weaknesses, and builds with tons of customization and flexibility that allow you to tailor yourself for a specific monster, or to compensate for a weak aspect of your weapon or playstyle. I found myself very drawn to the Long Sword for its design alongside its good range, great damage, and decent mobility. It’s by all means a universally good weapon with very few drawbacks, however it’s a very difficult weapon to master. I also dabbled in Dual Blades, and the Greatsword, but ended up using Long Sword exclusively for my whole playthrough. While I can’t comment much on other weapons, they each have unique purposes and quirks that give them just as much reason to use than any other weapon, they all feel viable and useful. Dual Blades for example have a lot of hits and DPS, so it’s good for applying status ailments, Insect Glaive is great for mounting, Great Sword is great at shattering monster parts, and bow is a ranged weapon that can keep you out of harm’s way with plenty of options to deal good damage. Learning your weapon however can be quite the endeavor, as you’ll have to put in time to become efficient with them and understand their limitations. Since this was my first Monster Hunter, I ended up spending a lot of time in the training area for the first twenty hours or so just trying to understand my weapon and everything about it, which can definitely be a difficult hurdle to get across, but it’s worth it in the long run. Not every weapon is complicated, Dual Blades are incredibly simple, as well as the Sword and Shield, both are also very solid weapons that don’t fall behind the others, which is important to stress, simply pick the weapon you like the most.
Most weapons have sharpness you will have to manage while hunting monsters as well. Sharpness is incredibly important because the sharper your weapon is, the better damage it will do, and the less likely it’ll bounce off a monster's tough hide or skin. There’s many different “levels” of sharpness, purple being the best, and red being the worst. You’ll always need to check your sharpness meter often to make sure it’s not getting too dull, usually yellow sharpness is around the best time to find a moment to sharpen, though I personally always sharpened after a monster ran away to ensure maximum damage and wouldn’t need to worry about my weapon becoming dull in the middle of a scrap. I think the game does a great job overall giving you plenty of opportunities and big openings to sharpen your weapon, even during encounters, but sharpness is a very committal action that’ll get you punished since it can take awhile to do, but there are ways around this issue, such as special sharpening tools and a skill called “speed sharpening” which is pretty self-explanatory. I liked the sharpness mechanic quite a bit because by being diligent with it, you’re rewarded with more damage and less risk overall of being in a tight spot, of course if you really needed to sharpen in the middle of a fight, despite how long it is to do, you can always roll out of the animation, which is nice, there’s also some special sharpening tools that make it much faster as well.
Armor, charms, and decorations are essential building blocks to a hunter’s survivability, there’s a lot to it, but a lot of it is quite good. You’ll start off with some rather meek armor, but once you overcome your first monster, you’ll be ready to upgrade your gear if you so choose. This decision-making of which monster to hunt for their gear is the majority of your monster hunting experience, and there’s plenty of options. I think the idea of both grinding a monster for drops, while also being able to re-fight your personal favorites makes for a very strong gameplay loop that keeps you engaged for a very long time, I very much enjoyed grinding Rathalos and Odagaron for my high rank gear that lasted me until I got to the DLC. On the flipside however, fighting a monster for a specific piece of gear you don’t enjoy fighting, or simply never getting the drop you need can be very unengaging and bloat game time quite a bit, but generally I think it’s a positive since fighting the monster a lot will let you gain mastery over it, letting you shave seconds each and every time, which is its own reward to many. Of course, if you don’t care about this and just wish to progress, most monsters only need to be fought once to progress the actual game, there’s also other methods to get more drops from monsters if you need. Charms is another piece of equipment crafted from monster parts that allow you to gain a specific skill you might want, or your armor might not provide, from attack boost, to critical eye, you name it. I opted to go for the Health Charm since it increases survivability a lot, which you’ll need if you don’t have stellar armor, but you can make anything work really. Decorations allow you to slot in even more skills if your armor has decoration slots, your weapons can also have some. Decorations really allow you to be flexible with your builds outside your armor, which lets you slot in what you want to have, which I really like because there’s so many skills to choose from, plus it helps make experimenting a bit easier without crafting an entire new set of armor. Overall, building your character up, the armor, and the grind for the materials are all fantastic and kept me playing Monster Hunter far longer than I would’ve normally, but that’s by no means a negative, I very much enjoyed the progression, it felt rewarding, significant, and not too slow to where it dragged much.
Mantles are another idea in Monster Hunter I really enjoyed because it gave even more customization, but also allowed you to handle certain fights and situations much easier. Mantles come in many forms, from the vitality mantle that gives you more health, temporal mantle that gives you invincibility for several attacks until it wears off, elemental mantles that lower specific elemental damage, like fire, and the rocksteady mantle which prevents your attacks from being interrupted by attacks while still taking reduced damage. While they’re not essential for hunts, they allow a lot more room for error, or simply make it easier, especially if you’re struggling with a monster, crafting a mantle can mean the difference between a win and a loss. I personally opted to use the Vitality and Temporal Mantle, and I couldn’t tell you the amount of times it saved me in a pinch, it does take a second to actually put on the mantle, so keep that in mind. The drawback of mantles is they’re on a timer, once you put it on, the mantle will slowly lose its energy until it blacks out entirely visually, this is when you need to take off the mantle to let it recharge. I like this idea of having to be diligent with the mantle, but in a tough battle, it’ll be hard to find a moment to take it off sometimes, even though it only takes a second to do so, but make sure to get everything you can out of them, because once they run out, they’ll be out of commission for a decent length of time. If you’re not particularly interested in using a mantle, there’s also “boosters” which create an area of effect that can increase your weapon affinity, heal you and your allies, and remove status ailments, I never personally used these since I found mantles infinitely more useful and versatile, but also because boosters have to be placed and have a small area of effect which can be difficult to utilize in fights where the monster is constantly repositioning, or you the hunter have to reposition due to the monster’s attacks.
The slinger and environmental hazards are two components of Monster Hunter World I very much enjoyed overall. The slinger is this arm mounted crossbow every hunter worth their salt uses and will utilize on hunts. In order to use the slinger, you need ammo, which can be stones, to moss, to any number of things really which can then be used to trip environmental hazards, as well as against monsters. Against monsters, there’s a few specific things you can do with it, like getting their attention, but most importantly it can allow you to stun or stagger a monster. Specific ammo types will allow you to interrupt a monster’s attack, granting you a big opening at your discretion which is pretty much an essential mechanic in later fights, but can be neglected early on. Not all ammo can stagger unfortunately, which is a small negative I think makes sense in theory, but would allow all ammo to be invaluable instead of only a select few. The slinger also allows you to shoot special crafted ammo you make yourself, such as flash pods to stun the enemy for a long period of time, as well as forcing flying monsters to crash back down to the Earth, providing a gigantic opening and is almost essential for monsters like Rathalos, to the more obscure screamer pods that create a high-pitched noise that’s particularly useful against the likes of Diablos. Flash pods are more universally useful though, and in base Monster Hunter World, they’re a tad overtuned, making certain fights an absolute joke, so I opted to not abuse them much but is something to be aware of. I think the slinger’s most important use however is triggering environmental hazards. There’s a few cutscenes in-game that showcase this idea which I really like, though they still give you a tutorial on it which is understandable, though I’d much prefer to have put two and two together. Environmental hazards are usually unstable formations above monsters you can hit to make them come crashing down, like rocks in the ancient forest, to giant crystals in later areas. Though not every environmental trap needs the slinger to activate, some of them work if you can attract the monster to where they are like vine traps, which entangle the monster for several seconds, allowing you to get a lot of damage in! It’s up to you to take advantage of these environmental traps however, and they’re not guaranteed as you need to get the monster in position and either stun them or knock them down to do it, or get very lucky where they just don’t happen to move. If you do successfully hit a monster with one of these hazards, they will take a large amount of damage and automatically topple, giving you an opening on top of the high damage, which is incredibly beneficial and can make hunts go way faster if utilized well. Traps can also help you break monster parts which we’ll get into in a bit, but overall environmental traps can turn the tide or snowball your advantage momentously, and I quite loved the interactive environmental aspects a lot, there’s other things you can trigger as well like swarms of flashbugs to flash a monster, water geysers and lava geyser that deal passive damage as the monster stands in them, and environmental destruction from rampaging monsters among other things, such as Rathalos attacking the rocks in his nest to cause the water behind it to rush out, potentially flinging him off the cliff along with you if you’re not careful. It’s truly an interactive world, which I really appreciate as it helps the immersion aspect a lot, and again just very helpful to gain an advantage if you’re paying attention.
My absolute favorite aspect of Monster Hunter World are the monsters themselves. If you actually decide to not attack them and watch them from a safe distance, you can observe them, how they interact with the environment, other monsters, and themselves. For example, you can watch a Rathian hunt for food, you can watch Barroth try to cool itself off in the mud, and you can see even more intimidating monsters like Nergigante ( my personal favorite monster) groom himself and just walk around peacefully. These dynamics make these monsters feel real in an actual environment, not just boss fights that net you rewards. I think they absolutely nailed this aspect, since while even fighting monsters, they’ll often retreat to their nests to rest and restore their health, and if you take too long you’ll be at a further disadvantage. Turf Wars help emphasize these monsters are territorial not only to you, but other invading monsters, and will fend them off best they can. Mechanically speaking, Turf Wars always end in a tie as both monsters deal a massive amount of damage to each other alongside a unique animation. After this is over, the monsters can still fight each other with their normal attacks, which can drag on sometimes depending on the monsters, but you can sling a dung pod to drive off any monsters you don’t want to deal with. Usually the monster who invaded the territory of another monster will leave, feeling threatened, which thematically makes a lot of sense in some cases. In other cases, it makes less sense depending on the match-up, but I think the idea that every monster has a chance to beat another monster that is stronger than it is definitely possible. All of these monsters have specific routes, nests, and interactions that give them consistency to feel very real, and I absolutely love it. It was always a highlight to watch, and undoubtedly my favorite part of the game besides actually fighting the monsters.
Fighting monsters is one of the biggest selling points of Monster Hunter, so is it any good? Yes, very much so. When you’re fighting a monster, they have specific weak points you can take advantage of to deal higher damage than normal, and not every monster has the same weak points, which not only makes a lot of sense, but ensures not every fight feels the same. Some monsters might have weak arms, some might have soft tails etc. It’s up to you to figure out where the weak points are, though there are resources in-game to figure this out as well without guess-work, which I appreciate not having to look up a wiki to do so. There are some universal weaknesses though, monsters with large legs can be attacked to stagger them, if you damage their leg enough though, they might just topple over, completely at your mercy. This allows for a consistent strategy against monsters, especially new monsters you haven’t fought yet, but it’s not always guaranteed or ideal, since some monsters have very strong legs. One of my favorite parts of the combat though is part breaking. If you attack a specific part of the monster long enough, it’ll eventually break, which not only severely lowers their defense in that specific area, but it can also drastically weaken the monster. Let’s take Rathian as an example, Rathian has a tail flip attack that deals severe damage and can poison you, so this incentivizes you going for her tail, since if you cut her tail off, it’ll make her arguably strongest move much weaker. Not only does this give you a huge advantage to sever her tail, but it’s so satisfying watching the tail get cut off and go flying, you even get an extra carve from it, which basically means you get another drop from the monster, which can net you really valuable materials. Tail cutting isn’t the only part you can go for though, as monsters all have specific body parts they rely on for attacking that breaking will cause their moves to become far less dangerous, and in some cases, slow them down, or cause them to have much larger windows of opportunity to attack them. On top of all of these advantages, part breaking can topple the monster as well, which gives you even more opportunities to break parts which will eventually snowball you to breaking multiple parts in a row, which is so much fun to do and really rewards you as well. Each broken part will also give you an extra material after the hunt is over, further emphasizing part breaks, you can also destroy highly resistant parts of a monster to make them take solid damage in that area for the remainder of the battle. Part breaking is an essential component of hunts, and a very fun mechanic as well, once you figure out what part of their body the monster uses the most to attack with, or what its most dangerous attacks utilize, it becomes a glaring target for you to go for, which I love a lot, and was just another aspect of this game that made me put in so much time playing it.
As far as the monster’s attacks themselves, well it’s a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, there’s a lot of attacks in this game that feel well telegraphed and fair, allowing you to anticipate what the monster will do, and react accordingly by dodging or moving out of the way. On other occasions, some moves have some wild hitboxes that felt very deceptive in their size and range. One thing I need to stress about Monster Hunter World is how a monster’s attack pattern is entirely random. A monster may just use their worst attack three or four times in a row, and there’s not much you can do about that besides using slinger to stun them, avoiding it, or just getting hit. I think this randomness factor works since these are monsters, and just like animals, their behavior will be unpredictable, so thematically it all checks out, but mechanically it can feel utterly unfair at times. If a monster decides to just not give you many openings, or keeps moving around and you have to chase them down a lot, it can become rather annoying and hurt the pacing of the battle. Let’s not forget every hunt outside expeditions have a time limit, so the less time you’re attacking, the more that clock is ticking down. I will say in base game, the clock usually never played a factor in victory or success for me, but it’s definitely something that became an issue later on. I didn’t really notice these issues until the endgame, since most of Monster Hunter world is actually rather easy once you get the hang of it, but in the endgame it starts getting a little ridiculous. Some moves have barely any start-up at all, so reacting to them is a nightmare, insta-kill moves, ridiculously sized attacks etc. This definitely bogged my experience down somewhat, though it wasn’t super consistent enough for me to feel like it was a pressing issue a lot of the time, but it’s definitely there. Some monsters are better than others in this regard, though like any game, some monsters are incredibly well designed, some are incredibly poorly designed. Some of my least favorite monsters were definitely Black Diablos, Uragaan, and Kirin for reference. My favorite fights include Nergigante, Teostra, and Odagaron. My biggest issue with the combat really just boils down to some moves either being too strong, too fast, or just having weird hitboxes, everything else is either fine or manageable, especially in a multiplayer environment, I’d even argue some of these criticisms disappear if you’re playing with one other person like I was, but when playing by myself, these flaws became much more apparent.
Monster hunter world was one of the best multiplayer experiences I’ve ever had. Even though I only played with one other person, being able to share this experience with them and fighting giant monsters together was always fun. Even in the more difficult fights, having someone to rely on is comforting, but always keeps the fight engaging since teamwork becomes essential in multiplayer. Monster’s gain much more HP the more people are in a hunt, so everyone needs to usually pull their weight for a hunt to be a success. Having an ally to split aggro can help ease pressure and give you a moment to heal or buff up if you need, but makes the monster a bit more chaotic to predict, which I honestly preferred, made things more interesting, plus the trade-off of being able to take a breather was very welcome. Allies can hit you out of stun and other nasty aliments as well, heavily rewarding teamwork as you’ll both be keeping an eye on each other if you’re ever in a bind, which is pretty much essential in the endgame. There’s plenty of multiplayer support skills like wide range that allow you to support your team further by allowing you to heal some of your allies’ hp by drinking a potion which also heals you, as well as buffing items like might and adamant seeds. Of course, multiplayer has drawbacks as well, hitting your allies with your weapon will flinch them, interrupting their action for a second, in which case they’ll need to do it again, though the flinch animation actually has some i-frames on it, so it can have incredibly niche use in that regard. You can run flinch free to prevent this, and if you’re with a LongSword player like myself, I’d recommend it, ‘cause LongSword is very well-known for flinching allies, which can be frustrating for sure. I have to admit though, I vastly preferred my Multiplayer experience compared to my Single Player experience, which we’ll get into, but I was thoroughly impressed with how thoughtful and fun the Multiplayer was speaking strictly mechanically, because Multiplayer has its own specific issues we’ll also get into in a bit. Overall though, a must-play with friends if you can get them together for it, because it’s incredibly fun. I'd argue half of my enjoyment was just from reacting and making callouts in call to my teammate. Truly a one-of-a-kind experience.
For singleplayer, you have your trusty Palico friend to help you against monsters. The Palico, much like another hunter, can split aggro for you, heal you, and help deal damage to the monster. I very much liked the Palico not only for this, but because they’re just a very loyal and charming companion that has a lot of cute dialogue and interactions with your hunter. They really made it feel like you were a team with quite a bit of history before the game began. You can also craft gear and weapons for your Palico, which helps them scale up with you as monsters get tougher, and honestly my Palico was absolutely invaluable, even in Multiplayer. I decided to give my Palico a paralysis weapon, which gave me so many openings to attack the monster with, even if it was uncommon, over the playthrough it saved me so many times, and helped me clutch victory. Unfortunately, the Palico isn’t all positives, as if you’re by yourself, you have to rely on the Palico to get you out of specific status ailments. Stun and sleep are the two big ones that you really need your Palico to get you out of. Stun and sleep leave you wide open to be killed, but you can ping your Palico to hit you out of these… unfortunately the Palico is not consistent with doing this. Sometimes they’ll be on top of it and hit you every single time, other times they’ll ignore your cry for help and watch as you die. Because of this, relying on your Palico for these situations is incredibly risky, and I personally ensured this never happened because I didn’t trust my luck. Otherwise, the Palico is incredibly useful, especially for a support role. I gave my Palico vigor wasp spray the entire playthrough alongside a status weapon, and they were an invaluable part of my team and strategy, so overall Palico was an awesome and welcome addition to the game, and my team.
Now that I’ve gone over most of the positives, let’s go into some of the negatives.
My largest negative with Monster hunter world is the single-player experience. Now don’t get me wrong here, you can absolutely play and enjoy this game by yourself, and I have tons of admiration and respect for those who can solo the hardest monsters in the game, but to me, this was the epitome of my bad experiences with this game. A lot of the mechanics and design of this game seemed very geared towards multiplayer in a lot of ways, one aspect of it to me that screams this more than any other is stun. Stun is an overly punishing mechanic that, when hit too many times in quick succession by a monster, you lose all control of your hunter as they stand there like a sitting duck to get killed. Now yes, your Palico can hit you out of it like I mentioned, but it’s inconsistent, and while you can run Stun Resist to completely remove the mechanic altogether, I found it incredibly unfair and not fun to deal with. The game tells you that you can get out of stun faster by wiggling the left stick, however this does not impact much as far as how long you’re in stun for. On top of this, monsters with no split aggro can kill you in a matter of seconds, all it takes is a few swipes, and you’re as good as gone. A game like this, positioning and finding openings is crucial for success, but in my experience a lot of this never mattered when I was by myself because the monster would always be on me and I couldn’t do much about it. Now you do have your Palico friend to split the aggro up for you a bit, but I found it to not be enough to feel comfortable or even confident to go in and fight the monster, most of the time I just ran away and hung around waiting for a move I felt I could punish before going in. This, on top of insane hitboxes, stun, and slow recoveries with items and get-ups, ruined any semblance of pacing during battles and often found myself running the clock out on these hunts. Just as well, I failed many quests where I was assured victory just so long as I had enough time to capture the monster because I played too safe since I deemed the risk too high. Again, this is just my personal experience, and I know a lot of people stand by this game as a single-player experience, but for me, I vastly prefer playing in Multiplayer. Single-Player was just incredibly frustrating and unfun and often soiled my enjoyment of the game in sessions where I had to play by myself. I will say, once I had a competent build with the quality of life skills I wanted, Single-Player was less arduous and annoying, but I still didn’t find it nearly as engaging or rewarding as sharing my victories with my friend, or with other randoms after defeating a powerful monster together.
The roll, or more specifically, the lack of i-frames on the roll. I come from a very Fromsoft background, so a lot of my experience with these kinds of games are the likes of Dark Souls. Bloodborne, and Sekiro. While those and Monster Hunter play very differently, they both share one thing in common, and that’s a roll. In Monster Hunter, the roll allows you to reposition and dodge attacks from the monster, however the amount of i-frames it has does not always allow this. Some attacks are so long or have such giant hitboxes, your roll simply cannot dodge it and you will get hit. Just like Stun Resist, you can use skills like Evade Window to increase the amount of i-frames the roll has, and jumping to increase how far it goes. With that said however, the base roll should be good enough to dodge most quick attacks, because if it did, it’d tremendously help with the pacing and flow of fights once again. Now there is a more committal roll option called a “dive” where you run away from the monster, run, then roll, and you will dive. The dive has plenty of i-frames to dodge pretty much any attack, and there’s specific attacks monsters use with the dive in mind I actually really like. Nergigante’s dive-bomb move being a good example of one of these moves. The issue with dive is it takes forever to recover from, and getting your hunter to dive is too finicky for me. If you have your weapon drawn, forget about diving, it will not happen, and I’ve suffered many deaths from not being able to sheathe fast enough to dive, which very much annoyed me. I understand both this and stun are things you can alleviate or outright remove with certain skills, however skills have their own issues.
Decorations being random drops is something I’ll never understand. I’ve recently learned from a good friend of mine, Lemonstrade whom I’ve been talking to about my experience with Monster Hunter World, that previous Monster Hunter games did not have random decorations, but were simply craftable from specific monster parts. Not only would this have helped make more monsters useful to hunt in my playthrough, because I had so many monster parts just collecting dust, but would also allow you to focus in on decorations you really needed. Decorations are what give you those skills I’ve been mentioning in this review a lot. In order to get these decorations, you get them as rewards from pretty much every activity in the game. The big issue is: what decorations you get are entirely random. This to me is flat-out padding and a really bad idea overall. If I was struggling with stun or my roll being a bit too hard to use effectively, I should in theory, be able to grind for the decorations to help with me, not random chance. So instead, I have to grind monsters for potentially hours, and maybe never get what I’m looking for, which will make these issues much more consistent and noticeable throughout my experience, and surprise, they were. It’s especially bad in endgame when you want to optimize builds, or go for a luxurious build that makes the game more forgiving to play, good luck getting the decorations you need in a reasonable amount of time, though you may get lucky. What’s worse is you don’t even need to fight especially hard monsters to get decent gems, you can fight a special event called Greatest Jagras that’s always available now to grind gems, so it’s not even a matter of skill, it’s a matter of time. Gem farming takes too long, less monsters become useful to get their materials for, makes certain issues way harder to solve, and overall doesn’t feel rewarding, it’s all luck. I was able to get all the gems I needed through dedicated work, but I’m hoping the upcoming Monster Hunter game: Wilds fixes this issue and reverts back to the old way Monster Hunter games did it, by allowing you to craft gems you want, not a slot machine.
Last complaint I really have with Monster Hunter World is how jank it felt to play at first. A lot of things in this game did not come very naturally for me, such as sheathing and unsheathing my weapon, which thankfully running auto-sheathes for you. A lot of the animations in Monster Hunter are long and very committal, so you can’t just mash attack and get away with it, or cancel out of it like roll, at least with LongSword this was the case. I often got too greedy and got hit a lot, which led to some frustration, but I began to understand Monster Hunter is a slower-paced game, so playing it slower helps, but that’s not the case with certain quests only giving you 30 minutes or so, which puts the pressure on. Odd hitboxes and strong attacks were the least of my issues when it came to traversing areas, specifically the Ancient forest. Visually, it gets across how nature-focused this game is, but on the other hand, what an absolutely terribly designed area overall, and a nightmare to traverse. This really shouldn’t have been the first area, since later areas don’t suffer this labyrinthian design like Ancient Forest does, but have their own fair share of issues. While the game is called “Monster Hunter” actually hunting The monsters felt like a chore a lot of the time. Having to find footprints and markings, collecting them, gaining research, and then the scout flies tell you where to go. Not only do the Scout Flies sometimes just don’t tell you the right way to go, but it feels very hand-holding at the same time, I’d much prefer finding the monsters on my own without all these extra steps. Of course, you obviously can ignore the Scout Flies and the track-hunting most of the time, but some missions require you do it, and it bogs the game down so much. Much later on, you’ll have to find tracks for some particularly special monsters by revisiting older regions, and only once you fulfill the research requirement can you locate them and fight them to progress the game. Once again this feels like padding, since no other Monster Hunter game does this, so it’s an odd choice World would decide to do it. Though I’ve been informed many times that World is an “outlier” when it comes to Monster Hunter, these criticisms will likely only apply to this entry. A lot of the actual controls for the game felt fine enough, but as I mentioned before, diving was sometimes inconsistent, odd hitboxes, bad roll, stun, the entirety of the Ancient Forest, sheathing, it all felt janky for a game made in 2018. Now I will concede a lot of this stuff I adapted to overtime and got used to it, but initially these things turned me off from the game, but I really wanted to get into this series, and my friend helped me a lot along the way, so I’m very thankful those first handful of hours were easier because of that. I wouldn’t say even World as accessible as it might be for the series, is still quite intimidating and very hard to get a grasp of, but once you do and it clicks, it becomes a very addicting and satisfying experience.
Sieges, more specifically Zorah Magdaros. Every mission involving this oversized lava cake I did not enjoy whatsoever. The scale is quite amazing, and can be quite exhilarating when you first begin one of these giant monster sieges, but you quickly realize just how shallow it is. You use some special weapons like the cannon and the ballista to deal damage, you wait around for an eternity, you get a cutscene, then you do it again until the quest ends. It’s not engaging, it’s mechanically shallow, and it’s unnecessary. I love the idea on paper, but the execution is just so bad, I couldn’t wait for them to be over with, and I never went back to grind these missions either because they were so dull to me. Zorah Magdaros has an excellent introduction at the start of the game and presents tons of interesting questions and ideas about where the plot might go, which unfortunately is rather… mediocre. Gameplay wise? It’s just disappointing.
Last, but certainly not least, The Handler. Now The Handler has a notorious reputation for being annoying and constantly getting into trouble, and yeah I see where people are coming from. To be completely blunt, I did not care about her in the slightest, nor any character in this game. They all feel so shallow with little character besides a few quirks that helps them at least not meld into the same NPC’s, but there’s not enough there for me. With the Handler, she’s certainly annoying, but I don’t hate her as much as others. My issue is, with a character so paramount to you as a hunter, she should have far more caution and experience in the field, but she comes across aloof, and a liability, which is irksome. The game literally gives my hunter the background of being an A-list hunter from the Old world, a seasoned veteran, but then my Handler acts like a complete new blood? That doesn’t add up to me. Missions where you have to follow her are even worse, because her corny dialogue doesn't help her case I’m afraid, on top of gameplay slowing to a crawl so I’ll care about what she’s saying, or her well-being when the character isn’t well-written enough for that to be a possibility. Honestly, most story sequences I did not care for, all I really wanted to do was hunt monsters and become stronger, which is both good and bad. Good because the gameplay is good enough for me to want to get back to it, bad because the story is so boring and inconsequential to me it’s getting in the way of what I truly enjoy. Add unskippable cutscenes and friends not being able to join each other until everyone has seen the cutscene within a mission, and you have the recipe for disaster and a lot of annoyance. I digress, the handler, let me reiterate, I do not hate as much as others, but she is the golden example of one of my big issues this game has, emphasizing boring characters and a boring story I do not care about, I just want to hunt monsters.
Since we’re nearing the end of this review, I’ll quickly go over the music. Monster Hunter World has a surprisingly good soundtrack with plenty of memorable tracks, though it also balances it out with just allowing the nature of the World to speak for itself without music. There wasn’t too many songs that caught my ear while playing, but generally most songs were pretty good! My favorites were: Pride of a Nameless Hunter, Nergigante Theme, and Bazelgeuse Theme.
Monster Hunter World was a monumental, refreshing yet equally frustrating experience that I already look back on quite fondly. As a Multiplayer game? It’s top-notch, and one I’d highly recommend if you can find people to play with, there is nothing quite like that rush of taking down a new monster, or mastering the patterns of older foes. Satisfying gameplay loop with even more satisfying progression, great combat with a bit of jank in level design, mechanics, and hitboxes, a lackluster story with even more lackluster characters, and quite a bit of padding that you’ll either tolerate or dislike. Incredibly immersive monster designs and behaviors, excellent interactions, fantastic environmental interactivity, slow-paced yet fast, methodical and savage in tandem, it’s truly remarkable. I have to say, I loved Monster Hunter World, and cannot wait to dive into other games in the series, like 4U, Rise, and Wilds in the near future! Thank you all for reading this review, this is by far my longest review, and I’m still not done talking about this game! The Iceborne review will be out sometime soon, but I hope this review can tide you all over until then. As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, I'm still going to wrap up FFIV soon, and start Va11-Halla very soon as well. I also just want to say thank you all for the exponential growth lately! You all only continue to inspire and drive me forward with writing these, so please look forward to more as I continue to put more and more into this. Truly, thank you all so much! I’ll see you all in the next review, until next time.
Monster Hunter World creates a strong impression right away with the beautiful graphics, the presentation, and the first few cutscenes. While graphical fidelity isn’t necessarily Monster Hunter’s selling point, I must admit this game looked rather gorgeous, though the colors are a bit muted which seems to be a departure from other Monster Hunter games, but Rise seems to have gone back to the original artstyle. You create your character, you create your loyal Palico comrade, and are treated to some cutscenes. This is where we run into our first problem with this game, is the unskippable cutscenes. While I don’t skip cutscenes for my first playthrough, if I were to play Monster Hunter World again, I’d also have to sit through these cutscenes again as well, and they’re not necessarily short ones either. This normally wouldn’t be a big issue for me if the story was good, which we’ll get to, but the fact you cannot skip cutscenes is a minor blemish all things considered, but still odd.
The story of Monster Hunter World has some promise at the beginning, but never really does much with it really. A lot of the “story” is just to give you a reason to be fighting a specific monster, which works, but since these cutscenes are unskippable and typically uninteresting and long, they certainly don’t do much to hook or captivate the player as far as the plot goes. With that said, the cutscenes do a phenomenal job at introducing us to a new monster, as well as tease some of their capabilities when you actually fight them, which I really liked. Had Monster Hunter World focused entirely on the monsters themselves, and not the reason why you’re fighting them, I think it'd have benefited greatly from it, because any cutscene not involving a Monster introduction I found little to no reason to fully pay attention to since all it’s really doing is stringing things together for another encounter. I suppose that’s the point, but characters and dialogue in general are just bland to me, I’d rather just skip them to play the game instead. Except for the Huntsman, the Huntsman was alright.
Monster Hunter World’s gameplay is incredibly complicated with tons of moving parts, I find it both great and bad in a lot of cases, let’s get into it. I’m going to address my positives with the gameplay first, and then the negatives.
Monster Hunter World has a fantastic selection of weapons that each have their own playstyle, strengths, weaknesses, and builds with tons of customization and flexibility that allow you to tailor yourself for a specific monster, or to compensate for a weak aspect of your weapon or playstyle. I found myself very drawn to the Long Sword for its design alongside its good range, great damage, and decent mobility. It’s by all means a universally good weapon with very few drawbacks, however it’s a very difficult weapon to master. I also dabbled in Dual Blades, and the Greatsword, but ended up using Long Sword exclusively for my whole playthrough. While I can’t comment much on other weapons, they each have unique purposes and quirks that give them just as much reason to use than any other weapon, they all feel viable and useful. Dual Blades for example have a lot of hits and DPS, so it’s good for applying status ailments, Insect Glaive is great for mounting, Great Sword is great at shattering monster parts, and bow is a ranged weapon that can keep you out of harm’s way with plenty of options to deal good damage. Learning your weapon however can be quite the endeavor, as you’ll have to put in time to become efficient with them and understand their limitations. Since this was my first Monster Hunter, I ended up spending a lot of time in the training area for the first twenty hours or so just trying to understand my weapon and everything about it, which can definitely be a difficult hurdle to get across, but it’s worth it in the long run. Not every weapon is complicated, Dual Blades are incredibly simple, as well as the Sword and Shield, both are also very solid weapons that don’t fall behind the others, which is important to stress, simply pick the weapon you like the most.
Most weapons have sharpness you will have to manage while hunting monsters as well. Sharpness is incredibly important because the sharper your weapon is, the better damage it will do, and the less likely it’ll bounce off a monster's tough hide or skin. There’s many different “levels” of sharpness, purple being the best, and red being the worst. You’ll always need to check your sharpness meter often to make sure it’s not getting too dull, usually yellow sharpness is around the best time to find a moment to sharpen, though I personally always sharpened after a monster ran away to ensure maximum damage and wouldn’t need to worry about my weapon becoming dull in the middle of a scrap. I think the game does a great job overall giving you plenty of opportunities and big openings to sharpen your weapon, even during encounters, but sharpness is a very committal action that’ll get you punished since it can take awhile to do, but there are ways around this issue, such as special sharpening tools and a skill called “speed sharpening” which is pretty self-explanatory. I liked the sharpness mechanic quite a bit because by being diligent with it, you’re rewarded with more damage and less risk overall of being in a tight spot, of course if you really needed to sharpen in the middle of a fight, despite how long it is to do, you can always roll out of the animation, which is nice, there’s also some special sharpening tools that make it much faster as well.
Armor, charms, and decorations are essential building blocks to a hunter’s survivability, there’s a lot to it, but a lot of it is quite good. You’ll start off with some rather meek armor, but once you overcome your first monster, you’ll be ready to upgrade your gear if you so choose. This decision-making of which monster to hunt for their gear is the majority of your monster hunting experience, and there’s plenty of options. I think the idea of both grinding a monster for drops, while also being able to re-fight your personal favorites makes for a very strong gameplay loop that keeps you engaged for a very long time, I very much enjoyed grinding Rathalos and Odagaron for my high rank gear that lasted me until I got to the DLC. On the flipside however, fighting a monster for a specific piece of gear you don’t enjoy fighting, or simply never getting the drop you need can be very unengaging and bloat game time quite a bit, but generally I think it’s a positive since fighting the monster a lot will let you gain mastery over it, letting you shave seconds each and every time, which is its own reward to many. Of course, if you don’t care about this and just wish to progress, most monsters only need to be fought once to progress the actual game, there’s also other methods to get more drops from monsters if you need. Charms is another piece of equipment crafted from monster parts that allow you to gain a specific skill you might want, or your armor might not provide, from attack boost, to critical eye, you name it. I opted to go for the Health Charm since it increases survivability a lot, which you’ll need if you don’t have stellar armor, but you can make anything work really. Decorations allow you to slot in even more skills if your armor has decoration slots, your weapons can also have some. Decorations really allow you to be flexible with your builds outside your armor, which lets you slot in what you want to have, which I really like because there’s so many skills to choose from, plus it helps make experimenting a bit easier without crafting an entire new set of armor. Overall, building your character up, the armor, and the grind for the materials are all fantastic and kept me playing Monster Hunter far longer than I would’ve normally, but that’s by no means a negative, I very much enjoyed the progression, it felt rewarding, significant, and not too slow to where it dragged much.
Mantles are another idea in Monster Hunter I really enjoyed because it gave even more customization, but also allowed you to handle certain fights and situations much easier. Mantles come in many forms, from the vitality mantle that gives you more health, temporal mantle that gives you invincibility for several attacks until it wears off, elemental mantles that lower specific elemental damage, like fire, and the rocksteady mantle which prevents your attacks from being interrupted by attacks while still taking reduced damage. While they’re not essential for hunts, they allow a lot more room for error, or simply make it easier, especially if you’re struggling with a monster, crafting a mantle can mean the difference between a win and a loss. I personally opted to use the Vitality and Temporal Mantle, and I couldn’t tell you the amount of times it saved me in a pinch, it does take a second to actually put on the mantle, so keep that in mind. The drawback of mantles is they’re on a timer, once you put it on, the mantle will slowly lose its energy until it blacks out entirely visually, this is when you need to take off the mantle to let it recharge. I like this idea of having to be diligent with the mantle, but in a tough battle, it’ll be hard to find a moment to take it off sometimes, even though it only takes a second to do so, but make sure to get everything you can out of them, because once they run out, they’ll be out of commission for a decent length of time. If you’re not particularly interested in using a mantle, there’s also “boosters” which create an area of effect that can increase your weapon affinity, heal you and your allies, and remove status ailments, I never personally used these since I found mantles infinitely more useful and versatile, but also because boosters have to be placed and have a small area of effect which can be difficult to utilize in fights where the monster is constantly repositioning, or you the hunter have to reposition due to the monster’s attacks.
The slinger and environmental hazards are two components of Monster Hunter World I very much enjoyed overall. The slinger is this arm mounted crossbow every hunter worth their salt uses and will utilize on hunts. In order to use the slinger, you need ammo, which can be stones, to moss, to any number of things really which can then be used to trip environmental hazards, as well as against monsters. Against monsters, there’s a few specific things you can do with it, like getting their attention, but most importantly it can allow you to stun or stagger a monster. Specific ammo types will allow you to interrupt a monster’s attack, granting you a big opening at your discretion which is pretty much an essential mechanic in later fights, but can be neglected early on. Not all ammo can stagger unfortunately, which is a small negative I think makes sense in theory, but would allow all ammo to be invaluable instead of only a select few. The slinger also allows you to shoot special crafted ammo you make yourself, such as flash pods to stun the enemy for a long period of time, as well as forcing flying monsters to crash back down to the Earth, providing a gigantic opening and is almost essential for monsters like Rathalos, to the more obscure screamer pods that create a high-pitched noise that’s particularly useful against the likes of Diablos. Flash pods are more universally useful though, and in base Monster Hunter World, they’re a tad overtuned, making certain fights an absolute joke, so I opted to not abuse them much but is something to be aware of. I think the slinger’s most important use however is triggering environmental hazards. There’s a few cutscenes in-game that showcase this idea which I really like, though they still give you a tutorial on it which is understandable, though I’d much prefer to have put two and two together. Environmental hazards are usually unstable formations above monsters you can hit to make them come crashing down, like rocks in the ancient forest, to giant crystals in later areas. Though not every environmental trap needs the slinger to activate, some of them work if you can attract the monster to where they are like vine traps, which entangle the monster for several seconds, allowing you to get a lot of damage in! It’s up to you to take advantage of these environmental traps however, and they’re not guaranteed as you need to get the monster in position and either stun them or knock them down to do it, or get very lucky where they just don’t happen to move. If you do successfully hit a monster with one of these hazards, they will take a large amount of damage and automatically topple, giving you an opening on top of the high damage, which is incredibly beneficial and can make hunts go way faster if utilized well. Traps can also help you break monster parts which we’ll get into in a bit, but overall environmental traps can turn the tide or snowball your advantage momentously, and I quite loved the interactive environmental aspects a lot, there’s other things you can trigger as well like swarms of flashbugs to flash a monster, water geysers and lava geyser that deal passive damage as the monster stands in them, and environmental destruction from rampaging monsters among other things, such as Rathalos attacking the rocks in his nest to cause the water behind it to rush out, potentially flinging him off the cliff along with you if you’re not careful. It’s truly an interactive world, which I really appreciate as it helps the immersion aspect a lot, and again just very helpful to gain an advantage if you’re paying attention.
My absolute favorite aspect of Monster Hunter World are the monsters themselves. If you actually decide to not attack them and watch them from a safe distance, you can observe them, how they interact with the environment, other monsters, and themselves. For example, you can watch a Rathian hunt for food, you can watch Barroth try to cool itself off in the mud, and you can see even more intimidating monsters like Nergigante ( my personal favorite monster) groom himself and just walk around peacefully. These dynamics make these monsters feel real in an actual environment, not just boss fights that net you rewards. I think they absolutely nailed this aspect, since while even fighting monsters, they’ll often retreat to their nests to rest and restore their health, and if you take too long you’ll be at a further disadvantage. Turf Wars help emphasize these monsters are territorial not only to you, but other invading monsters, and will fend them off best they can. Mechanically speaking, Turf Wars always end in a tie as both monsters deal a massive amount of damage to each other alongside a unique animation. After this is over, the monsters can still fight each other with their normal attacks, which can drag on sometimes depending on the monsters, but you can sling a dung pod to drive off any monsters you don’t want to deal with. Usually the monster who invaded the territory of another monster will leave, feeling threatened, which thematically makes a lot of sense in some cases. In other cases, it makes less sense depending on the match-up, but I think the idea that every monster has a chance to beat another monster that is stronger than it is definitely possible. All of these monsters have specific routes, nests, and interactions that give them consistency to feel very real, and I absolutely love it. It was always a highlight to watch, and undoubtedly my favorite part of the game besides actually fighting the monsters.
Fighting monsters is one of the biggest selling points of Monster Hunter, so is it any good? Yes, very much so. When you’re fighting a monster, they have specific weak points you can take advantage of to deal higher damage than normal, and not every monster has the same weak points, which not only makes a lot of sense, but ensures not every fight feels the same. Some monsters might have weak arms, some might have soft tails etc. It’s up to you to figure out where the weak points are, though there are resources in-game to figure this out as well without guess-work, which I appreciate not having to look up a wiki to do so. There are some universal weaknesses though, monsters with large legs can be attacked to stagger them, if you damage their leg enough though, they might just topple over, completely at your mercy. This allows for a consistent strategy against monsters, especially new monsters you haven’t fought yet, but it’s not always guaranteed or ideal, since some monsters have very strong legs. One of my favorite parts of the combat though is part breaking. If you attack a specific part of the monster long enough, it’ll eventually break, which not only severely lowers their defense in that specific area, but it can also drastically weaken the monster. Let’s take Rathian as an example, Rathian has a tail flip attack that deals severe damage and can poison you, so this incentivizes you going for her tail, since if you cut her tail off, it’ll make her arguably strongest move much weaker. Not only does this give you a huge advantage to sever her tail, but it’s so satisfying watching the tail get cut off and go flying, you even get an extra carve from it, which basically means you get another drop from the monster, which can net you really valuable materials. Tail cutting isn’t the only part you can go for though, as monsters all have specific body parts they rely on for attacking that breaking will cause their moves to become far less dangerous, and in some cases, slow them down, or cause them to have much larger windows of opportunity to attack them. On top of all of these advantages, part breaking can topple the monster as well, which gives you even more opportunities to break parts which will eventually snowball you to breaking multiple parts in a row, which is so much fun to do and really rewards you as well. Each broken part will also give you an extra material after the hunt is over, further emphasizing part breaks, you can also destroy highly resistant parts of a monster to make them take solid damage in that area for the remainder of the battle. Part breaking is an essential component of hunts, and a very fun mechanic as well, once you figure out what part of their body the monster uses the most to attack with, or what its most dangerous attacks utilize, it becomes a glaring target for you to go for, which I love a lot, and was just another aspect of this game that made me put in so much time playing it.
As far as the monster’s attacks themselves, well it’s a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, there’s a lot of attacks in this game that feel well telegraphed and fair, allowing you to anticipate what the monster will do, and react accordingly by dodging or moving out of the way. On other occasions, some moves have some wild hitboxes that felt very deceptive in their size and range. One thing I need to stress about Monster Hunter World is how a monster’s attack pattern is entirely random. A monster may just use their worst attack three or four times in a row, and there’s not much you can do about that besides using slinger to stun them, avoiding it, or just getting hit. I think this randomness factor works since these are monsters, and just like animals, their behavior will be unpredictable, so thematically it all checks out, but mechanically it can feel utterly unfair at times. If a monster decides to just not give you many openings, or keeps moving around and you have to chase them down a lot, it can become rather annoying and hurt the pacing of the battle. Let’s not forget every hunt outside expeditions have a time limit, so the less time you’re attacking, the more that clock is ticking down. I will say in base game, the clock usually never played a factor in victory or success for me, but it’s definitely something that became an issue later on. I didn’t really notice these issues until the endgame, since most of Monster Hunter world is actually rather easy once you get the hang of it, but in the endgame it starts getting a little ridiculous. Some moves have barely any start-up at all, so reacting to them is a nightmare, insta-kill moves, ridiculously sized attacks etc. This definitely bogged my experience down somewhat, though it wasn’t super consistent enough for me to feel like it was a pressing issue a lot of the time, but it’s definitely there. Some monsters are better than others in this regard, though like any game, some monsters are incredibly well designed, some are incredibly poorly designed. Some of my least favorite monsters were definitely Black Diablos, Uragaan, and Kirin for reference. My favorite fights include Nergigante, Teostra, and Odagaron. My biggest issue with the combat really just boils down to some moves either being too strong, too fast, or just having weird hitboxes, everything else is either fine or manageable, especially in a multiplayer environment, I’d even argue some of these criticisms disappear if you’re playing with one other person like I was, but when playing by myself, these flaws became much more apparent.
Monster hunter world was one of the best multiplayer experiences I’ve ever had. Even though I only played with one other person, being able to share this experience with them and fighting giant monsters together was always fun. Even in the more difficult fights, having someone to rely on is comforting, but always keeps the fight engaging since teamwork becomes essential in multiplayer. Monster’s gain much more HP the more people are in a hunt, so everyone needs to usually pull their weight for a hunt to be a success. Having an ally to split aggro can help ease pressure and give you a moment to heal or buff up if you need, but makes the monster a bit more chaotic to predict, which I honestly preferred, made things more interesting, plus the trade-off of being able to take a breather was very welcome. Allies can hit you out of stun and other nasty aliments as well, heavily rewarding teamwork as you’ll both be keeping an eye on each other if you’re ever in a bind, which is pretty much essential in the endgame. There’s plenty of multiplayer support skills like wide range that allow you to support your team further by allowing you to heal some of your allies’ hp by drinking a potion which also heals you, as well as buffing items like might and adamant seeds. Of course, multiplayer has drawbacks as well, hitting your allies with your weapon will flinch them, interrupting their action for a second, in which case they’ll need to do it again, though the flinch animation actually has some i-frames on it, so it can have incredibly niche use in that regard. You can run flinch free to prevent this, and if you’re with a LongSword player like myself, I’d recommend it, ‘cause LongSword is very well-known for flinching allies, which can be frustrating for sure. I have to admit though, I vastly preferred my Multiplayer experience compared to my Single Player experience, which we’ll get into, but I was thoroughly impressed with how thoughtful and fun the Multiplayer was speaking strictly mechanically, because Multiplayer has its own specific issues we’ll also get into in a bit. Overall though, a must-play with friends if you can get them together for it, because it’s incredibly fun. I'd argue half of my enjoyment was just from reacting and making callouts in call to my teammate. Truly a one-of-a-kind experience.
For singleplayer, you have your trusty Palico friend to help you against monsters. The Palico, much like another hunter, can split aggro for you, heal you, and help deal damage to the monster. I very much liked the Palico not only for this, but because they’re just a very loyal and charming companion that has a lot of cute dialogue and interactions with your hunter. They really made it feel like you were a team with quite a bit of history before the game began. You can also craft gear and weapons for your Palico, which helps them scale up with you as monsters get tougher, and honestly my Palico was absolutely invaluable, even in Multiplayer. I decided to give my Palico a paralysis weapon, which gave me so many openings to attack the monster with, even if it was uncommon, over the playthrough it saved me so many times, and helped me clutch victory. Unfortunately, the Palico isn’t all positives, as if you’re by yourself, you have to rely on the Palico to get you out of specific status ailments. Stun and sleep are the two big ones that you really need your Palico to get you out of. Stun and sleep leave you wide open to be killed, but you can ping your Palico to hit you out of these… unfortunately the Palico is not consistent with doing this. Sometimes they’ll be on top of it and hit you every single time, other times they’ll ignore your cry for help and watch as you die. Because of this, relying on your Palico for these situations is incredibly risky, and I personally ensured this never happened because I didn’t trust my luck. Otherwise, the Palico is incredibly useful, especially for a support role. I gave my Palico vigor wasp spray the entire playthrough alongside a status weapon, and they were an invaluable part of my team and strategy, so overall Palico was an awesome and welcome addition to the game, and my team.
Now that I’ve gone over most of the positives, let’s go into some of the negatives.
My largest negative with Monster hunter world is the single-player experience. Now don’t get me wrong here, you can absolutely play and enjoy this game by yourself, and I have tons of admiration and respect for those who can solo the hardest monsters in the game, but to me, this was the epitome of my bad experiences with this game. A lot of the mechanics and design of this game seemed very geared towards multiplayer in a lot of ways, one aspect of it to me that screams this more than any other is stun. Stun is an overly punishing mechanic that, when hit too many times in quick succession by a monster, you lose all control of your hunter as they stand there like a sitting duck to get killed. Now yes, your Palico can hit you out of it like I mentioned, but it’s inconsistent, and while you can run Stun Resist to completely remove the mechanic altogether, I found it incredibly unfair and not fun to deal with. The game tells you that you can get out of stun faster by wiggling the left stick, however this does not impact much as far as how long you’re in stun for. On top of this, monsters with no split aggro can kill you in a matter of seconds, all it takes is a few swipes, and you’re as good as gone. A game like this, positioning and finding openings is crucial for success, but in my experience a lot of this never mattered when I was by myself because the monster would always be on me and I couldn’t do much about it. Now you do have your Palico friend to split the aggro up for you a bit, but I found it to not be enough to feel comfortable or even confident to go in and fight the monster, most of the time I just ran away and hung around waiting for a move I felt I could punish before going in. This, on top of insane hitboxes, stun, and slow recoveries with items and get-ups, ruined any semblance of pacing during battles and often found myself running the clock out on these hunts. Just as well, I failed many quests where I was assured victory just so long as I had enough time to capture the monster because I played too safe since I deemed the risk too high. Again, this is just my personal experience, and I know a lot of people stand by this game as a single-player experience, but for me, I vastly prefer playing in Multiplayer. Single-Player was just incredibly frustrating and unfun and often soiled my enjoyment of the game in sessions where I had to play by myself. I will say, once I had a competent build with the quality of life skills I wanted, Single-Player was less arduous and annoying, but I still didn’t find it nearly as engaging or rewarding as sharing my victories with my friend, or with other randoms after defeating a powerful monster together.
The roll, or more specifically, the lack of i-frames on the roll. I come from a very Fromsoft background, so a lot of my experience with these kinds of games are the likes of Dark Souls. Bloodborne, and Sekiro. While those and Monster Hunter play very differently, they both share one thing in common, and that’s a roll. In Monster Hunter, the roll allows you to reposition and dodge attacks from the monster, however the amount of i-frames it has does not always allow this. Some attacks are so long or have such giant hitboxes, your roll simply cannot dodge it and you will get hit. Just like Stun Resist, you can use skills like Evade Window to increase the amount of i-frames the roll has, and jumping to increase how far it goes. With that said however, the base roll should be good enough to dodge most quick attacks, because if it did, it’d tremendously help with the pacing and flow of fights once again. Now there is a more committal roll option called a “dive” where you run away from the monster, run, then roll, and you will dive. The dive has plenty of i-frames to dodge pretty much any attack, and there’s specific attacks monsters use with the dive in mind I actually really like. Nergigante’s dive-bomb move being a good example of one of these moves. The issue with dive is it takes forever to recover from, and getting your hunter to dive is too finicky for me. If you have your weapon drawn, forget about diving, it will not happen, and I’ve suffered many deaths from not being able to sheathe fast enough to dive, which very much annoyed me. I understand both this and stun are things you can alleviate or outright remove with certain skills, however skills have their own issues.
Decorations being random drops is something I’ll never understand. I’ve recently learned from a good friend of mine, Lemonstrade whom I’ve been talking to about my experience with Monster Hunter World, that previous Monster Hunter games did not have random decorations, but were simply craftable from specific monster parts. Not only would this have helped make more monsters useful to hunt in my playthrough, because I had so many monster parts just collecting dust, but would also allow you to focus in on decorations you really needed. Decorations are what give you those skills I’ve been mentioning in this review a lot. In order to get these decorations, you get them as rewards from pretty much every activity in the game. The big issue is: what decorations you get are entirely random. This to me is flat-out padding and a really bad idea overall. If I was struggling with stun or my roll being a bit too hard to use effectively, I should in theory, be able to grind for the decorations to help with me, not random chance. So instead, I have to grind monsters for potentially hours, and maybe never get what I’m looking for, which will make these issues much more consistent and noticeable throughout my experience, and surprise, they were. It’s especially bad in endgame when you want to optimize builds, or go for a luxurious build that makes the game more forgiving to play, good luck getting the decorations you need in a reasonable amount of time, though you may get lucky. What’s worse is you don’t even need to fight especially hard monsters to get decent gems, you can fight a special event called Greatest Jagras that’s always available now to grind gems, so it’s not even a matter of skill, it’s a matter of time. Gem farming takes too long, less monsters become useful to get their materials for, makes certain issues way harder to solve, and overall doesn’t feel rewarding, it’s all luck. I was able to get all the gems I needed through dedicated work, but I’m hoping the upcoming Monster Hunter game: Wilds fixes this issue and reverts back to the old way Monster Hunter games did it, by allowing you to craft gems you want, not a slot machine.
Last complaint I really have with Monster Hunter World is how jank it felt to play at first. A lot of things in this game did not come very naturally for me, such as sheathing and unsheathing my weapon, which thankfully running auto-sheathes for you. A lot of the animations in Monster Hunter are long and very committal, so you can’t just mash attack and get away with it, or cancel out of it like roll, at least with LongSword this was the case. I often got too greedy and got hit a lot, which led to some frustration, but I began to understand Monster Hunter is a slower-paced game, so playing it slower helps, but that’s not the case with certain quests only giving you 30 minutes or so, which puts the pressure on. Odd hitboxes and strong attacks were the least of my issues when it came to traversing areas, specifically the Ancient forest. Visually, it gets across how nature-focused this game is, but on the other hand, what an absolutely terribly designed area overall, and a nightmare to traverse. This really shouldn’t have been the first area, since later areas don’t suffer this labyrinthian design like Ancient Forest does, but have their own fair share of issues. While the game is called “Monster Hunter” actually hunting The monsters felt like a chore a lot of the time. Having to find footprints and markings, collecting them, gaining research, and then the scout flies tell you where to go. Not only do the Scout Flies sometimes just don’t tell you the right way to go, but it feels very hand-holding at the same time, I’d much prefer finding the monsters on my own without all these extra steps. Of course, you obviously can ignore the Scout Flies and the track-hunting most of the time, but some missions require you do it, and it bogs the game down so much. Much later on, you’ll have to find tracks for some particularly special monsters by revisiting older regions, and only once you fulfill the research requirement can you locate them and fight them to progress the game. Once again this feels like padding, since no other Monster Hunter game does this, so it’s an odd choice World would decide to do it. Though I’ve been informed many times that World is an “outlier” when it comes to Monster Hunter, these criticisms will likely only apply to this entry. A lot of the actual controls for the game felt fine enough, but as I mentioned before, diving was sometimes inconsistent, odd hitboxes, bad roll, stun, the entirety of the Ancient Forest, sheathing, it all felt janky for a game made in 2018. Now I will concede a lot of this stuff I adapted to overtime and got used to it, but initially these things turned me off from the game, but I really wanted to get into this series, and my friend helped me a lot along the way, so I’m very thankful those first handful of hours were easier because of that. I wouldn’t say even World as accessible as it might be for the series, is still quite intimidating and very hard to get a grasp of, but once you do and it clicks, it becomes a very addicting and satisfying experience.
Sieges, more specifically Zorah Magdaros. Every mission involving this oversized lava cake I did not enjoy whatsoever. The scale is quite amazing, and can be quite exhilarating when you first begin one of these giant monster sieges, but you quickly realize just how shallow it is. You use some special weapons like the cannon and the ballista to deal damage, you wait around for an eternity, you get a cutscene, then you do it again until the quest ends. It’s not engaging, it’s mechanically shallow, and it’s unnecessary. I love the idea on paper, but the execution is just so bad, I couldn’t wait for them to be over with, and I never went back to grind these missions either because they were so dull to me. Zorah Magdaros has an excellent introduction at the start of the game and presents tons of interesting questions and ideas about where the plot might go, which unfortunately is rather… mediocre. Gameplay wise? It’s just disappointing.
Last, but certainly not least, The Handler. Now The Handler has a notorious reputation for being annoying and constantly getting into trouble, and yeah I see where people are coming from. To be completely blunt, I did not care about her in the slightest, nor any character in this game. They all feel so shallow with little character besides a few quirks that helps them at least not meld into the same NPC’s, but there’s not enough there for me. With the Handler, she’s certainly annoying, but I don’t hate her as much as others. My issue is, with a character so paramount to you as a hunter, she should have far more caution and experience in the field, but she comes across aloof, and a liability, which is irksome. The game literally gives my hunter the background of being an A-list hunter from the Old world, a seasoned veteran, but then my Handler acts like a complete new blood? That doesn’t add up to me. Missions where you have to follow her are even worse, because her corny dialogue doesn't help her case I’m afraid, on top of gameplay slowing to a crawl so I’ll care about what she’s saying, or her well-being when the character isn’t well-written enough for that to be a possibility. Honestly, most story sequences I did not care for, all I really wanted to do was hunt monsters and become stronger, which is both good and bad. Good because the gameplay is good enough for me to want to get back to it, bad because the story is so boring and inconsequential to me it’s getting in the way of what I truly enjoy. Add unskippable cutscenes and friends not being able to join each other until everyone has seen the cutscene within a mission, and you have the recipe for disaster and a lot of annoyance. I digress, the handler, let me reiterate, I do not hate as much as others, but she is the golden example of one of my big issues this game has, emphasizing boring characters and a boring story I do not care about, I just want to hunt monsters.
Since we’re nearing the end of this review, I’ll quickly go over the music. Monster Hunter World has a surprisingly good soundtrack with plenty of memorable tracks, though it also balances it out with just allowing the nature of the World to speak for itself without music. There wasn’t too many songs that caught my ear while playing, but generally most songs were pretty good! My favorites were: Pride of a Nameless Hunter, Nergigante Theme, and Bazelgeuse Theme.
Monster Hunter World was a monumental, refreshing yet equally frustrating experience that I already look back on quite fondly. As a Multiplayer game? It’s top-notch, and one I’d highly recommend if you can find people to play with, there is nothing quite like that rush of taking down a new monster, or mastering the patterns of older foes. Satisfying gameplay loop with even more satisfying progression, great combat with a bit of jank in level design, mechanics, and hitboxes, a lackluster story with even more lackluster characters, and quite a bit of padding that you’ll either tolerate or dislike. Incredibly immersive monster designs and behaviors, excellent interactions, fantastic environmental interactivity, slow-paced yet fast, methodical and savage in tandem, it’s truly remarkable. I have to say, I loved Monster Hunter World, and cannot wait to dive into other games in the series, like 4U, Rise, and Wilds in the near future! Thank you all for reading this review, this is by far my longest review, and I’m still not done talking about this game! The Iceborne review will be out sometime soon, but I hope this review can tide you all over until then. As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, I'm still going to wrap up FFIV soon, and start Va11-Halla very soon as well. I also just want to say thank you all for the exponential growth lately! You all only continue to inspire and drive me forward with writing these, so please look forward to more as I continue to put more and more into this. Truly, thank you all so much! I’ll see you all in the next review, until next time.
Edit 1/17/24: Don't like this writeup anymore, still have tons of problems but didn't get at them well here
THIS IS FOR THE BASE GAME ONLY
I've written too many positive things lately, let's change that. Here's an unhinged rant, written in a paroxysm of rage. If that doesn't sound appealing then click off; otherwise, read on.
---
Finally, Monster Hunter has reached the AAA market! The series's core systems have been massively improved in a few important ways: graphical fidelity has been increased, the game is on home platforms, and the marketing budget is much bigger. Unprecedented sales numbers, especially in the West, are a natural consequence of fans noticing how these changes make the game fundamentally better to play.
Ostensibly this is a return to the grounded aesthetic of Gen 1 and 2, of being in touch with nature and your place in the ecosystem. And of course, what better way to do that than with loads of unskippable cutscenes and NPCs chattering at you in the field? If we have characters constantly say "Wow, isn't nature beautiful?" then it should be clear how much deep resonance the plot has. Games like Super Metroid, Dark Souls 1, or Monster Hunter 2 are far too subtle in their execution of themes. But that method is perfect for addressing important combat mechanics like sharpness damage modifier, staggers, and true raw!
With Ancient Forest, by taking inspiration from the iconic area 9 of Forest and Hills, Capcom has truly managed to capture the essence of a hostile environment, clearly shown by player comments like "Why the fuck is Anjanath camping in the hallway?", "Why do I keep doing sliding attacks?", and the repeated "Where the fuck do I even go?". The other maps are disappointingly playable, but luckily still have readability issues and their own obtrusive environmental gimmicks to keep flow state at bay.
In a break from past games, monsters will fight each other when they get close. This is impresively scripted and repetitive, but unfortunately falls flat by keeping the focus on the 1v1s that the combat is built for. Luckily, non-target monsters can still disrupt players by entering, roaring, inciting the target to roar, roaring in response, then leaving, wasting 10+ seconds and possibly causing the player to take damage. Phew, dodged a bullet there!
Don't think Capcom has forgotten their roots though. In a brilliant reprise of one of the most beloved elements of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Lao-Shan Lung key quests, the new titanic monster Zorah Magdaros appears twice in the story of the game. Hammer users will be delighted to hear that underneath the bombast, the same thrilling Triangle-Triangle-Triangle gameplay is alive and well. Wisely, Capcom dedicated a large amount of dev staff and time to this, more than any other monster, to make sure that the 2 hours players spent in their 100+ hour playtime would be memorable and thrilling.
One of the most disappointing aspects of Doom 2016 is how it presented a flawed-but-promising base to build upon that was distinct from the classic Doom games. It's clear the team working on World was aware of this pitfall, as they adopted a decidedly different mindset: haphazardly change core mechanics and let the other teams sort it out. By removing commitment in potion drinking and weapon sharpening, and allowing gunners to both shoot and reload while moving, they've managed to deftly replace decision points dependent on monster knowledge and situational awareness with flowcharted reaction tests. Add restocking items from camp, which completely breaks the gunner ammo system and enables potion spam indefinitely, and the picture is complete. It's obvious that this approach has worked wonders when you look at the janky, fight-specific mechanisms like DPS checks, strict time limits, and Farcaster bans that Iceborne's Alatreon and Fatalis designers were forced to resort to when creating difficult endgame fights.
The logical counterpart to making the players more powerful is to make the monsters weaker. Fights in World are satisfyingly lethargic, exemplified by new monsters Pukei-Pukei and Paolumu as well as returning favorites like Barroth and Diablos. Monsters stagger extremely often, which wisely rewards unskilled aggression and hit trades. Flagship monster Nergigante is a perfect example: breaking his spikes before they harden will trip him, giving you an opportunity to damage the other spikes. Skilled players will be rewarded with an unengaging fight where the monster is completely locked down and unable to fight back!
Reactive combat, a concept lurking in the background for the series for several years now, also makes its triumphant entrance into the starring role. Past hunters leveraged positioning and prediction to commit themselves to risky decisions, but this is antiquated, clunky gameplay that belongs on the NES. NES games are old and terrible, so to advance the series, monsters now move randomly, erratically, and often. Small positioning differences thankfully aren't very relevant anymore, and those disgusting-looking head turns are long gone.
Many weapons have been changed to align with this new focus. Greatsword now has most of its damage in the very last hit of a set of 3 charge moves, which pairs beautifully with the new highly random monster AI. Longsword takes some much-needed inspiration from other action games by adding an overcentralizing, generous iframe move that bypasses meter management. Disappointingly, Switch Axe's forms are well-integrated with each other, but some missteps are understandable.
Overall, I'm glad Capcom has finally modernized this old, clunky series. Modern gaming has come a long way, and a lot of the classics, while great for nostalgia, simply don't live up to modern AAA standards. Hopefully the new Silent Hill 2 remake can recognize how flawed a PS2-era game must be, and follow in Monster Hunter World's footsteps!
THIS IS FOR THE BASE GAME ONLY
I've written too many positive things lately, let's change that. Here's an unhinged rant, written in a paroxysm of rage. If that doesn't sound appealing then click off; otherwise, read on.
---
Finally, Monster Hunter has reached the AAA market! The series's core systems have been massively improved in a few important ways: graphical fidelity has been increased, the game is on home platforms, and the marketing budget is much bigger. Unprecedented sales numbers, especially in the West, are a natural consequence of fans noticing how these changes make the game fundamentally better to play.
Ostensibly this is a return to the grounded aesthetic of Gen 1 and 2, of being in touch with nature and your place in the ecosystem. And of course, what better way to do that than with loads of unskippable cutscenes and NPCs chattering at you in the field? If we have characters constantly say "Wow, isn't nature beautiful?" then it should be clear how much deep resonance the plot has. Games like Super Metroid, Dark Souls 1, or Monster Hunter 2 are far too subtle in their execution of themes. But that method is perfect for addressing important combat mechanics like sharpness damage modifier, staggers, and true raw!
With Ancient Forest, by taking inspiration from the iconic area 9 of Forest and Hills, Capcom has truly managed to capture the essence of a hostile environment, clearly shown by player comments like "Why the fuck is Anjanath camping in the hallway?", "Why do I keep doing sliding attacks?", and the repeated "Where the fuck do I even go?". The other maps are disappointingly playable, but luckily still have readability issues and their own obtrusive environmental gimmicks to keep flow state at bay.
In a break from past games, monsters will fight each other when they get close. This is impresively scripted and repetitive, but unfortunately falls flat by keeping the focus on the 1v1s that the combat is built for. Luckily, non-target monsters can still disrupt players by entering, roaring, inciting the target to roar, roaring in response, then leaving, wasting 10+ seconds and possibly causing the player to take damage. Phew, dodged a bullet there!
Don't think Capcom has forgotten their roots though. In a brilliant reprise of one of the most beloved elements of Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Lao-Shan Lung key quests, the new titanic monster Zorah Magdaros appears twice in the story of the game. Hammer users will be delighted to hear that underneath the bombast, the same thrilling Triangle-Triangle-Triangle gameplay is alive and well. Wisely, Capcom dedicated a large amount of dev staff and time to this, more than any other monster, to make sure that the 2 hours players spent in their 100+ hour playtime would be memorable and thrilling.
One of the most disappointing aspects of Doom 2016 is how it presented a flawed-but-promising base to build upon that was distinct from the classic Doom games. It's clear the team working on World was aware of this pitfall, as they adopted a decidedly different mindset: haphazardly change core mechanics and let the other teams sort it out. By removing commitment in potion drinking and weapon sharpening, and allowing gunners to both shoot and reload while moving, they've managed to deftly replace decision points dependent on monster knowledge and situational awareness with flowcharted reaction tests. Add restocking items from camp, which completely breaks the gunner ammo system and enables potion spam indefinitely, and the picture is complete. It's obvious that this approach has worked wonders when you look at the janky, fight-specific mechanisms like DPS checks, strict time limits, and Farcaster bans that Iceborne's Alatreon and Fatalis designers were forced to resort to when creating difficult endgame fights.
The logical counterpart to making the players more powerful is to make the monsters weaker. Fights in World are satisfyingly lethargic, exemplified by new monsters Pukei-Pukei and Paolumu as well as returning favorites like Barroth and Diablos. Monsters stagger extremely often, which wisely rewards unskilled aggression and hit trades. Flagship monster Nergigante is a perfect example: breaking his spikes before they harden will trip him, giving you an opportunity to damage the other spikes. Skilled players will be rewarded with an unengaging fight where the monster is completely locked down and unable to fight back!
Reactive combat, a concept lurking in the background for the series for several years now, also makes its triumphant entrance into the starring role. Past hunters leveraged positioning and prediction to commit themselves to risky decisions, but this is antiquated, clunky gameplay that belongs on the NES. NES games are old and terrible, so to advance the series, monsters now move randomly, erratically, and often. Small positioning differences thankfully aren't very relevant anymore, and those disgusting-looking head turns are long gone.
Many weapons have been changed to align with this new focus. Greatsword now has most of its damage in the very last hit of a set of 3 charge moves, which pairs beautifully with the new highly random monster AI. Longsword takes some much-needed inspiration from other action games by adding an overcentralizing, generous iframe move that bypasses meter management. Disappointingly, Switch Axe's forms are well-integrated with each other, but some missteps are understandable.
Overall, I'm glad Capcom has finally modernized this old, clunky series. Modern gaming has come a long way, and a lot of the classics, while great for nostalgia, simply don't live up to modern AAA standards. Hopefully the new Silent Hill 2 remake can recognize how flawed a PS2-era game must be, and follow in Monster Hunter World's footsteps!
Monster Hunter's console return is a triumphant success.
My last experience with Monster Hunter was back on the Playstation portable when my friends and I used to gather together with a load of junk food, bring our PSP's along and play four player Monster Hunter for hours. When World was announced, my old Monster Hunter crew all gathered together again even though some of us live in different countries now and it has met all of our expectations. To those new to the series, Monster Hunter is essentially a form of RPG where you and up to three other players take on missions to hunt certain large monsters in maps, think of every level being a boss fight. It's a game that spawned it's own genre with series like Toukiden, God Eater and Soul Sacrifice doing their own take but never managing to be as good.
Monster Hunter World does have a story, you are part of a fleet following Elder Dragons out to the new world, in an unexplored land to try and find out why the migration is happening. To be honest...it's crap, the story exists solely to send you out to different areas and fight various monsters, you can pretty much ignore it, it literally isn't important. However it does get in the way, Monster Hunter is a co-op game, an absolutely fantastic one and the way it is implemented in World is mostly brilliant except for some reason you can't join a friend on a story mission if he/she hasn't seen the cutscenes in it or you haven't beaten it yet. So if you buy it to play it with a friend you could be let down, that was pretty frustrating for us at first. Fortunately the game really gets going after the story is over and how it plays is where it really shines.
Despite being an RPG, from the start of the game until the end your characters stats never change, what does change is your armour pieces (head, chest, arms and legs) and your weapons. These armour sets unlock as you find more monsters, this is because your armour is literally made from parts of their body you carve off after getting a kill and will often have attributes linked to that monster, one that uses lightning may have high lightning defense for example and weapons follow the same pattern. Each armour set has it's own unique skills and their are slots for customizing with extra skills or to level them higher later on in the game so you can design your character literally how you want, I have several load outs with different equipment and skills depending on the monster I'm fighting. Frankly the options in Monster Hunter for fighting are massive, various monsters have different strengths and weaknesses against weapon types, element types, ailment types to think about, the amount of skills is huge not to mention you can take into missions bombs, traps, throwing knives, buff items. Do you want to tank? speed heal? be highly resistant to roars and ground tremors? Experiment, there are tons of armour pieces and sets.
Adding to this 14 different weapons each with their own huge array of weapon trees and different attack styles. They differ from ranged weapons like bows, and guns with a variety of ammos to more up close and personal weapons like swords and axes. Most of these weapons are completely different to use and effective on different monsters. For example the sword and shield is quick, can allow you to use items super fast but does little damage compared with the charge blade that you build up charges by attacking before locking the shield and sword together in a giant axe before doing a massive elemental discharge, but it is super slow and easy to miss. Both weapons are sword and shield variants, I love them both but they are very different.
The maps in Monster Hunter World these battles take place in and the monsters involved are equally impressive. There are only five maps throughout the game but each one comes with plenty to explore with items to find, short cuts to unlock and even some little side missions for fishing, capturing wildlife and gaining little cat companions to help you fight when playing solo. My favorite map is the first, the ancient forest which is very vertical in design winding around a giant tree. It's pretty confusing until you know it but the new ability of having scout flies that will direct you towards your prey once you've found enough tracks makes it fairly straight forward even for new players.
There is a good amount of different monsters to fight (Though I hear a lot less than previous handheld titles) with already one new one added free to the roster already. They range from cool looking flying dragons to a T-rex, a lightning unicorn, and others hard to describe like one that's made of bone and rolls around like a tire. They are really fun to fight with decent attacks and tactics allowing you to trap them, use the environment on them in some cases and my favorite, ride them! Yep, in Monster Hunter World if you jump on them from a higher vantage point you can sometimes ride them stabbing them with your boot knife for minimal damage but as they tire they will fall over giving your team a chance to beat on them.
Presentation wise the game is great. The visuals are wonderful and the game runs pretty smoothly performance wise considering all that is going on at any one time in the game. The game is richly detailed, the art design of the monsters and environments is also brilliant. The game is fully voiced in English for the story and cutscenes and for the most part I enjoyed it, the performances are all good to great with none I hated. Lastly the music is very good, I especially like The Rotten Vale's theme but it's all round excellent.
In conclusion, to stop myself typing about how much I liked it, Monster Hunter World is just really great, while you can probably beat the main story in 40 hours? My total clock time before Iceborne was at 800....
Recommended.
+ Huge amounts of armours, weapon variety, items and skills.
+ The maps and monsters are great.
+ Fantastic graphics with excellent music and good voice acting.
+ Co-op is really good fun...
- But having to beat story missions first was a terrible decision.
- Only five maps.
- Story is terrible.
My last experience with Monster Hunter was back on the Playstation portable when my friends and I used to gather together with a load of junk food, bring our PSP's along and play four player Monster Hunter for hours. When World was announced, my old Monster Hunter crew all gathered together again even though some of us live in different countries now and it has met all of our expectations. To those new to the series, Monster Hunter is essentially a form of RPG where you and up to three other players take on missions to hunt certain large monsters in maps, think of every level being a boss fight. It's a game that spawned it's own genre with series like Toukiden, God Eater and Soul Sacrifice doing their own take but never managing to be as good.
Monster Hunter World does have a story, you are part of a fleet following Elder Dragons out to the new world, in an unexplored land to try and find out why the migration is happening. To be honest...it's crap, the story exists solely to send you out to different areas and fight various monsters, you can pretty much ignore it, it literally isn't important. However it does get in the way, Monster Hunter is a co-op game, an absolutely fantastic one and the way it is implemented in World is mostly brilliant except for some reason you can't join a friend on a story mission if he/she hasn't seen the cutscenes in it or you haven't beaten it yet. So if you buy it to play it with a friend you could be let down, that was pretty frustrating for us at first. Fortunately the game really gets going after the story is over and how it plays is where it really shines.
Despite being an RPG, from the start of the game until the end your characters stats never change, what does change is your armour pieces (head, chest, arms and legs) and your weapons. These armour sets unlock as you find more monsters, this is because your armour is literally made from parts of their body you carve off after getting a kill and will often have attributes linked to that monster, one that uses lightning may have high lightning defense for example and weapons follow the same pattern. Each armour set has it's own unique skills and their are slots for customizing with extra skills or to level them higher later on in the game so you can design your character literally how you want, I have several load outs with different equipment and skills depending on the monster I'm fighting. Frankly the options in Monster Hunter for fighting are massive, various monsters have different strengths and weaknesses against weapon types, element types, ailment types to think about, the amount of skills is huge not to mention you can take into missions bombs, traps, throwing knives, buff items. Do you want to tank? speed heal? be highly resistant to roars and ground tremors? Experiment, there are tons of armour pieces and sets.
Adding to this 14 different weapons each with their own huge array of weapon trees and different attack styles. They differ from ranged weapons like bows, and guns with a variety of ammos to more up close and personal weapons like swords and axes. Most of these weapons are completely different to use and effective on different monsters. For example the sword and shield is quick, can allow you to use items super fast but does little damage compared with the charge blade that you build up charges by attacking before locking the shield and sword together in a giant axe before doing a massive elemental discharge, but it is super slow and easy to miss. Both weapons are sword and shield variants, I love them both but they are very different.
The maps in Monster Hunter World these battles take place in and the monsters involved are equally impressive. There are only five maps throughout the game but each one comes with plenty to explore with items to find, short cuts to unlock and even some little side missions for fishing, capturing wildlife and gaining little cat companions to help you fight when playing solo. My favorite map is the first, the ancient forest which is very vertical in design winding around a giant tree. It's pretty confusing until you know it but the new ability of having scout flies that will direct you towards your prey once you've found enough tracks makes it fairly straight forward even for new players.
There is a good amount of different monsters to fight (Though I hear a lot less than previous handheld titles) with already one new one added free to the roster already. They range from cool looking flying dragons to a T-rex, a lightning unicorn, and others hard to describe like one that's made of bone and rolls around like a tire. They are really fun to fight with decent attacks and tactics allowing you to trap them, use the environment on them in some cases and my favorite, ride them! Yep, in Monster Hunter World if you jump on them from a higher vantage point you can sometimes ride them stabbing them with your boot knife for minimal damage but as they tire they will fall over giving your team a chance to beat on them.
Presentation wise the game is great. The visuals are wonderful and the game runs pretty smoothly performance wise considering all that is going on at any one time in the game. The game is richly detailed, the art design of the monsters and environments is also brilliant. The game is fully voiced in English for the story and cutscenes and for the most part I enjoyed it, the performances are all good to great with none I hated. Lastly the music is very good, I especially like The Rotten Vale's theme but it's all round excellent.
In conclusion, to stop myself typing about how much I liked it, Monster Hunter World is just really great, while you can probably beat the main story in 40 hours? My total clock time before Iceborne was at 800....
Recommended.
+ Huge amounts of armours, weapon variety, items and skills.
+ The maps and monsters are great.
+ Fantastic graphics with excellent music and good voice acting.
+ Co-op is really good fun...
- But having to beat story missions first was a terrible decision.
- Only five maps.
- Story is terrible.
where I stopped: right after beating xeno'jiiva. sort of straightforward... but I haven't done anything past that as of the time of this review. I'll come back for sure, though maybe not until I buy iceborne
+the overall changes to the feel of combat and esp the movesets of the weapons are much appreciated. the added fluidity makes aggressive (well, sloppy aggressive) play more viable, and from the few weapons I've used the updates are well-thought out for how they affect playstyles
+I have divided opinions on the changes to the quest progression but I really do appreciate that high rank is fully incorporated into the storyline. the game is very smart about how it gently nudges you towards building your equipment to match whatever the current main quests demand as well
+investigations are an absolute godsend for the grind, they're extremely handy. combined with the lucky vouchers, it makes building armor sets and weapon lines feel like less of a chore
+there's still a nice chunk of people playing this online on ps4, and it seems very easy to hop into a session or respond to an SOS call. it's still best to play with friends, but jumping in with random people isn't bad at all
+incredibly animation on the monsters... not new to this game, but it really shines here I think. the hitboxes are also much more reasonable than previous games, and rolling between a monster's legs never gets old here
+as I've played p3rd high rank, it's become increasingly apparent to me how annoying non-target large monsters are in a hunt. here monsters will properly fight each other and can deal some massive damage; leading your target hunt to another monster that can soften it up for you is a legit mechanic here, and nets you nice research points as well
+I really appreciate all of the QoL tweaks they made here, specifically with how items work. there's no way they could lock you down when using items since you can't run to a different area to take a break, so I appreciate them making that change. removing pickaxes/nets is a relief as well as making whetstone infinite: those items were easy to come by past the intro of the other games already, so having to manage them was more of a formality than anything in previous games
+vigorwasps are a great mechanic imo. I don't mind just getting free heals in the older games ofc, but making the heals items that you have to actually reach in the field gives a nice risk/reward bent to it
+the difficulty scaling for quests based on the amount of players was desperately needed imo, soloing guild quests in older games felt great but I also like knowing I can jump into a random quest solo and my damage output will be appropriate for the difficulty. this is esp true now that patches have added a two-player autobalancing option instead of just solo/multi balancing
-the camera is horrid, especially when locked-on. the monster movement is simply too dynamic and the lock-on is too choppy to use
-compounding the above, whenever you're stuck in a tight space with a monster the game becomes very frustrating. the game has the capability to zoom out the action when a turf war happens... why can't it do it in normal battle as well? I would rather my character be small then have to sit with my shield up indefinitely while I wait to find an angle where the camera isn't stuck inside the monster
-the reason for these tight spaces is ofc the level design, which can be very very confusing at first thanks to how big each of the areas are and how many tiny pathways, hallways, and dead ends there are. the worst offender is ancient forest for sure; as the starting area they probably should have made the layout cleaner, as I got lost there many many times even late into the game (I couldn't even find the camp at the top of the area until a tailrider led me there)
-there's a lot of random running around that I'm not really a fan of, especially early on when you don't have a good grasp on where monsters spawn and your research level isn't high enough to instantly spot them on the map. feels like typical open-world padding... esp since it's built into the main story. why not just tell me what monster I'm going to need to fight instead of making me go on an expedition, run into a cutscene trigger, and then get the quest to deal with the monster
-the multiplayer is unbearable when trying to do the story missions. my gf and I attempted this for a bit and got tired fast, as you have to first enter the quest individually, each play until you hit the cutscene trigger, return from quest, and then post the quest again so you can both join (or one person uses an SOS request and the other person leaves and hops into their game). way too much of a pain
-scoutflies are useful when they work but are far too persnickety. it's very frustrating for them to disappear when small monsters aggro you (esp since it takes a while for the state to wear off even after you run away), as it can be near-impossible to tell where to go without them.
-I lauded the animation earlier but there's definitely some odd characteristics here and there with how the monsters move and attack. even in offline monsters will occasionally jerk around or suddenly feel like they're moving at double speed for no reason. there's also some other odd things, like barroth's mud just appearing next to it when it shakes it off instead of having an animation of flying off and adhering to the ground like in the older games
I think I had a worse time than I should've with this game thanks to how long I convinced myself to play longsword. I think sunk cost fallacy kept me going far past the point where I should've stopped, and I ended up having to switch to gunlance at the back quarter of the game after already beating nergigante when I realized that I'm so much worse at this game playing a dodge-heavy weapon like that. I'm really grateful this game exists to help ease new players in, as I would have struggled tremendously hopping into the old ones without the knowledge I gained here. on the other hand, there's a lot of growing pains here from the switch to a new engine, and it's a detriment to the experience in some ways. still, it's a next-gen monster hunter, and it's so cheap now too; I definitely think I made the right choice by picking this up at a whim
+the overall changes to the feel of combat and esp the movesets of the weapons are much appreciated. the added fluidity makes aggressive (well, sloppy aggressive) play more viable, and from the few weapons I've used the updates are well-thought out for how they affect playstyles
+I have divided opinions on the changes to the quest progression but I really do appreciate that high rank is fully incorporated into the storyline. the game is very smart about how it gently nudges you towards building your equipment to match whatever the current main quests demand as well
+investigations are an absolute godsend for the grind, they're extremely handy. combined with the lucky vouchers, it makes building armor sets and weapon lines feel like less of a chore
+there's still a nice chunk of people playing this online on ps4, and it seems very easy to hop into a session or respond to an SOS call. it's still best to play with friends, but jumping in with random people isn't bad at all
+incredibly animation on the monsters... not new to this game, but it really shines here I think. the hitboxes are also much more reasonable than previous games, and rolling between a monster's legs never gets old here
+as I've played p3rd high rank, it's become increasingly apparent to me how annoying non-target large monsters are in a hunt. here monsters will properly fight each other and can deal some massive damage; leading your target hunt to another monster that can soften it up for you is a legit mechanic here, and nets you nice research points as well
+I really appreciate all of the QoL tweaks they made here, specifically with how items work. there's no way they could lock you down when using items since you can't run to a different area to take a break, so I appreciate them making that change. removing pickaxes/nets is a relief as well as making whetstone infinite: those items were easy to come by past the intro of the other games already, so having to manage them was more of a formality than anything in previous games
+vigorwasps are a great mechanic imo. I don't mind just getting free heals in the older games ofc, but making the heals items that you have to actually reach in the field gives a nice risk/reward bent to it
+the difficulty scaling for quests based on the amount of players was desperately needed imo, soloing guild quests in older games felt great but I also like knowing I can jump into a random quest solo and my damage output will be appropriate for the difficulty. this is esp true now that patches have added a two-player autobalancing option instead of just solo/multi balancing
-the camera is horrid, especially when locked-on. the monster movement is simply too dynamic and the lock-on is too choppy to use
-compounding the above, whenever you're stuck in a tight space with a monster the game becomes very frustrating. the game has the capability to zoom out the action when a turf war happens... why can't it do it in normal battle as well? I would rather my character be small then have to sit with my shield up indefinitely while I wait to find an angle where the camera isn't stuck inside the monster
-the reason for these tight spaces is ofc the level design, which can be very very confusing at first thanks to how big each of the areas are and how many tiny pathways, hallways, and dead ends there are. the worst offender is ancient forest for sure; as the starting area they probably should have made the layout cleaner, as I got lost there many many times even late into the game (I couldn't even find the camp at the top of the area until a tailrider led me there)
-there's a lot of random running around that I'm not really a fan of, especially early on when you don't have a good grasp on where monsters spawn and your research level isn't high enough to instantly spot them on the map. feels like typical open-world padding... esp since it's built into the main story. why not just tell me what monster I'm going to need to fight instead of making me go on an expedition, run into a cutscene trigger, and then get the quest to deal with the monster
-the multiplayer is unbearable when trying to do the story missions. my gf and I attempted this for a bit and got tired fast, as you have to first enter the quest individually, each play until you hit the cutscene trigger, return from quest, and then post the quest again so you can both join (or one person uses an SOS request and the other person leaves and hops into their game). way too much of a pain
-scoutflies are useful when they work but are far too persnickety. it's very frustrating for them to disappear when small monsters aggro you (esp since it takes a while for the state to wear off even after you run away), as it can be near-impossible to tell where to go without them.
-I lauded the animation earlier but there's definitely some odd characteristics here and there with how the monsters move and attack. even in offline monsters will occasionally jerk around or suddenly feel like they're moving at double speed for no reason. there's also some other odd things, like barroth's mud just appearing next to it when it shakes it off instead of having an animation of flying off and adhering to the ground like in the older games
I think I had a worse time than I should've with this game thanks to how long I convinced myself to play longsword. I think sunk cost fallacy kept me going far past the point where I should've stopped, and I ended up having to switch to gunlance at the back quarter of the game after already beating nergigante when I realized that I'm so much worse at this game playing a dodge-heavy weapon like that. I'm really grateful this game exists to help ease new players in, as I would have struggled tremendously hopping into the old ones without the knowledge I gained here. on the other hand, there's a lot of growing pains here from the switch to a new engine, and it's a detriment to the experience in some ways. still, it's a next-gen monster hunter, and it's so cheap now too; I definitely think I made the right choice by picking this up at a whim
Excelente juego y un paso hacia adelante para la franquicia, aunque tuviera una menor cantidad de contenido comparado con sus predecesores además que ciertas peleas DLC llegas a ser injustas.
Been replaying this with my partner after we both got Steam Decks and I wanted her to try it for herself since I got her into MH with GenU and Rise. My feelings stay pretty much the same as this is one of my most played in the series; I've gotten my thoughts together on this back during its peak but there's so many unique aspects to this game, it's a lot to unpack.
I think it goes without saying that the MH dev team's attempt at making the world of Monster Hunter feel like a living breathing World with this title was an absolute success at first glance. Even as someone who's played MH since 3U, I think World succeeds as the most interesting and captivating title in the series in spite of its obvious growing pains. The focus on ecology and every creature's relationship with their biomes was such a beautiful way for the player to connect with the world. Following monster tracks to their hideouts, filling out investigations and growing research levels per monster, watching monsters defend their ground by attacking other monsters in turf wars, utilizing endemic life and using terrain gimmicks to shift favors in battle all tied into this game's focus to the awareness of its ecosystem and it honestly pained me to see so many veteran players vilify those new mechanics. To see these inventive new perspectives met with such playerbase ridicule to the point where most of them were scrapped completely in Rise instead of any attempt to revise them was heartbreaking for me and I'll forever hold a judging side-eye to these "hardcore" fans because of it.
And that's not to say this game is barred from criticism, because this game did indeed have its fair share of issues. Maybe a little more than a fair share. The Slinger was a very confusing mechanic and still one that never feels truly right to use at times. Picking up Dragon Pods that are apparently oh-so effective against Dragon type monsters that only deal a fixed number of 20 hit points on impact just flat out makes no sense to me, and that goes for all the other types. To see the Slinger also replace the usage of Pods by having to load them first also always feels overly cumbersome. On one side of that coin, it's always fun to sling a Pod at a piece of destructible environments to entangle monsters into avalanches of debris. On the other side, however, having to switch to Dung Pods, Screamer Pods, or whatever might be crucial in the heat of battle almost never feels worth it for the amount of time it takes to finagle them onto your slinger. The usage of Torch Pods in Rotten Vale is one of my favorite implementations of this idea as they have to be used to interact with the environment, but having to scramble through your items and radial menus to load up Dung Pods because some asshole Odogaron decided to join the fight is such a pain in the ass that it almost feels more correct to just wait the guy out before he decides to leave.
The always online multiplayer was definitely a more good-intentioned approach to the concept here than other titles at the time but this is where the bulk of my problems lie, and where Rise made the most effective improvements. Merging Village and Hub quests into a unified list created a hunt directory of completely arbitrary difficulty from beginning to end. Scaling methods in this game make no sense, as just one player joining will buff the boss' HP to ludicrous amounts, and in the event of a player leaving or disconnecting, the boss' Max HP is not scaled back down to match. Not to mention the horrendous state of the online around launch for PC, where disconnects abound often left you or your party robbed of a member and left to deal with a monster buffed beyond your strength in numbers. In my second playthrough of this, I have had quests take as short as 3 and a half minutes and as long as 25 in the same rank level, all in multiplayer with just me and my partner.
That is, to say, if you and your friends were even around the same areas of MSQ progress to even progress, because holy shit, what was the deal here? Why, for every single MSQ, did every player have to comb the entire biome for the monster to trigger its reveal cutscene, and have the choice of either
A) popping an SOS Flare to open their gates to other players or
B) Return to the Gathering Hub, wait for all your buddies to do the same thing, and restart the same quest with everyone together?
Oh man, and that's not even mentioning the random expeditions the game forces you to go on to find tracks. More than three times from the first mission to Xeno'jiva you'll have to break away from your party to find stupid "???" tracks that may or may not be all enough there for you to find on your first visit. If you can't find the rest, come back, start another expedition (by yourself) and look for those tracks again.
So too often was party progress barred by one of your party members who may or may not have already seen these cutscenes or done these expeditions. To gate progress by making sure everyone has at least started the same quest is an absolutely redundant design decision, and it's even more baffling that this wasn't fixed in the expansion and took a whole sequel and the removal of the unified quest list to be fixed.
For every genius idea that breathed immersion, there was a suffering game mechanic to dull its impact. I believe that ultimately things levelled out towards the positive side, and while I could have predicted from the start that series purists wouldn't see it the same way, my soul was crushed to see these systems dulled down in Iceborne, and then completely eradicated in Rise.
Monster Hunter: World has more glaring issues than maybe any other game in the series, and despite all of them, it's the title I enjoy coming back to the most. While I love Rise and especially Sunbreak for their cleanest refinement cuts yet to the combat formula, I will never not miss the ambition this game set out with. The subtitle here is the most important thing, because this the closest Monster Hunter has ever gotten to feeling like a truly cohesive ecosystem. To see it come so earnestly with its ecology focus and to then see it ridiculed and beaten down back to old tradition for the next mainline installment absolutely broke my heart. I can hope for the rest of my life that they'll try this again, because I want Monster Hunter to feel like a World again.
I think it goes without saying that the MH dev team's attempt at making the world of Monster Hunter feel like a living breathing World with this title was an absolute success at first glance. Even as someone who's played MH since 3U, I think World succeeds as the most interesting and captivating title in the series in spite of its obvious growing pains. The focus on ecology and every creature's relationship with their biomes was such a beautiful way for the player to connect with the world. Following monster tracks to their hideouts, filling out investigations and growing research levels per monster, watching monsters defend their ground by attacking other monsters in turf wars, utilizing endemic life and using terrain gimmicks to shift favors in battle all tied into this game's focus to the awareness of its ecosystem and it honestly pained me to see so many veteran players vilify those new mechanics. To see these inventive new perspectives met with such playerbase ridicule to the point where most of them were scrapped completely in Rise instead of any attempt to revise them was heartbreaking for me and I'll forever hold a judging side-eye to these "hardcore" fans because of it.
And that's not to say this game is barred from criticism, because this game did indeed have its fair share of issues. Maybe a little more than a fair share. The Slinger was a very confusing mechanic and still one that never feels truly right to use at times. Picking up Dragon Pods that are apparently oh-so effective against Dragon type monsters that only deal a fixed number of 20 hit points on impact just flat out makes no sense to me, and that goes for all the other types. To see the Slinger also replace the usage of Pods by having to load them first also always feels overly cumbersome. On one side of that coin, it's always fun to sling a Pod at a piece of destructible environments to entangle monsters into avalanches of debris. On the other side, however, having to switch to Dung Pods, Screamer Pods, or whatever might be crucial in the heat of battle almost never feels worth it for the amount of time it takes to finagle them onto your slinger. The usage of Torch Pods in Rotten Vale is one of my favorite implementations of this idea as they have to be used to interact with the environment, but having to scramble through your items and radial menus to load up Dung Pods because some asshole Odogaron decided to join the fight is such a pain in the ass that it almost feels more correct to just wait the guy out before he decides to leave.
The always online multiplayer was definitely a more good-intentioned approach to the concept here than other titles at the time but this is where the bulk of my problems lie, and where Rise made the most effective improvements. Merging Village and Hub quests into a unified list created a hunt directory of completely arbitrary difficulty from beginning to end. Scaling methods in this game make no sense, as just one player joining will buff the boss' HP to ludicrous amounts, and in the event of a player leaving or disconnecting, the boss' Max HP is not scaled back down to match. Not to mention the horrendous state of the online around launch for PC, where disconnects abound often left you or your party robbed of a member and left to deal with a monster buffed beyond your strength in numbers. In my second playthrough of this, I have had quests take as short as 3 and a half minutes and as long as 25 in the same rank level, all in multiplayer with just me and my partner.
That is, to say, if you and your friends were even around the same areas of MSQ progress to even progress, because holy shit, what was the deal here? Why, for every single MSQ, did every player have to comb the entire biome for the monster to trigger its reveal cutscene, and have the choice of either
A) popping an SOS Flare to open their gates to other players or
B) Return to the Gathering Hub, wait for all your buddies to do the same thing, and restart the same quest with everyone together?
Oh man, and that's not even mentioning the random expeditions the game forces you to go on to find tracks. More than three times from the first mission to Xeno'jiva you'll have to break away from your party to find stupid "???" tracks that may or may not be all enough there for you to find on your first visit. If you can't find the rest, come back, start another expedition (by yourself) and look for those tracks again.
So too often was party progress barred by one of your party members who may or may not have already seen these cutscenes or done these expeditions. To gate progress by making sure everyone has at least started the same quest is an absolutely redundant design decision, and it's even more baffling that this wasn't fixed in the expansion and took a whole sequel and the removal of the unified quest list to be fixed.
For every genius idea that breathed immersion, there was a suffering game mechanic to dull its impact. I believe that ultimately things levelled out towards the positive side, and while I could have predicted from the start that series purists wouldn't see it the same way, my soul was crushed to see these systems dulled down in Iceborne, and then completely eradicated in Rise.
Monster Hunter: World has more glaring issues than maybe any other game in the series, and despite all of them, it's the title I enjoy coming back to the most. While I love Rise and especially Sunbreak for their cleanest refinement cuts yet to the combat formula, I will never not miss the ambition this game set out with. The subtitle here is the most important thing, because this the closest Monster Hunter has ever gotten to feeling like a truly cohesive ecosystem. To see it come so earnestly with its ecology focus and to then see it ridiculed and beaten down back to old tradition for the next mainline installment absolutely broke my heart. I can hope for the rest of my life that they'll try this again, because I want Monster Hunter to feel like a World again.
My first Monster Hunter and was significantly better than Rise. I definitely enjoyed playing with friends but there were things I didn't like about the series such as monsters running away and having to start an entire mission over if you didn't succeed in enough time. Plus the monster parts grind.
Probably the only Monster Hunter I took seriously and played into the endgame. Kulve Taroth was the superior gameplay style and Capcom are cowards for not following it up with a sequel monster while this game was being supported.
Monster Hunter but casual but also still fun
I think shaving the traditional monster hunter edges off in this title made this game way too fucking easy.
Also Great Sword Ledge Float spam is stupid OP.
Also Great Sword Ledge Float spam is stupid OP.
one of the most fun games gameplay wise I've ever played. I personally hate grinding in games, but this somehow made it actually fun through the sheer quality of it's gameplay loop. the environments and monster designs in the game are nothing short of amazing too. it's a shame that the narrative aspects of the game are either completely forgetable or actively annoying, though I think it's still a testament to how engrossing the gameplay loop is that I'm still giving this a 9 regardless
My first monster hunter and now i know how amazing the appeal to fight big monsters is.
There is almost no reason to talk about story because clearly is not their focus, yet, the lore is spectacular. How engaging is to know about the biology and behavior of the species and all the world of monster hunter.
The monsters destroy entire ecosystems and cause a huge environmental imbalance, so KILL THEM ALL WITHOUT REMORSE!
There is almost no reason to talk about story because clearly is not their focus, yet, the lore is spectacular. How engaging is to know about the biology and behavior of the species and all the world of monster hunter.
The monsters destroy entire ecosystems and cause a huge environmental imbalance, so KILL THEM ALL WITHOUT REMORSE!
this game changed my life fr
give me the fucking gem you piece of shit spiked shitface
Rating includes Iceborne, played as one continuous game.
Absolutely a peak video game for me. It took me a good while to get into and figure out (monster hunter is infamous for not telling you how to play monster hunter, there is absolutely a barrier to entry) but once I took the time and figured it out, and started playing with friends, this game quickly became one of my favorites - I did a 100% run and played through from the beginning again afterwards too. Just completely perfect combat, with an intricate system that feels rewarding to master. I can point out small things that I don't like here and there, but there's never a time I'm truly frustrated at this game where I'm never enjoying it.
Absolutely a peak video game for me. It took me a good while to get into and figure out (monster hunter is infamous for not telling you how to play monster hunter, there is absolutely a barrier to entry) but once I took the time and figured it out, and started playing with friends, this game quickly became one of my favorites - I did a 100% run and played through from the beginning again afterwards too. Just completely perfect combat, with an intricate system that feels rewarding to master. I can point out small things that I don't like here and there, but there's never a time I'm truly frustrated at this game where I'm never enjoying it.
This game might have flaws but consider this: it features a T. rex suplexing a dragon as a gameplay mechanic
One of my very favourite games of all time. To avoid incoherent gushing, I’m just going to list all the things I love about this game. Most of this applies both to the base game and Iceborne.
- The combat, deliberately paced, and fine tuned to perfection. Your moves don’t come out instantly, so you have to be thoughtful and deliberate in how you fight, figure out what’s safe, what’s risky, find openings, or try to create openings yourself. Monsters move more frenetically than in prior entries, it isn’t as easy to bait out the easy to punish moves anymore. Apparently a somewhat divisive change, but I like it because it encourages you to engage more with the monsters, take risks, duck and weave and try to create your own openings. The monsters still have their tells and reads, they’re still learnable, just harder to cheese. The feedback on your hits is satisfying as well, with the beefy sound effects and a satisfying hitlag when you’re hitting weak spots, like it’s taking time to cut through a target, especially gratifying when you’re playing great sword.
- The gear grind. With a carefully balanced power creep from beginning to endgame that keeps you constantly moving forward, and tons of skills and build options to toy with once you reach the endgame, even easier now with the reworked armour skill system. And since your loot drops are the materials to craft gear rather than the gear itself, you’re always making some progress towards your next upgrade, never getting screwed over by RNG, at least not until you have to hunt rubies and mantles, but thankfully the game has systems that make their acquisition easier. Not to mention the gear itself, new and returning, all looks top notch (aside from...I’ll get to that).
- 14 different weapon types. The weapon roster almost feels like a video game weapon hall of fame. You got Cloud’s great sword, Sephiroth’s longsword, Arthas’ hammer, the Lumen Sage’s glaive, Kratos’ dual blades, etc. Each of them is interesting, varied and fleshed out to a point where any one of them could be the lead of it’s own action game.
- The industry leading monster designs. Each creature is thought out with their own semi-realistic biology and behaviour. Just following them around the map on their routines is one of the most interesting things to do in this game, watching Anjanath chill on the cliffside with it’s sails out, or Odogaron dragging a carcass back to it’s den, or Zinogre howling at the moon, etc. But as well, each of them implements their biology into their fights, meaning it’s to your advantage to know them thoroughly, know how to counter each ability. Rathian poisoning you with her tail? Sever it and neuter her toxin. Barioth too fast for you? Break it’s arm spikes reducing it’s grip on icy surfaces. Nergigante keeps skewering you on it’s spikes? Be aggressive, break them before they can harden. There’s also knowledge of it’s spot on the food chain, what monsters to lure it towards that’ll wittle it down in a turf war. The decision of what equipment to bring, what element or status they’re strong or weak to, which do you have to watch out for. What items counter it. Each creature, new and returning, is like a brilliantly thought out action puzzle, all unique, engaging, thoughtful, it’s some peak boss design.
- The environments. Beautiful to look at, multilayered, dense with secrets, things to explore, and unlike a lot of video game environments that feel like just themed arenas or corridors, these places feel authentic and alive. They’ve also ramped up interactions with the environment. Many of the game’s monsters will lure you into areas where they can really take advantage and let loose with their abilities, but likewise there’s lots of options for you to take advantage of yourself. My favourite map has to be the Hoarfrost Reach from the Iceborne expansion. From the cozy coniferous forests at it’s base, to the precarious glacial shelves along the coast, to it’s frozen peaks, to the ice caverns underneath, to the breathtaking frozen magma formations that surround Velkhena’s lair, the map is just mesmerizing, not to mention it’s battle music is a series highlight.
- It’s fun loving personality. The game offers a ton of light hearted reprieve in the coziness of the village and it’s denizens, the felynes, always getting into slapstick shenanigans, speaking in cat puns, my favourite is the Seliana chef who threatens to whack you with her laddle should you fail to consume an adequate amount of her cooking, the endemic life hunting, how you can catch creatures in the wilds and let them loose in your customizable player home, all the little activities you can perform with other players in the gathering hub like arm wrestling, the suana, getting drunk, to all the event quests and the goofy shit you can earn from them. The game is just so full of charm and character, I love it.
- The community. One of the healthiest, friendliest fanbases that exists for an entertainment product. Incredibly welcoming to newcomers, always willing to explain the game’s systems, help people when they’re stuck. Playing this game’s multiplayer I have witnessed more superhero moments than in any other game, someone throwing their last lifepowder so the next hit doesn’t kill me, or runs out and shields a fireball for me while I’m stunned, or running out to whack me out of stun, putting thenselves in danger so I too have a chance to escape the big area sweeping ultimate attack. It’s the kind of social experience I play multiplayer games for and I’ve really yet to experience it anywhere else.
- It’s generosity. As a franchise, the series has always been honest and consumer focused, offering tons of free dlc, never trying to force exploitative monetization down our throats. Watching World double down on that generosity, offering new monsters, new Siege raids, these high production value collaborations with the likes of Final Fantasy XIV and The Witcher 3, in addition to the usual suite of event quests and gear, in contrast to other games like Destiny and Star Wars Battlefront II descending further into their cynicism was very much a wakeup call for me, a reminder when when you pay $60 you should get a complete product, your money’s worth and then some. The franchise has kind of been a beacon of hope for the AAA industry in my eyes because of that. I honestly want to hug Ryozo Tsujimoto for that comment he made about how paid lootboxes undermine games by making you pay to not play them.
The game isn’t flawless obviously. Lots of people have criticized how half the weapon designs in the game use this weird modular scales on bone or iron system in contrast to the series’ usual unique designs across the board (it didn’t bother me as much because most of my favourites made it back, but I sympathize with those whose didn’t). And the game doesn’t quite have the diversity of monster types other games had, no serpents, bugs, crabs, I would have loved to see something like Nerscylla in the Rotten Vale map. For me though, they’re negligible in the context of what this game is to me. It was my escape throughout several of the most tumultuous moments of my life, it reminded me what it’s like to be a part of a community, it revitalized my love of gaming when I thought it was doomed to cynicism, shot one of my favourite franchises up to AAA stardom. Following it’s lifecycle from the initial beta to the final title update for Iceborne was one of the most exciting, incredible gaming journeys I’ve ever been on. My love for this video game is something I can barely even put to words.
- The combat, deliberately paced, and fine tuned to perfection. Your moves don’t come out instantly, so you have to be thoughtful and deliberate in how you fight, figure out what’s safe, what’s risky, find openings, or try to create openings yourself. Monsters move more frenetically than in prior entries, it isn’t as easy to bait out the easy to punish moves anymore. Apparently a somewhat divisive change, but I like it because it encourages you to engage more with the monsters, take risks, duck and weave and try to create your own openings. The monsters still have their tells and reads, they’re still learnable, just harder to cheese. The feedback on your hits is satisfying as well, with the beefy sound effects and a satisfying hitlag when you’re hitting weak spots, like it’s taking time to cut through a target, especially gratifying when you’re playing great sword.
- The gear grind. With a carefully balanced power creep from beginning to endgame that keeps you constantly moving forward, and tons of skills and build options to toy with once you reach the endgame, even easier now with the reworked armour skill system. And since your loot drops are the materials to craft gear rather than the gear itself, you’re always making some progress towards your next upgrade, never getting screwed over by RNG, at least not until you have to hunt rubies and mantles, but thankfully the game has systems that make their acquisition easier. Not to mention the gear itself, new and returning, all looks top notch (aside from...I’ll get to that).
- 14 different weapon types. The weapon roster almost feels like a video game weapon hall of fame. You got Cloud’s great sword, Sephiroth’s longsword, Arthas’ hammer, the Lumen Sage’s glaive, Kratos’ dual blades, etc. Each of them is interesting, varied and fleshed out to a point where any one of them could be the lead of it’s own action game.
- The industry leading monster designs. Each creature is thought out with their own semi-realistic biology and behaviour. Just following them around the map on their routines is one of the most interesting things to do in this game, watching Anjanath chill on the cliffside with it’s sails out, or Odogaron dragging a carcass back to it’s den, or Zinogre howling at the moon, etc. But as well, each of them implements their biology into their fights, meaning it’s to your advantage to know them thoroughly, know how to counter each ability. Rathian poisoning you with her tail? Sever it and neuter her toxin. Barioth too fast for you? Break it’s arm spikes reducing it’s grip on icy surfaces. Nergigante keeps skewering you on it’s spikes? Be aggressive, break them before they can harden. There’s also knowledge of it’s spot on the food chain, what monsters to lure it towards that’ll wittle it down in a turf war. The decision of what equipment to bring, what element or status they’re strong or weak to, which do you have to watch out for. What items counter it. Each creature, new and returning, is like a brilliantly thought out action puzzle, all unique, engaging, thoughtful, it’s some peak boss design.
- The environments. Beautiful to look at, multilayered, dense with secrets, things to explore, and unlike a lot of video game environments that feel like just themed arenas or corridors, these places feel authentic and alive. They’ve also ramped up interactions with the environment. Many of the game’s monsters will lure you into areas where they can really take advantage and let loose with their abilities, but likewise there’s lots of options for you to take advantage of yourself. My favourite map has to be the Hoarfrost Reach from the Iceborne expansion. From the cozy coniferous forests at it’s base, to the precarious glacial shelves along the coast, to it’s frozen peaks, to the ice caverns underneath, to the breathtaking frozen magma formations that surround Velkhena’s lair, the map is just mesmerizing, not to mention it’s battle music is a series highlight.
- It’s fun loving personality. The game offers a ton of light hearted reprieve in the coziness of the village and it’s denizens, the felynes, always getting into slapstick shenanigans, speaking in cat puns, my favourite is the Seliana chef who threatens to whack you with her laddle should you fail to consume an adequate amount of her cooking, the endemic life hunting, how you can catch creatures in the wilds and let them loose in your customizable player home, all the little activities you can perform with other players in the gathering hub like arm wrestling, the suana, getting drunk, to all the event quests and the goofy shit you can earn from them. The game is just so full of charm and character, I love it.
- The community. One of the healthiest, friendliest fanbases that exists for an entertainment product. Incredibly welcoming to newcomers, always willing to explain the game’s systems, help people when they’re stuck. Playing this game’s multiplayer I have witnessed more superhero moments than in any other game, someone throwing their last lifepowder so the next hit doesn’t kill me, or runs out and shields a fireball for me while I’m stunned, or running out to whack me out of stun, putting thenselves in danger so I too have a chance to escape the big area sweeping ultimate attack. It’s the kind of social experience I play multiplayer games for and I’ve really yet to experience it anywhere else.
- It’s generosity. As a franchise, the series has always been honest and consumer focused, offering tons of free dlc, never trying to force exploitative monetization down our throats. Watching World double down on that generosity, offering new monsters, new Siege raids, these high production value collaborations with the likes of Final Fantasy XIV and The Witcher 3, in addition to the usual suite of event quests and gear, in contrast to other games like Destiny and Star Wars Battlefront II descending further into their cynicism was very much a wakeup call for me, a reminder when when you pay $60 you should get a complete product, your money’s worth and then some. The franchise has kind of been a beacon of hope for the AAA industry in my eyes because of that. I honestly want to hug Ryozo Tsujimoto for that comment he made about how paid lootboxes undermine games by making you pay to not play them.
The game isn’t flawless obviously. Lots of people have criticized how half the weapon designs in the game use this weird modular scales on bone or iron system in contrast to the series’ usual unique designs across the board (it didn’t bother me as much because most of my favourites made it back, but I sympathize with those whose didn’t). And the game doesn’t quite have the diversity of monster types other games had, no serpents, bugs, crabs, I would have loved to see something like Nerscylla in the Rotten Vale map. For me though, they’re negligible in the context of what this game is to me. It was my escape throughout several of the most tumultuous moments of my life, it reminded me what it’s like to be a part of a community, it revitalized my love of gaming when I thought it was doomed to cynicism, shot one of my favourite franchises up to AAA stardom. Following it’s lifecycle from the initial beta to the final title update for Iceborne was one of the most exciting, incredible gaming journeys I’ve ever been on. My love for this video game is something I can barely even put to words.
No matter the monster, big or small, I'll hit it with my big fucking sword til it falls.
Average day in Australia
I really don't get why this series is so popular in japan.
It's just a bunch of easy but terribly drawn out fights against uninteresting spongy bosses that spend most of their time running away around janky terrain. I get that the long fights combined with the grinding is sort of the appeal but if you're after a good action game I honestly wouldn't recommend this series. I had a bit more fun with MHIVU but I still wouldn't say that one was great either.
It's just a bunch of easy but terribly drawn out fights against uninteresting spongy bosses that spend most of their time running away around janky terrain. I get that the long fights combined with the grinding is sort of the appeal but if you're after a good action game I honestly wouldn't recommend this series. I had a bit more fun with MHIVU but I still wouldn't say that one was great either.
Nearly 100 hours of playtime and a lot of grinding i really didnt need to put myself through, I have finished the base content for Monster Hunter: World, including every optional quest. This is fantastic. It's not a game that's trying to peddle some 'deeper meaning' by any means nor should it be trying to, as it does exactly what it sets out to do; give you the experience of being a hunter and all the learning and prowess that comes with it. goated with the sauce
playing rise first really ruined my impression of this because it's uglier, less fun and simply has worse monsters and worse mechanics
i got to the grindy part and quit
will i ever go back and grind? i'm leaving the door open (the real answer is no)
i got to the grindy part and quit
will i ever go back and grind? i'm leaving the door open (the real answer is no)
This was my first monhun experience and I'm glad I chose this one to start with. This game can eat your entire weekend if you're not careful
MHW is a solid first entry in the Monster Hunter series for newcomers, but as a veteran I found myself not going back to it as much as the other games.
It cuts out a load of tedious busywork, but has a very low difficulty floor, the "beginner's tools" used to ease the load off later becoming essentially mandatory for the hardest hunts in the game - something that I personally dislike, but I can see others enjoying. The story unfortunately isn't very good, with unskippable cutscenes that bog down the first time experience - but it's Monster Hunter so the majority of your playtime will be post-story.
It cuts out a load of tedious busywork, but has a very low difficulty floor, the "beginner's tools" used to ease the load off later becoming essentially mandatory for the hardest hunts in the game - something that I personally dislike, but I can see others enjoying. The story unfortunately isn't very good, with unskippable cutscenes that bog down the first time experience - but it's Monster Hunter so the majority of your playtime will be post-story.
MY HUNTERS IN THE RESEARCH COMISSION ARE ALL MORONS‼️
Monster Hunter World is a wonderful yet frustrating marathon of boss fights. Hunting monsters is pure bliss. Each monster feels distinct, with unique attack patterns and elemental attacks, intelligent AI and fantastically outlandish designs. The game continued to deliver wow moments throughout my playthrough, whether it be through the spectacle of the monsters themselves or some truly unexpected (and lethal) attacks. But these monsters wouldn’t have been as fun to fight if it wasn’t for the tremendous combat system. Each weapon has so many layers and an excellent difficulty curve, being easy to chain basic combos together, but challenging to master those devastating attacks that require timing and precision. My personal favourite weapon was the charge blade, giving me great mobility with the weapon in its sword and shield form, but dishing out vast amounts of damage at the expense of movement speed when combined into a large blade. Needless to say, MHW does not let its quantity of monsters and weapons come at the expense of their quality. A special shoutout also goes to the incredibly cute but pretty useless felyn companion. I do have some gripes with the combat system such as how out of control it feels when you get stunned and some janky hit detection, but these are fairly minor.
Outside of these gargantuan battles is where I feel MHW falters. Menus for upgrades, crafting and purchasing can be a bit overbearing and getting the necessary materials to upgrade armour can become very grindy, especially in the latter half of the game with high rank armour. It just feels unnecessary to have to fight monsters several times to unlock their armour. Pacing was another issue for me. In low rank the next monster hunt was always around the corner, but in high rank it felt like the game length had been padded with having to find a certain amount of monster tracks before you can fight them. Finally, the story itself is very forgettable and I found it more tedious than enjoyable to trawl through all the dialogue to the next quest. Don’t get me wrong, the cutscenes introducing you to new monsters are fantastic, but I had no attachment to any of the characters to keep me invested in what was going on outside of the prospect of the next hunt.
The ‘World’ aspect of the title comes from the fact that this is the first entry in the series where there are large environments with no loading screens between areas. Having played previous games, I can’t emphasise how much this enhances the experience. Not only are these vast environments gorgeous and rich with detail, but the pacing of fights is improved as there is no longer any loading when monsters move from area to area. Maps can feel a bit too big at times, with your limited movement speed, but they are still well designed for traversal with lots of verticality and shortcuts as well as making great fighting areas. The icing on the cake is that you can enjoy these playgrounds with others via online matchmaking. Though slightly flawed by preventing your friends from joining your game in certain missions, matchmaking is fairly smooth and seamless. Working together to take down monsters is a tonne of fun and adds a completely new dimension compared to the solo experience.
There is a lot to love here, but some questionable design decisions hold MHW back from true greatness. With the improvements Rise has made, I’d recommend not bothering with World and jumping straight that, but this still is a fantastic monster hunting experience.
2018 Ranked
Co-op/Multiplayer Recommendations
Outside of these gargantuan battles is where I feel MHW falters. Menus for upgrades, crafting and purchasing can be a bit overbearing and getting the necessary materials to upgrade armour can become very grindy, especially in the latter half of the game with high rank armour. It just feels unnecessary to have to fight monsters several times to unlock their armour. Pacing was another issue for me. In low rank the next monster hunt was always around the corner, but in high rank it felt like the game length had been padded with having to find a certain amount of monster tracks before you can fight them. Finally, the story itself is very forgettable and I found it more tedious than enjoyable to trawl through all the dialogue to the next quest. Don’t get me wrong, the cutscenes introducing you to new monsters are fantastic, but I had no attachment to any of the characters to keep me invested in what was going on outside of the prospect of the next hunt.
The ‘World’ aspect of the title comes from the fact that this is the first entry in the series where there are large environments with no loading screens between areas. Having played previous games, I can’t emphasise how much this enhances the experience. Not only are these vast environments gorgeous and rich with detail, but the pacing of fights is improved as there is no longer any loading when monsters move from area to area. Maps can feel a bit too big at times, with your limited movement speed, but they are still well designed for traversal with lots of verticality and shortcuts as well as making great fighting areas. The icing on the cake is that you can enjoy these playgrounds with others via online matchmaking. Though slightly flawed by preventing your friends from joining your game in certain missions, matchmaking is fairly smooth and seamless. Working together to take down monsters is a tonne of fun and adds a completely new dimension compared to the solo experience.
There is a lot to love here, but some questionable design decisions hold MHW back from true greatness. With the improvements Rise has made, I’d recommend not bothering with World and jumping straight that, but this still is a fantastic monster hunting experience.
2018 Ranked
Co-op/Multiplayer Recommendations
I kinda hate how it looks and how the areas are designed and they tried to give it a more 'cinematic' story except it's Monster Hunter so it sucks absolute shit but that cat is SO buff dude
A single tear of awe rolling down my cheek as I watch Safi do the nuke attack for the 300th time
There's a good co-op game buried deep, deep in here, but god do they try their best to keep you from discovering it. WHY is playing this game with friends, especially the story, so damn overcomplicated? I can't imagine what the other games in the series are like if this is considered the most accessible, it feels like there are 8000 different mechanics to keep track of and none of them are too satisfying other than the glowing bugs that lead you to your destination.
You would think combat would be the highlight given fighting these monsters is the whole point but it really all feels so weightless - I understand the nature of the game is that every major enemy is a damage sponge but your weapons feel like they may as well be toothpicks.
Everything is made out to be as complicated as possible and repetitive. There's incredible variety in the visual design of the monsters but the fights themselves are so formulaic they may as well all be the same thing after a certain point. There is fun to be had doing a hunt with a friend and I see the appeal of collecting materials to get all the weapons/armor sets, but it's nowhere close to worth it for me.
You would think combat would be the highlight given fighting these monsters is the whole point but it really all feels so weightless - I understand the nature of the game is that every major enemy is a damage sponge but your weapons feel like they may as well be toothpicks.
Everything is made out to be as complicated as possible and repetitive. There's incredible variety in the visual design of the monsters but the fights themselves are so formulaic they may as well all be the same thing after a certain point. There is fun to be had doing a hunt with a friend and I see the appeal of collecting materials to get all the weapons/armor sets, but it's nowhere close to worth it for me.