I always had an itch to play this but the price always seemed to steep for me so thanks to user Detchibe for gifting this for me for my birthday. I can now say with full affirmation and disappointment that this is one of the most dulling games I've played in a good long while.
It's almost as if every single component of this game was to be just "good enough," like the developer mission here was to merge half baked percentages of ideas to make a 100% "complete" game. It's a game with "tax writeoff" levels of care and effort.
It's not that Monster Hunter could never work in JRPG format, or that the presentation is too kiddie. It's that MHS2 brings absolutely nothing to the table so it masquerades as kiddie shit to deflect criticism, probably unintentionally but is unfortunately what happens. A half-baked, boring rock-paper-scissors battle system doesn't mean it's an "easy" battle system for children; it means it's half-baked. It's simple in the worst way; it's simply unengaging. Battling the same overworld monsters becomes so repetitive and uninteresting that the "S" rank you'll gain after from peerless play after each battle will mean nothing every time. There's a distinct lack of challenge and real strategy even though the game will always tell you about the "unpredictable" monsters, unpredictable in the sense that they only spam Rock but glow when they're about to use Scissors so watch out!
An annoying companion and a "power of friendship" plot aren't child-friendly ideas to tell a story, they're stale bread JRPG story tropes that dominate a story with nothing of substance to tell. I played about 7 hours of this 50+ hour game and I took it upon myself to see how the rest of the story goes through synopsis reading and cutscene watching and it has absolutely nothing more to show. It's a low stakes morality story that never once feels like it gets its feet on the ground. Everything is not just horribly cliché, but horribly anime cliché, like a stab wound but the already boring anime art style is like a little bit of lemon juice on the tip of the blade to make it hurt just a little bit more. If I can be real I found better "Stories" in the past 4 mainline entries of the series where it served as nothing but a standard backdrop of context to the gameplay.
I see too many reviews writing this off like "but it's for kids so," and I ask why so many people leave it at that. Since when has children's media been barred from such criticism? Especially since so many other JRPGs for children exist like Ni no Kuni, early Tales of, Yo-Kai Watch, Paper Mario, hell even Pokémon. Maybe I was saved of having to spend $60 on this but are we all just trying to justify a purchase here? So many middling reviews but I've never seen so many excuses. A game doesn't have to be "kiddie shit" to be boring and vice versa. MHS2 was obviously a spinoff made with skimpish resources as it shows with the repetitive overworld design and over-reuse of assets, but was never intended to be made with enough love and care to make something fulfilling out of. There's no heart, there's no soul, it feels like a product of a JRPG lab. If you want your kids to get into Monster Hunter just make your youngest play Freedom Unite and watch his ass get kicked by Nargacuga instead of trying to play Rock Paper Scissors with it.
It's almost as if every single component of this game was to be just "good enough," like the developer mission here was to merge half baked percentages of ideas to make a 100% "complete" game. It's a game with "tax writeoff" levels of care and effort.
It's not that Monster Hunter could never work in JRPG format, or that the presentation is too kiddie. It's that MHS2 brings absolutely nothing to the table so it masquerades as kiddie shit to deflect criticism, probably unintentionally but is unfortunately what happens. A half-baked, boring rock-paper-scissors battle system doesn't mean it's an "easy" battle system for children; it means it's half-baked. It's simple in the worst way; it's simply unengaging. Battling the same overworld monsters becomes so repetitive and uninteresting that the "S" rank you'll gain after from peerless play after each battle will mean nothing every time. There's a distinct lack of challenge and real strategy even though the game will always tell you about the "unpredictable" monsters, unpredictable in the sense that they only spam Rock but glow when they're about to use Scissors so watch out!
An annoying companion and a "power of friendship" plot aren't child-friendly ideas to tell a story, they're stale bread JRPG story tropes that dominate a story with nothing of substance to tell. I played about 7 hours of this 50+ hour game and I took it upon myself to see how the rest of the story goes through synopsis reading and cutscene watching and it has absolutely nothing more to show. It's a low stakes morality story that never once feels like it gets its feet on the ground. Everything is not just horribly cliché, but horribly anime cliché, like a stab wound but the already boring anime art style is like a little bit of lemon juice on the tip of the blade to make it hurt just a little bit more. If I can be real I found better "Stories" in the past 4 mainline entries of the series where it served as nothing but a standard backdrop of context to the gameplay.
I see too many reviews writing this off like "but it's for kids so," and I ask why so many people leave it at that. Since when has children's media been barred from such criticism? Especially since so many other JRPGs for children exist like Ni no Kuni, early Tales of, Yo-Kai Watch, Paper Mario, hell even Pokémon. Maybe I was saved of having to spend $60 on this but are we all just trying to justify a purchase here? So many middling reviews but I've never seen so many excuses. A game doesn't have to be "kiddie shit" to be boring and vice versa. MHS2 was obviously a spinoff made with skimpish resources as it shows with the repetitive overworld design and over-reuse of assets, but was never intended to be made with enough love and care to make something fulfilling out of. There's no heart, there's no soul, it feels like a product of a JRPG lab. If you want your kids to get into Monster Hunter just make your youngest play Freedom Unite and watch his ass get kicked by Nargacuga instead of trying to play Rock Paper Scissors with it.