The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!
Let’s discuss the Monster Hunter series. What is your favorite game? What aspects do you like about it? What doesn’t work for you? Are there games that gave you a similar experience? Feel free to share any thoughts that come up, or react to other peoples comments. Let’s get the conversation going!
If you have any recommendations for games or series for the next post(s), please feel free to DM me or add it in a comment here (no guarantees of course).
Previous entries: Persona, Monkey Island, 8 Bit Era, Animal Crossing, Age of Empires, Super Mario, Deus Ex, Stardew Valley, The Sims, Half-Life, Earthbound / Mother, Mass Effect, Metroid, Journey, Resident Evil, Polybius, Tetris, Telltale Games, Kirby, LEGO Games, DOOM, Ori, Metal Gear, Slay the Spire
I’ve never played these games. It all just feels extremely overwhelming with the large amount of menus and systems. I’m also unable to focus on long games (I also have issues with long open world games like Breath of the Wild for example), so that is another thing that pushes me away. But the idea of a cosy grind while listening to podcasts does interest me.
However, I have seen the film: an absolute masterpiece in the “bad film genre”. Just beautifully brainless action, similar to the amazing Resident Evil films of the same creator.
That’s totally fair, Monster Hunter is infamous for its utterly terrible onboarding process. If you ever decide that you want to really figure out Monster Hunter, there’s two options I always recommend.
The first is incredibly simple: get someone who knows the game to play with you. They can walk you through what does and doesn’t matter, and help you get used to the game with someone there to keep you engaged.
The second option, if you don’t have a MH friend or don’t want to play with other people, is a simple process you can follow which I’ve found tends to work for getting people through the early game confusion:
First, ignore the constant tutorial popups. They’ll be there in the hunter notes in your menu at any time, and most of them don’t matter until after you figured out how to literally play the game at all.
Second, find your weapon. Every weapon type in Monster Hunter plays very differently. The weapon that sounds the best to you might not be the weapon that feels the best to you. Once you unlock the training area (I think it happens before your first quest even) just go in there and pick a weapon from your box and start slapping shit. If you don’t like that weapon, pick a different one and rinse and repeat until you’ve found the one that speaks to you.
Finally, just start playing! I find things make way more sense when you actually experience them rather than just reading about them or watching someone else experience them. Just start playing and eventually all those complicated systems will click and you’ll wonder why you ever had a problem!
A common joke in the Monster Hunter community is that everyone loves monster hunter, they just haven’t played it long enough to realize it yet! I hope you give the series another chance someday because it’s really something special!
Regarding the movie, as a terrible movie fan I agree, it was a fantastic watch! As a Monster Hunter fan however, ohhhhhh boy was I screaming at my TV! WHY did they give gore magala a beard?!?!?
I’ve only played a bit of 4 and lots of worlds. I really loved the additional stuff to do in worlds. I was enthralled by the exploration and little collectible stuff as much as the actual combat. I do feel like it’s a lot of fun with friends. Playing with Randoms feels scary lol.
I’ve been trying to finish iceborne at some point but I hit a brick wall at frostfang barioth for a long time and then got distracted with other games. I’ve been meaning to go back and finish but u have a feeling the next title will come out before then. I haven’t even gotten around to rise yet lol!
One thing I kind of like about monster hunter is you don’t need to commit to the long term, a hunt will last at most 50 minutes usually closer to 25 or less. You can boot the game up do a hunt and shutdown, and still feel like you did something in it.
Similar boat. I’ve tried with friends on numerous occasions and it’s never clicked for me. I will say MH rise and the wolf mounts and weird grapple shot thing got me the closest to getting into one. The movement those 2 afforded made the game feel better to me.
A single play session isn’t actually all that long, as others have said. It’s about 25-50 minutes depending on how familiar you are with the monster. You also don’t have to interact with all the systems at once initially, pick one thing and try it out. There’s no real penalty for failing besides having to re-do the mission that you failed.
I started with 3rd and I completely agree with you. It’s so confusing and shit to get into, I technically started with the first PSP game but I played for like 40 minutes. Then I met a friend who became be first friend and he taught me how to play, and I ended up LOVING the games. They’re all some of my favorite games now. GU is my favorite. World is second. 4u is third.