Be Excellent To Each Other

Oh, it's shipped, not sold. Still, the actual sales figures suggest they won't sit on retailer's shelves.

Christ.

MH always does crazy good in Japan. Now they've done Monster Hunter without as much arcane stuff, rough edges and added decent controls and opened it up to the rest of the world.

Monster Hunter 3rd Portable did 4.7m. In Japan.

This is a bewildering mess of a game.

The monsters look absolutely terrific; the graphics are lush; my furrytwat sometimes gets out a dingy and paddles along the water with me and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

The UI is terrible, the map doesn’t rotate, quests aren’t signposted, starting a quest is a maddening affair, the multiplayer is a bag of shit and won’t let players play the same mission unless they’ve already completed it even if their progress is identical to you, my inventory is jammed full of shit I don’t know what to do with, inventory management is clunky, basic attack isn’t X on the Xbox but rather Y, I don’t know what 90% of my weapons and armour do and whether to switch it up, some monsters just fuck off before you’ve killed them even after bashing them for literally 30 minutes and I’ve somehow acquired an armour set called something something ‘alpha’ for coming late to the party that means I’m taking sod all damage so far.

Good game though. I think.

Indeed. I'm sure there's a good game in there. It's just utterly impenetrable.

Alas, no crossplay, either.

I can't understand why the game gives you a set of armour that's better than anything you can possibly craft. Did they just decide that people wanted to ignore the equipment part of the game completely? It just completely removes any motivation for doing half the game.

It's for blitzing the original content and getting to the expansion as fast as you can. For Alts or people who played PS4 but now want to play on PC or vice versa.

I had to check what that armour was cause it’s leagues ahead of any of the others. Leather armour grants +1 but Guardian Alpha armour is a whopping +50, so why would I ever bother with anything else? Turns out it was only released alongside the DLC release of Ice World to help you smash through the main game so you can be suitably levelled for Ice World. (EDIT: wot he said)

Reading up, people are saying it removes the grind for gear between monsters which is apparently part of the “fun”. Grind is a dirty word in this house so it can fuck off while I wear some natty armour and teabag a dragon’s face with a hammer the size of a T-Rex’s nutsack.

This is now less bewildering.

Basically, you pick the biggest hammer you can find and bash big monsters craniums until they collapse. Sometimes when you smash a skull open and return to base your hammer gets bigger thanks to the bit of brain matter you’ve collected. There’s things that aren’t hammers but who wants to play with something that isn’t a giant hammer with the most raw damage output? There’re vendors that sell consumables, some that ask you plant stuff to get more stuff later and a bloke in a ship that sells stuff every now and again and people who give you quests that involve picking up mushrooms and shit. There’s a fighting arena for more stuff; a bloke who sells food to boost your stats for a quest; and some other crap. The list goes on. It feels more straightforward now.

But ignore all that, grab the cheap armour that avoids any grind and an increasingly bigger hammer and bash a skull in. Easy. This is surprisingly fun.

I’ve hit “High Rank” which basically means I’ve progressed the story which unlocks some new upgrades for weapons and new armour. The top armour has +43 defence so my starting armour is still the best at +50. Unfortunately you still have to grind monsters and minerals, mushrooms, herbs and the hundreds of other bollocks populating the land to get the materials to make my hammer even bigger than it is.

This is still immensely good fun though. I was kicking some skinny dragon’s ‘ed in when an absolute unit rocked up and started beating us both up. I was fighting some raptor looking thing and managed to stun lock him in a giant flower trap thing and just crushed his fucking skull like flour. Then I was fighting a dinosaur with a head built like a brick when a dragon rocks up, grabs the dinosaur’s neck and lobs him off a cliff.

The combat is lovely and meaty. The weapons feel great to use. The monsters look fucking brilliant. The fights are lengthy and punishing. Basically, it’s great.

The MP is fiddly since to play with friends you’ve got to be at the same level. The campaign is fun though: it’s actually got a story which is nice; I’ve always thought these games were storyless. Shows how much I know. And yet I’m, like, 20 odd missions in and then suddenly the story slows to a fucking full stop as you suddenly have to search every single fucking level for randomly placed tracks on the map. So you just go running about pressing the B button avoiding the locals. It’s really fucking boring. I’d finished all the campaign missions and optional missions available and now all I’m doing is nobbing around looking for invisible tracks to materialise. Just let me smack things in the face, for fucks sake. That’s all I’m here for.

Man, this game is cool as fuck sometimes.

I’m fighting this dodo then some dinoallegator rocks up and nicks my bird. THEN HE BEATS ME WITH IT.