I’m a very new MH fan. I didn’t really get into the series before Rise. I tried a few (mainly on PSP) and it just didn’t click with me at the time. But Rise really got my attention and I loved it. But as such, I missed the first Monster Hunter Stories on 3DS.

But I saw a bunch of this game (Capcom was REALLY pushing this game a lot) and it looked really fun. So I picked it up. And I played through it and started the post-game. So time to review it I guess. Spoilers: I like this game.

Let’s gooooooo!

Developer and Publisher: Capcom
Release date: July 9th 2021
Platforms: Switch, PC (Switch version played)
Genre: Console-style RPG

So Monster Hunter is this cool, strict action game where you fight giant monsters that are pretty cool. This game is a bit different because it’s a turn-based RPG, and you don’t specifically play as a hunter. Instead you play as a rider, a person who steals monster eggs from their nests to brainwash them into being your friends and have them help you traverse the environment and fight wild monsters. It does take Monster Hunter concepts and plays around with them, which is nice, more on that later.

So the story… You play as a Rider (that you can customize and name) from Mahana village, a small village on a tropical island covered in monsters. You’re specifically the grandkid of Red, a somewhat legendary rider from Mahana who was the rider for the Guardian Ratha, before he died. One day a weird light appears and all the Rathalos both on the island and across the world fly off to an unknown place. An elf girl, Ena, was investigating certain things, including the Guardian Ratha. The Guardian Ratha gave her an egg before flying off. The egg is of course a Rathalos egg, that is presumed to contain the Razewing Rathalos, a powerful Rathalos that might destroy the world, according to legend. You go to several different villages/cities, help them out with their local problems, hatching the Ratha egg and training up your team. Plenty of places around the world have pits appearing with shining lights, and said lights seem to make some of the monsters go berserk (including Ratha himself who seems to be displaying strong powers). So the goal of the story is to find the source of the pits, and figure out if Ratha is actually what will cause the end of the world. It’s not an amazing story, but it works enough to give some motivation.

There are issues with the story though. Ena is kinda cool, but it feels like her whole role in the story is to be there to speak for you, because your character is a silent protagonist. Navirou is also a bit annoying because he seemingly never learns to not be an idiot, and he also serves the “talk instead of the silent protagonist” role sometimes because Ena isn’t enough of that I guess. Navirou is also the “knows who some people are because they’re from the first game” character. He does have a cool moment or two, but I could do without him. You could pretty much remove both Ena and Navirou and keep the story pretty much the same if you gave a few lines to the protag. I wish they were a bit more meaningful. The “villain” is a bit random and feels like he has pretty weak motivation, he’s a surprise reveal that doesn’t feel very impactful at all.

Not gonna talk about localization too much, but whoever wrote “Pawsitively Clawdacious” should be demoted to janitor (especially since the words “big” and “great”, in english, are literally in the japanese text). There’s many instance I noticed of the english translation just being completely different from the spoken japanese, it’s not something I’m ever happy about. One day maybe localizers will realize someone else’s art should stay as-is as much as humanly possible. It’s not hard. If you’re gonna give us the japanese audio, make damn sure the english text is the same.

I like the graphics. They’re really nice and colorful, they’re almost more attractive than the main series graphics because they’re a bit funner and more cartoony. They’re definitely going for a different style, so they obviously both have their place. The monsters look slightly less threatening because they’re not as big, but they still use the same designs as the mainline MH games so they still look pretty cool. The graphical quality is definitely up there, even on Switch. It’s very nice. Some people have complained about the framerate on Switch, but they’re wrong. The only places where drops are actually noticeable are actually during cutscenes, which… doesn’t matter. The rest of the time it’s mostly stable.

The game flow is pretty simple as far as continuing the story. Just go where the map icon tells you to go and fight stuff there or talk to the required NPC. Outside of town is usually the big open area of the region. This big open area, in addition to having all sorts of materials around for you to grab/mine, also has monsters walking around that you can fight (touch them to start battle, from behind to get an extra turn and vice versa of course). If a monster sees you they’ll usually run at you to try and fight you, you can avoid them pretty easily. The big open areas (and some of the other smaller named areas) will also spawn a bunch of monster dens in random places. Some of them are rare, some of them are subquests. That’s where you get monster eggs to build up your monster team. There’s also a few everdens in most areas, those have bottle cap items (for the main campaign it’s the only place to get them other than occasional quest rewards). Also, sometimes when beating a monster the monster will retreat instead of dying (with extra chance of that if you use a paintball item), which opens up a den that will specifically have an egg of that monster (so if you want a specific monster, using paintballs is the best way). So you always have an objective, but if you just want to fight monsters to grind for materials/EXP, or do a bunch of dens to get more eggs, or do sidequests, you can totally spend a bunch of time doing that. I know I did.

The combat has some cool ideas. It’s a bit odd because, despite having 2 to 4 units in battle at once, you only control one: yourself. Sort of. You can have up to 6 monsters with you at a time, but only one will help you in battle at once. You can have one ally. If the ally is a rider, they’ll have a monster of their own. If the ally is a hunter, they’ll be alone but be a bit stronger. Once per turn you can switch to a different monster and switch weapon. Before you choose your own action, you’ll see what your teammates are planning to do. If you’re not happy with your monster’s choice, you can give them orders. The orders, can only be skills, not normal attacks. Once you choose your attack and target, the turn goes, in speed order. It seems weird to not be able to control your other units much, but if you look at the rest of combat, you’d realize that too much control would make things too easy. So, weirdly enough, this is good design.

So how this game works is that normal attacks and skills have a “style” to them, represented by color. Red for Power, Blue for Speed and Green for Technical. When an enemy and one of your units are both targeting each other, there’s a “Head-to-Head”, which will compare the colors of the attacks. Red wins over Green, Green wins over Blue and Blue wins over Red. If you draw you just both hit each other. If you win, you deal more damage and get dealt less damage. If you lose, same thing but the other way. You do still deal damage regardless (and vice versa). But there’s one exception. If you and a monster or hunter are both targeting the same enemy and there’s a Head-to-Head that said unit would win, and you’re also using the same attack type (so, say, both using speed against a monster using power), you launch a double attack. This is an attack that combines the power of both units, and a bit more, and it also stops the enemy’s attack entirely, so you don’t get damaged back. For clarification, if you and the other unit are BOTH using a skill, the double attack won’t happen, but if one of you is using a skill and the other a normal attack, it will (and if the skill has a chance to deal some status effect, that still happens). Also you can’t Head-to-Head with a rider. This is a big focus for combat, if you get a lot of double attacks, that helps quite a bit because you stop enemies from doing anything.

Weapons are interesting. There’s 6 weapons from MH you can use here: Great Swords, Sword and Shield, Hammer, Hunting Horn, Bow and Gunlance. There’s 3 damage types. Slashing damage (GS and SaS), blunt (Hammer, HH) and piercing (bow, gunlance). As you may expect, enemies are gonna be weak to specific damage types. Big enemies have multiple body parts you can target, and so some parts on the same monster might not have the same weakness (tails like to be weak to slashing damage, for example, but not always). So, strategically, you could have one of each weapon type at a time, which is good because you can equip 3 weapons at once. The fun thing is that each weapon type functions differently. Great Swords have attack skills that give it charge, and attack skills that expend that charge for extra damage. Sword and Shield has elemental skills and, since you have a shield, provide more defense too. Hammer gains charge when you win a Head-to-Head, and that charge can be used for special kinds of attacks (3 charge for an attack that deals a lot of damage to monster parts). Hunting Horn doesn’t have functionality, kinda like the Sword and Shield, but instead has buffing moves for your party which can be useful. The bow has status effect moves, and also a Charge move to activate a special skill (different based on the bow), and doing that special skill also gives you a second attack in the turn in addition to the special skill. I… have no idea how the gunlance works, I think certain actions generate ammo that you can spend on special skills. Basically, all the weapons are pretty interesting, and since you can equip 3 you can have some good variety.

I guess to round off the combat part, just a few small things… I mentioned this quickly, but big monsters have several body parts to target. Some monsters get stunned for a turn if you destroy a specific part, which makes all your attacks crits. Very fun, very MH-ish. Breaking a part also gives you extra material drops which is nice. One thing about monsters (both those on your team and the ones you fight) have a certain attack type they’ll focus on. Ratha will focus on power, Khezu is technical, Barioth is speed. Just to name a few. They won’t exclusively use that attack type, but generally they’ll use that (I have a red palamute that, despite being speed, only uses power… very annoying). They may also have skills that don’t apply to their preferred type, which is helpful in some cases. Wild monsters do have that preferred type, as I mention, but sometimes they get mad, which changes their type (and you just have to remember these, or try to guess). Or some, like Zinogre, may charge up in different ways to perform big attacks, but during that process they’ll change types too. Also, an enraged enemy will sometimes attack twice in a turn (and even a double attack won’t fully stop them). And there’s items. Barrels do damage that ignores defense, sonic bombs scare monsters that hide underground and flash bombs can make fliers crash to the ground (and also blinds enemies which is a thing I guess). You may get some of the MH vibe from the item usage. There’s also all sorts of healing, of course. Another MH-ish element is how you actually lose abattle. You have 3 hearts (and your ally will have his or her own 3 hearts). If you or your monster gets to 0 HP you go down, but you get back up at the cost of a heart. If you have no more hearts, it’s game over and you’re carted back to town. So it pretty much works like in MH where you get 2 free knockdowns before failing a hunt. Finally, there’s a super meter you and your ally can fill up. When it’s full, you can ride your monster. Doing this heals you (the rider fully, and the monster heals the amount of HP the rider had before healing), and you can do normal attacks like this, which increases the level of your super bar. At any point you can use a Kinship attack. A kinship attack is stronger the more levels the super bar has. Some let you aim at specific body parts, some not. Kinship attacks will always completely stop the enemy from attacking this turn. If an ally uses a Kinship attack at the same time as you, you do a super special awesome double kinship attack for a ton of damage. And of course since this attack stops the enemy’s turn, you can’t get Head-to-Heads or double attacks during these.

So outside of battle and progressing the story, you can do a few things. Namely a lot of the game is spend fighting because enemies give you materials. Materials are used at the blacksmith to build new weapons and armor, as well as upgrade them. Different weapons will have different attack, defense and crit stats, but also different skills. So there’s some fun choices there. Same with armor, those give you different elemental defenses (and defense overall), but they also have a weakness (basically the defense value is lower), and up to 3 passive skills which can be all sorts of stuff like better crit rate or buffs when HP is full or buffs when HP is under 50%. There’s NPCs in towns that will give you sidequests. Those generally give okay rewards, sometimes even new attacks, always some EXP. Some quests that you finish will become repeatable sidequests on the quest board, which give different rewards but always a bit of EXP at least. Each town has a Prayer Pot. You can put charms in them for a buff (only one buff at once so you can overwrite the buff) and you can pray to it for a smaller buff that resets when you come back to a town. As you place more and more charms in the pot, you power up its buffs. Max level is 20, which takes, I think, around 170 charms. I suggest just sacrificing useless charms like lucky charms to get more pot levels TBH.

Powering up is fairly simple. Weapons and armor are a big thing for you (and each weapon can be upgraded to level 3). EXP levels you up. If a monster you have is lower level than you it actually gets bonus EXP, so if you get a new monster you like and want to use it, no problem even if you’re high level. Even at 1 level below you monsters get a 75% EXP bonus, it goes up to like 500% I think if they’re low enough. So monsters actually catch up to your party level pretty quickly which is great. You have your armor, monsters have genes. This is a 3 by 3 grid with 9 nodes. Each node either has a skill in it (passive or active). As a monster levels up it’ll unlock certain gene nodes. Some have skills in them, some are empty. If you have a non-rare monster, you’ll need stimulants to unlock them, rarer monsters usually have access to more genes slots by default. For empty slots, there’s something called the Rite of Channeling. Basically you sacrifice a monster to give one of its genes to another. So you can make them learn new attacks or give them new passive skills that way. The genes also have colors and icons. If you line up 3 of the same color or icon in the grid, you power up that “color”. For example, getting a red line powers up fire attacks by 10%. Lining up 3 “Speed” symbols power up Speed attacks by 10%. Very interesting. Also as you progress monsters tend to have better and better genes.

I guess quickly on eggs. When you go into a den, you’ll find ONE egg… sort of. There’s more than one in most dens (except everdens and retreat dens), but you can only carry one out. The same nest may include eggs from many monster types. You dig up in the nest at the end of the den. You’ll see the eggs design (and it’ll shine yellow if it’s rare and rainbow if it’s even more rare). The same designs will always be the same monster once it’s hatched, though each monster may have slightly different gene setups (regardless of rarity). If you find an egg of a certain design but the color is different, it’s probably a differently-colored (and thus probably better) version of the same monster. You can hatch as many eggs as you have slots at the stable. With bottle caps you can buy extra stable slots. The stable also lets you release monsters (something you’ll only do early in the game pretty much), and send monsters that aren’t in your party on expeditions (to gather items mostly).

The post game is fun. Basically the world spawns a bunch of High Rank monster dens. Much like normal MH games, High Rank monsters are way stronger, give stronger materials and yes, allow you to make better weapons than during the story campaign. Like, even the weakest high rank weapon is gonna be better than the best low rank weapon. These monster dens not only give you better materials from the High Rank monsters, but also the monster eggs in there have considerably better genes. I do have one complaint with that, specifically that you can’t tell by looking at a gene pool whether a gene is good or not. Like, if you have a monster that has Divine Blessing (M) and another with Divine Blessing (XL), you can’t tell the difference that easily. I feel there should be SOME indication. So anyways… alongside hunting, making better weapons and getting better monsters, there’s the Elder’s Lair. It’s a special challenge area where enemies are considerably stronger, so it’s the proper challenge part of the game. I assume there’s a final boss at the end because the monsterpedia does have an empty slot after the final boss. Also during post-game you can chose which of the allies from the story will follow you along. That’s fun, I get to have Kayna with me again. So yeah, the post-game is basically grinding some to beat challenge levels, it’s pretty good. It’s like a whole separate game.

I just realized I didn’t mention ride skills in this review yet… huh… yeah so different monsters can do different things outside of battles. Some jump, some fly, some climb vines, some break rocks, some dive in lava. It’s good to build your team to have a good variety of things because you never know what’s gonna be in a monster den or story “dungeons”.

Overall

I really had a lot of fun with this game. The combat is really interesting and fun. It seems a bit weird at first but the design is actually really well thought-out if you think about it. The monster collecting and grinding and team-making and post-game are all really fun stuff. Upgrading your character and monster party is always fun. I don’t even mind that every monster den is the exact same bunch of randomly generated set of preset rooms. Honestly I have very few problems with this game, surprisingly. It’s really good. Surprisingly, it’s a pretty good representation of Monster Hunter concepts made into a console-style RPG, with the monster hunting for materials, items functioning like they do in MH, different weapon types functioning differently and even something like separating the game between low and high rank monsters and equipment. It’s very much a Monster Hunter game despite playing differently.

If I have any complaints, it would be that Ena feels fairly pointless, I’d like her to have a bit more of a role (I was expecting her to participate on gameplay at some point but she doesn’t). And I think they could do some better things visually to show which genes are better and such (no way to differentiate an S gene from an XL gene just by looking at them is pretty annoying when you have a lot of monsters in your stables). And if they could let us skip the Rite of Channeling and egg hatch animations, that would be great. And Navirou is annoying (I don’t need to be interrupted EVERY SINGLE TIME when I get in the egg room to be told there’s if there’s a monster in there or if it’s sleeping, I can see that, with my eyes). There’s probably a few other really small complaints that honestly don’t really bring the experience down at all.

I did see lots of complaints about the Switch version’s performance. This is vastly overstated. It barely ever chugs at all, except in cutscenes. Sometimes it drops from 30fps to the mid-20s in certain areas/towns but it hardly noticeable. Yeah the PC version will run better… but that kinda goes without saying. The Switch is a potato, and it runs this game pretty admirably.

I definitely recommend getting this game, it’s really fucking good. I was surprised at how much I was enjoying myself playing it, and I want to continue doing the post game a bit still.