Week 8: Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

46 hours. Mathed out, thus far I've spent about $5 an hour towards my investment in a New 3DSXL with Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. That ratio is pretty great already. It'll get much better not only because I will end up putting many, many more hours into MH4U, but because there are a number of 3DS games I haven't played that are waiting for me too. Right now, though, it's all about Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate.

Monster Hunter has been around for awhile. It started on PS2, has been on PSP, PS3 (HD Port), Wii, Wii U, and 3DS. I didn't really get play until Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on the PSP, and even then I wasn't "into" it that much. That really happened with Monster Hunter 3 on the Wii. I put a lot of time into that game, then even more into Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate for Wii U/3DS. We're talking 400+ hours. So what clicked? What made me fall in love with this series? Nothing has fundamentally changed since the series started, but it was finally understanding the game that made me enjoy it as much as a do. I'm not really going to do a full rundown of the game. I'm just going to talk about Monster Hunter as a series and what the game is at its core, for those that don't know. There are a lot of reviews out there for people that want more information.

To say Monster Hunter can be obtuse is an understatement. There are a number of things they do poorly, and up until MH4U, teaching the player how to play the game was chief among them. Honestly, there is still a ways for them to go, too. There are a lot of moving parts to understand, and without someone having explained them to me, I probably would not have gotten into the series.

I realize that there may be some people that don't really know what Monster Hunter is. The easy explanation is Dungeon Boss Fight: The Game. You and up to three friends gear up and go fight giant monsters. A more complicated explanation is that its a lot like boxing. It requires patience, understanding your opponent, knowing when to jab versus when to go in with the haymaker. Maybe MMA with it's large variety of fighting styles is actually more accurate. Either works as an analogy.

In both of those sports, pattern recognition is a major part. Fighters will study tape of their opponents, and watch for certain tells that they have. "When leans back with his left shoulder, he's trying to get me to move in so that he can swing at me with his right," is something one might notice. Some might call it a tell. They'll then come up with a way to react to that situation if it comes up during the fight. At it's core, this is what Monster Hunter is. Knowing a monster, and how to react. Each monster has it's own patterns and tells. Each weapon type you can use has it's own attack speed and combos. Every item has it's own timing for using during a battle. All the armor sets provide more than just extra defense. What you do with this information can win or lose you the fight.

It's worth noting that Monster Hunter is not an easy game. You're probably going to fail learning a monster before finally winning, and this is part of what makes the game great for me. I have probably shouted more in both anger and joy at Monster Hunter than any other game I've played. The frustration of failing a quest whenever the monster is already injured; the exhilaration of killing a monster you've been bashing your head against a few times. It's a feeling rarely matched in gaming. In fact, the only other time I've been as excited about finally overcoming a boss in a game was being in the first group in the guild I was in that took down The Lich King in World of Warcraft after weeks of trying. Monster Hunter provides that feeling regularly.

Next week, I will talk a little more about Monster Hunter, and give some protips that I learned from people which helped me when I started out. They also give a better picture of the game, too.

Currently Playing: Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate
Games Completed: 3 (The Longest Journey, Final Fantasy XIII-2, Hyrule Warriors)
Games Purchased (SP/Narrative): 1 (Majora's Mask)
Other Games Purchased: GRAV, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate
Net Total: +2

Week 7: Better Late than Never

So I've been a bit busy. Well, a bit is an understatement, but I still had time to finish the Story Mode in Hyrule Warriors. I have to say, it's a really entertaining game. As mentioned in my post last week, it succeeds because it doesn't try to do too much with it's core gameplay and builds around it in interesting ways. Getting loot, skill trees, leveling...the systems aren't anything too extravagant, but they're good enough and pull together well to make it a lot of fun. There is still a lot of game there to play with the Adventure Mode, and I'll probably continue playing it off and on.

I got my New 3DS on Friday, and picked up both Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate and Majora's Mask. I had to think about what I was really tracking for completion in regards to my backlog, and I decided that when I talk about completing games, I'm really thinking about games that have a generally single player, narrative driven experience. So, for instance, a game like Minecraft wouldn't count against purchases. That actually applies to the only other game I've purchased this year, GRAV. So I'm going to remove it. Maybe that's cheating? Ah well. I'm still going to track all the purchases here, but label them differently. With my focus on actually playing things, I'll still hopefully end up above even.

Since MH4U isn't really a game with an end, I'm not going to count it against purchases. Majora's Mask, however, does count. I haven't started Majora's Mask, and I actually never played it on the N64. I'm really looking forward to it. It will have to wait, though, as MH4U is going to get a majority of my time. Look forward to this coming weekend, in which I expound the reasons why I love Monster Hunter as a series, and what the new one does to make it even better.

Currently Playing: Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate
Games Completed: 3 (The Longest Journey, Final Fantasy XIII-2, Hyrule Warriors)
Games Purchased (SP/Narrative): 1 (Majora's Mask)
Other Games Purchased: GRAV, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate
Net Total: +2

It's Game Time!: Week 6: Hyrule Warriors & Darkest Dungeon - with g...

It's Game Time!: Week 6: Hyrule Warriors & Darkest Dungeon - with g...: When I've gotten a chance to play anything this week, it's either been Darkest Dungeon, which I Kickstarted last year, or Hyrule War...

Week 6: Hyrule Warriors & Darkest Dungeon - with guest blurb by Richard Dansky

When I've gotten a chance to play anything this week, it's either been Darkest Dungeon, which I Kickstarted last year, or Hyrule Warriors with the wife. Let's talk about Darkest Dungeon for a bit. I'm just going to steal their blurb from their Steam page:

Darkest Dungeon is a challenging gothic roguelike turn-based RPG about the psychological stresses of adventuring. Recruit, train, and lead a team of flawed heroes against unimaginable horrors, stress, famine, disease, and the ever-encroaching dark. Can you keep your heroes together when all hope is lost?

Essentially, your father wasn't happy enough living a life of luxury in a swanky cliff-side estate and decided to dig into the earth, finding a gateway to a realm of evil. Good job, dad! Now it's up to you to recruit adventurers and send them off to their eventual death in an attempt to reclaim the place. The game works on building a large group to select from, and continually cycling them in and out of groups of four, shoveling them off into dungeons to try to get heirlooms and increase their levels. While they're on their adventures, which you control, they'll gain stress, which can give them attributes that change their character. There is a lot to juggle in the game, and it can seem like too much at times. It's also intended to be very difficult, and excels at this. If you want to rush through something, it definitely is not the game for you. They want it to be slow paced overall. They could have some better explanations in some of the menus, but it's Early Access still, so we'll see what they do over time besides add content to it. So far, it's an extremely fun game if you're looking for a Rogue-like that doesn't play with kid gloves.

Now, Hyrule Warriors is a game I'm really enjoying, too. Yes, it's a Musou game. For those that don't know, Musou games are the "genre" that games like Dynasty and Samurai Warriors belong to. Most of them are made by Koei, as it's something they kind of specialize in. You play as a single character and fight against hordes of enemies. In Dynasty and Samurai Warriors, they try to tie into some historical reference material, but that isn't why you play, because they just get ridiculous in that regard. I asked Richard Dansky, Lead Clancy Writer for Ubisoft, friend and former co-worker, to write a few thoughts as to what makes Musou games great. He's responsible for me getting into them, as I didn't really play them much until I kept hearing him talk about them.

"The wonderful thing about Musou games is that they have a very simple goal: Make you feel like an incredible badass. And so when done well, they bend all their systems towards reinforcing that feeling of ultimate mastery. Flying bodies, camera pans, SFX, kill counters spinning like crazy - all of that is there to tell you that you are indeed awesome." - Richard Dansky

And they do a great job of this in Hyrule Warriors, which is a Musou set in The Legend of Zelda universe. Numerous characters to choose from, huge over-the-top attacks, and easy to pick up gameplay make it great to play after a day of work. I don't have to think too hard to make awesome stuff happen. I'll probably finish the main story this week, but will likely continue to play after finishing the story as there is a lot of extra stuff to unlock. Of course, hopefully on Friday I'll be playing Monster Hunter 4. It all depends on when Gamestop ships my New 3DS.


Currently Playing: Hyrule Warriors, Darkest Dungeon
Games Completed: 2
Games Purchased: 1
Net Total: +1

Week 5: Another Final Fantasy Finally Finished

Two games completed in 2015! Hooray!

Seriously, though. I have this terrible habit of starting games and not finishing them, so it's actually nice to see them through to the end. It's not really an outstanding achievement or anything, but it makes me feel like I'm not wasting my money.

So, Final Fantasy XIII-2. What a strange game... From a gameplay standpoint, very solid. I'm a fan of the Paradigm system, and that was here and working very well. Having two permanent party members for the entirety of the game felt a bit weird, but the ability to get monsters and use them to build out the paradigms you had was pretty neat. There were "right answers", by which I mean there were ones you wanted to grind to have, and that's always a bit of a bummer since it doesn't really let you have the ones you WANT to have. 

The story was about time travel and paradoxes and fixing timelines, etc. I watch Doctor Who, so wibbley-wobbley timey-whimey stuff doesn't really bother me, but there were more than a few things that weren't explained very well at all. I'm not going to go into spoilers here, but man they used very theory of time travel that exists. I think. It's confusingly straightforward. 

Overall, it's not going to reside in my upper-tier list of Final Fantasy-related titles. I wasn't compelled to do any of the side content as I didn't really care enough about the rewards or characters to want to stick with them too long. My completed save clocked in at 18 hours, which is apparently not too far off from doing a speed run. Honestly, at 18 hours, I felt it was starting to overstay its welcome. I admit I almost gave up on the last boss with the intent to just watch the ending, simply because I'd screwed up my leveling and didn't realize it until the end, which made the final fight pretty difficult. I gave it another few goes, though, and managed to eek it out. That felt pretty good. In all I give it 3 Red Chocobos (yes that's actually the song that plays when you ride a red chocobo in the game)/5.

Up next, I'm really going to dig into Hyrule Warriors. I've not given that game the attention I've heard it deserves.

Currently Playing: Hyrule Warriors
Games Completed: 2
Games Purchased: 1
Net Total: +1