Monster Hunter 4 Ships 4 Million Units in Japan

[roseofbattle]

Monster Hunter 4 Ships 4 Million Units in Japan

The Monster Hunter series has done very well for itself, and Monster Hunter 4 shows that the 3DS is standing strong.

Shipments of Monster Hunter 4 have topped four million, Capcom announced today. Despite its great success within Japan, Capcom has made no announcements on whether it will bring the game to western territories.

The 3DS game launched in Japan in September and sold two million units [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/127853-Monster-Hunter-4-Sells-Two-Million-Units-in-Four-Days] in just four days. Capcom marketed the game through events like the "Monster Hunter Festa '13" in five cities across Japan; 48,500 attended. Celebrities promoted the game in TV commercials as well. Another event, "Monster Hunter 4 in Nanja Town" in Tokyo, is still ongoing. Starting February 2014, Capcom and Universal Studios Japan will present "Monster Hunter the Real 2014." So yes, Monster Hunter is doing very well for itself. As of today, the series, first launched in 2004 for the PlayStation 2, has shipped 28 million units. This number includes sales of the downloadable version.

That's good news for Capcom and Monster Hunter fans, but the good numbers also show that games for the 3DS have been selling well. Pokemon X and Y sold four million units [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/129211-Animal-Crossing-New-Leaf-Sells-6-35-Million-Units] within just a few days of its launch. Even if Nintendo is struggling to market the Wii U to consumers, the 3DS is the company's winner.

Western fans hoping to play Monster Hunter 4 will have to keep waiting for an announcement of western release - if one ever comes.

Source: Capcom [http://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/news/html/e131204.html]


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[Yopaz]

Seriously Capcom, get your heads out of your asses and release this in Europe. It's one of the few games that you're making money from and there's no voices that needs to be translated.

I really want to play this game since everything I've seen seems quite cool and I am really enjoying 3 so far.

 

[OuendanCyrus]

I've already put around 50 hours into this. As a former Long Sword user, I'm loving the hell out of the Charge Axe~

 

[FancyNick]

I want this! Come on guys, throw us a bone here.

 

[Cybylt]

Wait, I havn't tried it before, but how the fuck would one play a Monster Hunter game on 3DS? I mean, it was horrible enough to control on PSP for gods sake.

Surprisingly well, they've added a soft lock on toggle as well as a camera controlling d-pad on the touch screen.

Touch screen can also be set with kind of hotkeys and shortcuts.

The Quick Look feature is probably the big one though, it's a toggle where when you tap L you look at the selected boss monster instead of re-centering the camera. Fixed vertical angles to the camera are gone too, bringing in a complete free rotational camera.

4 also finally brings full online to a handheld entry, as well as feeling like a much more natural successor to the second generations titles, and I say that as someone who loved Tri and 3U.

The main new features though are the faster animations, jumping attacks, and clinging attacks where you hold yourself onto the back of a monster by stabbing into it with a pair of carving knives in a reversal of the pinning attacks brought with the third generation. Then there's the addition of climbing, and with that climbing comes along insanely more natural, multi-tiered terrain. Anything about head level and lower is instantly scaled, you can climb in just about every angle, leap off of cliff faces to attack, and make quick hops up, down, left, or right while climbing.

In the look of the game, there is a much more vibrant color palette to it, though it's resulted in the screenshots not making the transition to a pc display all that well. The game is gorgeous in play though, and the AI and motion improvements are immediately noticeable.

For the old fans, we've also seen the return of Veloci/Gen/Io-drome/prey, Kut Ku, Garuga, Congalala, Gypceros, Basarios, Gravios, Kirin, Kushala Daora, Akantor, Teostra, Rajang(and his angry cousin), and both the black and crimson variants of Fatalis. All with totally revamped movesets and animations.

That isn't to say there's no new monsters here though, there's the new Serpent Wyvern, Insects(specifically a giant flying mantis and a massive armored scorpion that are actually the male and female of the same species and a giant spider that skins gypceros to wear their hides over its pearl-like carapace)and Amphibian class monsters. My favorite is this ice shark frog that bloats its body once it is out of its rage mode.

There's also rabid versions of just about every monster that hit like a ton of bricks but have weaker elemental resistances and less health.

Another thing, we finally got a plot. The story follows your travels with a caravan through several towns on the hunt for a mystery beast that dropped an emerald scale all the while being hounded by a black wyvern that spreads a rabid infection.

Oh, and for those who complained about the drop in difficulty as the series went on. High rank Great Jaggi hip check hits nearly twice as hard as low rank Rathalos fireballs.

Just fucking top notch stuff all around.

 

[Yopaz]

So its completely and utterly unplayable. Thanks for clearing that up. If your using your hands on the direction buttons and the face buttons, you cant use the touch screen period. So its less playable then it was on PSP. (which at least had the hand pain giving claw technique)
Also the animations were fast enough (at least from my experience playing Freedom Unite) and going any faster would hurt the game. Plus, that picture looks just as vibrant as Freedom Unite was. And that game also had full online. The lock-on also sounds like something that would VASTLY decrease the difficulty, especially against charging attacks.



So a game I barely enjoyed somehow managed to damage the little I found good, or brag about things that were in previous titles, showing a complete lack of confidence in the games quality.

It's not a lock-on it's a quicker way to turn the camera in order to orientate yourself, it works exactly like simply turning the camera in every other Monster Hunter which means that if you do it at the wrong time you're screwed.. You don't need to use the touch screen as you can use the circle pad pro, but the touch screen can be used to quickly access potions rather than scrolling through all your items.

Good to see you have read just the bare minimum of the control scheme and already deemed it unplayable.

 

[Cybylt]

So its completely and utterly unplayable. Thanks for clearing that up. If your using your hands on the direction buttons and the face buttons, you cant use the touch screen period. So its less playable then it was on PSP. (which at least had the hand pain giving claw technique)
Also the animations were fast enough (at least from my experience playing Freedom Unite) and going any faster would hurt the game. Plus, that picture looks just as vibrant as Freedom Unite was. And that game also had full online. The lock-on also sounds like something that would VASTLY decrease the difficulty, especially against charging attacks.



So a game I barely enjoyed somehow managed to damage the little I found good, or brag about things that were in previous titles, showing a complete lack of confidence in the games quality.

You make it sound as if you always have to have your hand on the direction pad(to clarify, I mean the touchpad one) and face buttons at once, which you don't. The claw was a workaround to a shitty situation, not something that was actually good. I don't know why people continually convince themselves otherwise.

Freedom Unite did not have full online, it had ad-hoc local multiplayer and you could use a PS3 to get into an online mode, but it had no full online built into itself.

Like I said, the pictures don't translate well, and it looks much better on the system itself.

Faster may not be the right word, but Unite looks like It's a Small World robots compared to it. Stiff, rigid, and lifeless. And again, it's not a full lock on but a quick look, instead of using the claw to constantly make micro-adjustments to your vision, you just tap L and get back into the fight. It's a recetering that looks at the monster instead of straight ahead.

First and second gen had slow, stiff, robotic creatures with highly obvious tells, but it was difficult through the fake difficulty of a shitty camera and broken hitboxes. Third gen fixed the hitboxes and animations, and 4 refines it even more by making the creatures harder to read by making them move more naturally and subtly.

"I can play through the shitty controls!" is dumb, dumb consolation. Seriously. And I think you completely ignored that the monsters still kill you in two or three hits, or that when you combine that with the less readable, more agile nature of their new motions, makes for infinitely more challenging battles. The game's not hard because of bullshit broken mechanics anymore, it's hard because it's genuinely challenging and requires you to learn the increasingly subtle tells and exploit openings of everything you face.