Yahtzee Croshaw said:
But of course the actual point of the game is the fights with giant monsters. That's what all the ancillary pottering about is leading up to and the most glaring absence from the main points of my review. Well, I did actually play far enough to start doing those. The last mission I played was one that had me hunting and killing some giant version of the velociraptor lads.
Basically this involved me smashing my shortsword against his flank over and over and over again, chipping away at his wretchedly massive amount of health for half an hour because every other weapon was so fucking slow to use that he'd jump out of the way and slap me across the chops with his tail in the time it took to swing them. This isn't even mentioning the weapon degradation system, for which someone badly deserves a mongoose up the trouser leg. Every ten hits or so (with the stupid, stupid Wiimote controls) my sword would lose sharpness, to the point that every other blow would bounce ringingly off the monster's hide as if I'd hit the thing with a fucking bamboo walking stick. So I'd have to pick between trying to get through the fight with a half-useless weapon or run off to slide a whetstone slowly along the blade with even odds whether or not the boss and all his friends come over and interrupt me with murder.
Was that really so hard..? :|
If you had acknowledged this boss fight to begin with, maybe it wouldn't have been blown out of hand to quite this extent. Obviously, some people would still complain, but probably not to
quite the same extent. I know I personally wouldn't have even bothered posting, as I'm well aware of many of the issues in the game(and yes I do like the game.) The thing that bothered me was that they weren't even being acknowledged... Different people have different opinions and I respect that, which I actually find interesting to listen to (Maybe I'm weird in that respect? I don't know), assuming they actually talk about the main game. I enjoyed hearing you complain about that boss fight being frustrating/tedious/annoying/etc, significantly more than 'collecting mushrooms' and 'killing small helpless animals'...
Yahtzee Croshaw said:
I won't bother quoting specific examples, suffice to say there were a lot of them. The main thrust of the argument was that Monster Hunter Tri totally gets good once you've gotten past the tutorial, which takes about ten hours of gameplay.
Ten hours. Do you people listen to yourselves? Maybe if I had your kind of wealthy, privileged lifestyle and could spend most of my days idly playing Wii by the pool as a team of oiled bodybuilders fanned me with palm fronds, but some of us have jobs to do. Articles to write. Other, better games to review. Fun Space Games to avoid working on. As I've said time and again, "it gets better later" as an excuse does not wash for me. Even if the game is 50 percent poo and 50 percent mind-blowing envelope-pushing extravaganza, that's still mediocre on average.
Maybe I missed something, but I don't recall anyone saying anything about 10 hours. Not entirely sure where you're getting that from. Single Player took me less than a couple hours to get into boss fighting territory, and on multiplayer I was already fighting the chicken-dragon boss with 4 friends 30 seconds into the game (Qurupeco, if anyone's wondering.) Other than that, I've spent god knows how many hours at this game... and hardly ever collect mushrooms/etc unless I need to whip together a couple of mega potions for healing during a boss fight, which are obscenely easy to find and take a matter of seconds at the worst. Other than that, one of the *worst* things I had to do in terms of gathering was getting a few Machalite Ores, which I basically just ran off to the side for a moment while my teammates were fighting the boss in the same area, banged on a couple of rocks with my pick axe for several seconds and jumped right back into the fight. After a couple of these quests we were already doing anyway, I managed to get I needed on the way and that was it, without ever going on any gathering quests, I just grabbed them during the boss fights.
However, this of course all comes down to whether someone actually
enjoys said boss fights or not. Which I fully expected you would loathe, and was hoping you would tear it to shreds in your video review last week, but that unfortunately didn't happen.
Yahtzee Croshaw said:
Someone explain to me how it makes sense that you can only change your equipment in your bedroom. Well, sure, OK, it would make sense in real life, but what if I'm in the overworld fighting big slow lumbering monsters with my giant two-handed sword, but now I've spotted some of those quick, whippy little bastards and want to switch to a shortsword and shield? I'd have to go all the way back home to do it. That'd just be embarrassing. Like having to come back to school in the evening because you left your P.E. kit there.
Essentially, the idea is to promote tactical play, in a sort of class-based manner. It's primarily designed around the concept of 4 player groups with other people fighting stuff together, so they expect you to essentially pick a 'role' for the group and stick with it. Although, it doesn't translate all that well to single player, and I personally think it would been nice if they would have let you have 2 weapon slots in Offline play, as sometimes the enemies are rather annoying to fight against depending on what's going on and normally, if you were online, your team would vary up some different tactics to suit the situation. Although, I suppose the weird little Cha Cha creature they slapped onto it helps with this a bit, but it's still not quite the same...
The map itself, by the way, is not actually an 'overworld'. It's just a plain old, nothing special level. You wind up fighting in others as well, like a volcano, snowy mountains, desert, swamp, etc. The whole 'overworld' aspect that they let you wander around in at Moga Woods wasn't even present in the original Monster Hunter, but they put it in there so that if people felt like wandering around it and fishing for example, if they wanted to, they could. As originally, it was purely mission based, and you only loaded up a level when you had a quest to do, but some people found that extremely annoying (said quest changes the sort of creatures in the level as well, which can make things even trickier if people just want to do some random little thing), so it was added in as an option. Otherwise it's basically a set of different environment types which shuffle creatures/bosses/enemies/etc in them depending on what quests you pick. Sometimes, even the environment items move around a bit, like one mission might for example have a small patch or two for grabbing spiderwebs to make a pitfall trap for fighting the boss, while others will have something else, etc.