My Thoughts: Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate

Yes. YES!

No, ugh. FUCK YOU! Fuck you. Go to hell.

But still yes. Oh my god, yes. This will make sense in a second.

That summarizes my relationship with Monster Hunter over the years. Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is no different. The series is the heavyweight brawler that I hate the most but can’t stop playing. Each iteration of the game is a real two-forward, one-back situation. For this one, they’ve brought forward all the weapons they dropped in Tri. They added some critters from Portable 3rd.  They added lock on targeting. LOCK ON TARGETING! Something that MH fans derided and hated!

But along with the improvements they do things like dropping online play from the 3DS version. Tri on Wii had online and the Wii U version still retains it. If you own a Wii U, you can download a tunneling app to let you play the 3DS version online. So… why didn’t they just get online into the 3DS edition? It’s not like they even do local networking very well. They don’t even keep the small monsters in sync!

Why would Capcom remove sub-quests? Does anyone dislike receiving bonus materials? Why can’t any single interface be logically consistent with any other interface in the game? Why can’t I do sick gestures while readied for a quest and waiting for everyone else to join? Why can’t you Free Hunt in all the environments? Why, Capcom? “Why” so much and in such great volumes that it’s crazy.

But then I kill a really terrifying creature with three of my friends, and I can’t help but keep playing. No one else is making a comparable game. The others are all either too anime or not heavy and brutal enough. Capcom has a stupid strangle hold on this tiny (in America) niche. They never make the extra effort to really pull everything together to make it sing and bring in all the people who don’t get it. Instead, I sigh and try to overlook the horrendous UI and tiny piles of poor design decisions in order to enjoy it as much as I can.

Fuck. Maybe MH4 will be different.

Parting sidenote: It seems crazy to me that any of my friends just getting into Monster Hunter with this title will have never known Yian Kut-Ku. How can you be playing Monster Hunter but not know the Kut-Ku?

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MrMortis

A videogamesman making some video games.

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