If you’re not a Monster Hunter player, you should be. There’s a reason it’s so successful; like Dark Souls, it’s both exceptionally challenging and incomparably exhilarating, once you’ve gotten past your first few hours of pitiful flailing. It’s not just a series of boss fights, though each significant encounter with a properly intimidating monster evokes all the adrenaline and fear of the best boss battles in other games. It’s about getting to know your prey, learning their behaviour, and having the testicular fortitude to stand right under the noses of some of the meanest beasts ever imagined and poke a lance into their faces.
By the time you’re good enough to actually defeat Monster Hunter’s most intimidating foes, you’ll know them intimately. It’s just as much about the preparation, and the failure, as it is about the killing. Hence Monster Hunter, and not just Monster Fighter.
Monster Hunter Tri on Wii was quite easily the best in the series, and 3 Ultimate is an expanded version of it for 3DS and Wii U. The 3DS version has been out in Japan since last year and the Wii U version is due on December 8th, but both the 3DS and Wii U versions will launch together in North America and Europe in 2013. It’s got about 50% more content, most of which is up in the highest ranks of the game, but otherwise there are few changes. It’s got the same weapon selection – the awesome transforming Switch Axe among them – and the same sprawling maps, with a few extra monsters to hunt in them. And because Monster Hunter Portable 3rd on PSP never made it out of Japan, all those monsters are new to us, too. Among them is the Urcusis, one of the three monsters in the Tokyo Game Show demo.
Every significant encounter evokes all the adrenaline and fear of the best boss battles in other games
There is arguably nothing more representative of the Monster Hunter experience than trying and failing to kill what is essentially a giant armoured rabbit for half an hour, but that’s what happened to me and three others in the snowy expanses of the tundra map. The Urcusis isn’t the scariest monster in the world, but it’s fast, and with gameplay time limited to ten minutes we struggled to make a dent in him. Imagine an extremely aggressive bunny crossed with a koala, except bigger than a bear. That’s pretty much him. I picked the gunlance, which is a lance that also shoots explosive shells from its pointy tip, but it wasn’t the best choice; it’s a slow weapon for an aggressive monster, and he was very fond of sitting on me.
The Brachydios – a slavering, intimidating, rock-hard creature that slams its arms into the ground and leaves a sticky green residue that explodes if you touch it – was an even less approachable foe. He’d probably be pretty tough even without the explosive arms; he wipes his slobbering maw with them as you approach as if in anticipation of crunching up your hunter’s bones. Even with full Rathalos armour, his biggest attacks wipe out a good quarter of your health bar.
When Nintendo announced the Circle Pad Pro – or the 3DS Boat, as it’s still affectionately known by some of us at IGN – my immediate assumption was that it was made for Monster Hunter. But although you can use the add-on, 3 Ultimate actually works perfectly well without it. You can use the touch screen instead to control the camera, moving your left thumb off the buttons and onto a D-pad icon on the screen to move the view around your hunter. A press of the L button centres it behind him or her. Technically you can use the actual D-Pad as well, but as movement is on the left analogue, it’s an even more impractical setup than it was on the PSP. It’s still not a perfect compromise – nothing’s quite as accurate as a second analogue – but Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate a lot easier to control on 3DS that it was on Sony’s handheld even without the Circle Pad Pro, which hopefully should knock down one of the biggest barriers to entry for new players.
There’s no online play for the 3DS version, though, which means playing Monster Hunter at its best will still involve trying to persuade some friends to buy it too. On the plus side, you can use the same save file for Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate on both 3DS and Wii U, so you can play online at home and single-player (or local multiplayer) on the move. We’ve not seen this data-transferring in action, but hopefully it’ll be a simple process.
We’ll have more on the Wii U version of Monster Hunter 3 in the coming days – and tomorrow, I’ll be braving the enormous Tokyo Game Show queues to play Monster Hunter 4, the 3DS’ killer app here in Japan. It hasn't been confirmed for the West yet, but with Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate on the way for Wii U and 3DS worldwide, I have high hopes.
Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN’s games coverage in the UK, and has spent hundreds of hours hunting monsters on the PS2, PSP and Wii over a good five years now. You can follow her on Twitter and IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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