Monster Hunter Freedom 2

» Written on November 25, 2007 at 2:28 PM «

Box artThis is quickly turning into a game review blog, yes? Rest assured that my sudden vigour for bombastic critique is merely a temporary delusion that plagues my brain, a fad if you will, serving only to quell my urges to write about something (seeing as I haven’t really been doing anything else other than studying and playing as of late; I don’t think I’ve even touched XSI in the last couple of months). Today I shall go over yet another of the delights that I have accquired for my PSP but neglected to rant about in the chaos of school and examinations. Damn, who knew writing pointless reviews that no one ever reads could be so much fun?

Monster Hunter Freedom 2. I’ve never actually played its predecessor, dismissing it as yet another anime-inspired action RPG that was sorely based on the ever-popular MMORPG mechanic of grinding, something which I think I’ve finally grown out of after a few gruelling months of finding jewels of bless in the korean MMO MU Online.

Still, the original Monster Hunter Freedom, or Monster Hunter Portable as it was called in Japan, was one of the few PSP titles to actually hit the magic million in terms of overall sales, so when its sequel finally arrived, accompanied by much fanfare and mediocre reviews, I found the stark contrast curious and decided to see for myself what the fuss was all about.

When I booted up the game, it quickly became apparent to me that Monster Hunter Freedom 2 was definitely tailored as a single-player MMO experience of sorts: the character creation interface strangely resembled what I would perhaps find in Guild Wars, though definitely not as customizable as what you might find in Oblivion or Mass Effect. Tha’s understandable, of course, this is a PSP we’re talking about, and the UMD storage limitations aren’t exactly something to dismiss with ease. I ended up pimping my character with the best Squall Leonhart hairdo I could find, made him a blonde and proceeded to enter the game, expecting to remove the UMD and put it up on eBay a few minutes later.

In the villageThe opening cinematic surprised me at first; I had thought that the game would immediately plunge you into grindfest with no prior explanation or exposition, but as the sequence drew on, I realized that this in fact was the case; essentially the cinematic merely explains why you end up in a quaint snowy village with heavy nomadic influences, both in the atmosphere and the visual style. In fact, Monster Hunter has a very interesting visual style that isn’t usually seen in Eastern RPGs; it combines very obvious anime character styles with that of not ancient civilizations or futuristic steampunk technology, but quasi-modern nomadic styles that could actually exist in the modern world, save for the monsters prowling around the region, and the ubiquitous cats that seem to populate the village area.

Anyway, after a short explanation of your role as a monster hunter, which seems quite obvious actually, you’re encouraged to check out the chest in your house, which when checked will give you a starter set of basic equipment, which, I’m told, is a great improvement over the original game, since apparently now it’s a lot more friendly to newbies, (I’m told you can even import your save files from the old game and load your old characters into this one, which is pretty cool) and then given some training to educate you on the nuances of this game. Here is where the game’s complexity starts to show; the training can really take a long time, and I was on the verge of giving up and playing something else, because with the combined efforts of lame jokes from the training instructor and the numerous training missions I had to actually complete before being allowed to go on quest, my irritation with the game rose quite the fair bit.In your house

Admittedly, with the amount of game mechanics that this title has, it’s easy to understand the difficulty in educating the player in each and every one of them without making the experience feel boring, but perhaps such training should have been made optional, or at least integrated into the first few quests instead of being given a seperate mandatory section altogether. This would have at least alleviated some of the discomfort I had when labouring over the arduous training sessions.

Anyway, after enduring the training, I’m finally allowed to take quests from the village elder, who makes odd noises that remind me of the Old Woman from Worms Armageddon. Here’s where the MMO mechanic of Monster Hunter will quickly become obvious to players if they’re totally new to the series: the first few quests will have you gathering x of y items and killing x of y monsters for their completion conditions respectively, netting you some money and materials. Sound familiar? That’s because it is; Monster Hunter is essentially a single-player MMO experience, and it doesn’t try to sugarcoat that any way it can.

The game from this point on really has no other progression in terms of its storyline other than character development, and when I say character development I’m referring to basically killing more shit, finding more shit, crafting more shit, and doing it all over again. Seriously. There is basically nothing else in the game mechanic that is not relevant to one of the above aims; to pimp out your character as best as you can. Normally, I really dislike games that do not guide the player towards a significant purpose; they tend to fall flat on their faces and fail to keep the player’s interest within a very short amount of time, such as MU Online. Even Guild Wars had an overarching storyline to keep the player’s focus on saving Tyria with their heroics, and wasn’t sorely focused on grinding.

Which is why it will probably sound weird when I say Monster Hunter Freedom 2′s game mechanics work really well.

Why? It’s because of all the goddamned content in this game. Honestly. From the character customization to the weapon/armour crafting to the item creation systems, the game simply reeks of content. Monsters have varied and extravagant designs, there are far too many types of weapons and associated fighting styles for me to ever fully master, and there are inane amounts of armour and weapons that you can craft from the even more inane amounts of materials that you can find on your expeditions around the game world. It’s just simply bursting to the brim with content, and for fans of the original who think otherwise, all your favourite critters have returned, with a few new additions and a few new weapon types as well, along with a whole host of other game mechanics such as having cooks in your house to prepare meals. It’s really quite impressive just how much content there is; it could actually rival that of other typical RPGs.Combat

Monster Hunter has always had its trump card in the form of its RPG mechanic, so I shall now elaborate on its combat system. Essentially, you have a whole host of different weapon types to choose from: the short sword and shield, the longsword (which is what I’m currently using), the great sword, the crossbow, the bow, the hammer, the hunting horn and the gunlance. All of which have different styles associated with them. That makes for a lot of different ways you can choose to tackle enemies in this game.

Each weapon type has their own advantages and disadvantages; for example, fighting with the short sword allows for quick attacks, quick escapes from attacks, and the shield allows damage to be reduced by a whole lot. You can also use items (such as potions) when guarding with the shield, whereas with other weapon types you are forced to sheath your current weapon before using any items, a real time-saver. However, the short sword deals pitiful damage, and this could be a problem against larger ‘boss’ monsters when you are forced to fight an extended battle with them.  Conversely, the great sword deals powerful blows to monsters, even sometimes stunning them, but comes at the expense of heavy, clumsy maneuvers, forcing you to time your attacks carefully, lest you risk a counter.

For my currently preferred class, the longsword, it has the advantage of powerful strikes, mixed with decent speed and agility. Additionally, the longsword has a ‘spirit gauge’ that charges up whenever I connect my strikes, and allows me to execute ‘spirit attacks’, which, when coupled with attack combos, can deal an ungodly amount of damage to any critter who has the misfortune of getting in the way. However, I must still time my strikes correctly, as the longsword has a long recovery time (but not as long as the great sword), and it has less sharpness than other swords, which means that for long, extended battles, my sword could risk losing its sharpness and start bouncing off enemies (literally) or worse, shatter into pieces (thankfully I have not experienced this yet). Using a whetstone while being ravaged by a Yian-Kut-Ku dragon isn’t exactly grounds for survival, if you know what I mean.

If I were to go into details about how each and every one of the weapons functioned, I think this review would kind of lose the focus. So let me just say that Monster Hunter has definitely impressed me with the amount of depth that its combat system has, and is truly deserving of the Action in its Action RPG genre. There’s enough here for even Tekken fans like me, and that’s a true achievement. Hell, I even prefer the combat system in this game to Guild Wars, which had about a few billion more skills than this does.

Combat 2Monster Hunter doesn’t disappoint on the graphics front either. Remember how I said before that Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII was the best-looking game on the PSP, period? Monster Hunter Freedom 2 would be number 2 on that list. The environments here, while split up into several areas in order to avoid raping the PSP’s limited RAM, manage to convey the sense of a huge, explorable environment, not unlike what you might find in Oblivion or Morrowind. The game is completely non-linear in its quests, as per the MMO mechanic, and you are free to explore the area you are currently in to your heart’s content. There is no shortage to the variety in environments either; you have the usual jungle and swamp environments (which look damn gorgeous), along with snowy mountain regions, a desert, and even a volcanic region, among others.

One thing that really captured my attention when exploring the jungle region was how the background was composited; there were huge waterfalls and mountains in the background that were actually modeled instead of being given a random sky texture, and this really helped to attenuate the sense of scale that Monster Hunter has, even if it is an illusion. After all, all games are illusions of sorts, aren’t they? Trust me when I say that the illusion Monster Hunter provides is good enough that you won’t really be bothered by the mediocre quality of the textures or the average polygon counts of the 3D models. It’s like Half Life 2, where every element individually looks a little less awesome than it should be, but when everything comes together, it all fits together more awesomely than you ever thought it could.

All this talk about gameplay and graphics, and I haven’t even gotten to the multiplayer aspect yet. Yes, Monster Hunter brings back the Ad-Hoc cooperative gameplay that remains a staple of the Monster Hunter series, though the much-desired Infrastructure mode was left out. Capcom has taken quite a bit of flak for this seemingly strange decision, but Xlink kai kind of solves this problem if you’re part of the ‘misanthropic loser who has no friends’ group of people who own this game.

Coop battleThe cooperative aspect of this game is where the MMO analogies really start to show. With a maximum of 4 players playing together at any one time, Monster Hunter allows for players to help each other out on particularly difficult quests or have fun slaying the various wildlife present in the environments, if only to show off their skills with their individual weapons. Difficulty does scale with the number of players present, ensuring that you won’t be able to just blast through the quests with a couple of buddies. Having different weapon styles come together really makes this game shine, such as having one player use his great sword to deal damage up close, while his buddy stands back and fires arrows in relative peace. The amount of teamwork that can be had in this game is especially interesting for a portable title, and it really stands out among the usual “deathmatch” and “team deathmatch” options that plague PSP online-enabled titles these days. If you have a couple of buddies, even online buddies with PSPs and a copy of Monster Hunter Freedom 2, you could essentially have a real MMORPG experience with them, without the monthly charges.

The user interface in Monster Hunter is relatively well-done, with menus and interfaces designed with matching aesthetics in mind. Usability is kind of a mixed bag; on one hand, menus pop up immediately with no fancy transition effects, which is great, especially when you just want to make a quick deposit/withdrawal from your chest, but the sheer amount of items you can collect means that navigation through your menu can sometimes be a pain. While the autosort function works really well for making some sense of the mess that your item bag can sometimes become, frankly more could have been done to make sifting through items easier, such as adding a search function, perhaps? Filtering items based on their quantity or other attributes would also have been appreciated. Nevertheless, this is not really a major drawback, and shouldn’t be a problem most of the time.

Controls, while complex, are generally well thought out. The analog stick is used for character movement, while the directional pad is used for the fully-controllable 3D camera. While this setup can make for odd frantic motions in which you simultaneously try to move your character and the camera at the same time during battle, with the PSP’s lack of a second analog stick, you make do with what you have. It helps that L will instantly center the camera behind your character, solving a lot of the camera headaches.combat 3

Triangle, Circle and R are reserved for the various weapon styles, differing from each weapon type to the other.For example, the longsword has Triangle perform a vertical slice, Circle a thrust, and R a spirit attack. Combination attacks can be made, such as having your character perform two vertical slices, a thrust and then an uppercut, followed by a horizontal slash through the following input: Triangle, Triangle, Circle, Triangle, Circle + Triangle. There are plenty of other combinations that you can perform, and this is just for the longsword alone. See what I mean by depth?

Cross will have your character perform a roll (which is especially useful for dodging attacks), and square will have your character use the current item being selected, or, if held down, will allow you to select other items using L and R. It all sounds very complicated, but after a while, it is definitely one of the most intuitive setups I’ve seen on the PSP so far.

Audio-wise, while this game definitely isn’t as epic as other offerings on the PSP such as Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops and Crisis Core, the sound effects ranging from weapon slashes to monster howls are all well executed, and show no lack of effort on the part of the developers. While I would have loved to hear more environment-specific music apart from the tune played in town (there is no background music when merely exploring regions, the current audio offering it has still gives the illusion of a breathing, living world inside this hunk of circuitry.

There’s still a lot that I haven’t elaborated on about this game, such as the sidequests and minigames that include food preparation, maintaining your farm (yes, a farm you can plant stuff in, mine stuff from and catch bugs too!), the amount of literature that you can read in your house and so many other things. I haven’t even completed the game yet, and it wasn’t because I got bored with it; there’s just so much to do that I doubt I’ll even complete it all, and even then I would have only done so with a longsword.

My conclusion? Monster Hunter Freedom 2 is one of those games which reviewers hate: there’s absolutely no way you can finish the game in time to get an in-depth review out, and this, I suspect, is what contributed to the merely average scores it has received from most publications. Where they see a shallow excuse for an ARPG, I see a game that is bursting at the seams with content and gameplay, and offers enough replayability in the form of multiplayer and expansive environments that its utter lack of an overarching plot can be overlooked…to an extent. While a good storyline would have certainly been a huge improvement, Monster Hunter proves that sometimes, it isn’t a required element for a solid title.

   

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