Monster Hunter Freedom Unite
Martin's monstrous undertaking
It can only be something in the water. In Japan, Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G sold over two million copies in its first couple of months. Capcom's venerable series has never quite enjoyed that same level of success in Europe, mind you, but that hasn't stopped them trying to, once again, replicate their success with Monster Hunter Freedom Unite - the repackaged, translated, and rebranded version of 2nd G. It's basically Monster Hunter Freedom 2 with oodles of bells and whistles.
The beauty of the Monster Hunter series, for the uninitiated, is that the player doesn't have to spend aeons diddling with permanent stats, a constant relief for a game that frequently champions itself as being well over three hundred hours long. Monster Hunter constantly propels you forward; the player safe in the knowledge they're not wasting five/ten/eighty hours for doing something like investing the wrong points into the wrong skill tree. The fact that everything in the game is accessible to every player, all the weaponry, items, and the monsters, is one of the very strongest parts of Monster Hunter. But it's all with one, strict, proviso: you need to invest an awful lot of time.
It's the very definition of a slow burner, a game of minute increments, with players slowly forging forward to craft newer, better sets of armour and weaponry to take on grizzlier, ever-bigger monsters. As a game it's also riddled with stops and starts, demanding players manoeuvre through extensive, unskippable sequences as they attempt to fight ginormous beasties that are, more often than not, faster, stronger and far more able to soak up simply preposterous amounts of damage. Everything in the game carries a certain heft, and no action is considered too minute to not warrant some kind of animation that leaves you completely defenceless. Trying to heal in the middle of a fight will routinely result in your innards being pasted over the floor. Humans are a notoriously mushy bunch, and Monster Hunter is habitual in its efforts to remind us of such.
It's not afraid to slap you about. It's more of a difficulty chasm than a curve, with the game becoming immediately unforgiving as soon as the tutorial levels - complete with a brash, eccentric veteran shouting amusing nonsense - are over. You spend the first hour being mollycoddled, and then you're tossed out into the big, cruel world to learn everything the hard way. The first few hours of Monster Hunter push the limits of patience, demanding an almost masochistic tendency to return to areas and confront enemies that produce nothing short of apoplectic sensations. Of course, revisit the same locations and quests five hours later and you'll be slicing up prey as if your genetic code had been spliced together with a potent combo of Jason Statham and Ray Mears. But the sensation is fleeting: within ten minutes you'll wander into a new area and get yourself bumped off by something bigger, angrier and in possession of more teeth.
As you can imagine, it's very rarely smooth sailing. Frustration sets in on a regular basis, with the insane difficulty permanently guaranteeing high stakes. Superior equipment makes you more resilient, but even the most substantial pieces of armour can be torn open after catching a few stray hits. Such intricacy ensures colossal satisfaction is always obtained from even minor achievements, and felling fiddly prey deserves more jubilation than the PSP's tiny speakers can allow. It's very much a game that dwells on the minutiae, though, with greater successes predicated on a demanding involvement with all sorts of tasks regularly considered too menial for gaming: you'll forever be managing your character's internal temperature with hot and cold drinks, keeping your weapons sharp, and harvesting seeds, herbs, bugs, and metals from the environment alongside carving off bones, pelts, claws and hides from the various wildlife that is unfortunate enough to get in your way. Not to forget you're also fighting the elements as much as the animals, too, struggling to keep an ever-depleting stamina bar at maximum capacity. And in your spare time the game has you maintaining a farm alongside permanently fussing with your inventory. You're always doing something.
Advancement is achieved by grinding through familiar areas and collecting the right items, eventually allowing you to forge stronger equipment after collecting all the right pieces. You'll spend much of your time revisiting areas, across hundreds of assigned quests, and before long there's an intimate familiarity with the nooks, crevices and crannies of the world. Tracking a monster's movement becomes second nature, and harvesting a recognisably prime patch of fungi is a subconscious action.
High-end equipment and player skill operate in tandem, then, with one permanently needing the other. It's an example of gameplay genius, and after spending a while with the game it's easy to see why so many are hooked; the game demands that victories are earned, whilst dangling the proverbial carrot on a stick in front of your face the entire time.
But the game is just as renowned for a compelling multiplayer mode as it its addictive gameplay, and it's here where Monster Hunter has continually floundered in the West. Japan, and therefore the game's creators, remains firm advocates of social, face-to-face communal gaming, with players convening in coffee bars, restaurants and tube stations to affectionately slay monsters together. Capcom Japan's stubborn obstinacy to exclude a functional online mode ultimately results in the game's biggest pitfall. It's a real shame, as multiplayer Monster Hunter is rife in certain gameplay subtleties that the solo component gravely lacks. If you manage to get a game going it's easy to see why it's so popular: multiplayer Monster Hunter allows individual players to take on a more specialised role within a glorious, efficient whole to bring down the game's biggest, nastiest foes - as well as collectively reap the largest rewards. It's an engrossing experience.
Unite makes a small concession for solo players with its addition of Felyne sidekicks, jovial cat warriors who can accompany you into quests, spending much of their time as an unwitting diversion and enabling players to take enough of a break to heal themselves. It's a help, granted, but never quite enough to stop you dwelling on the necessity of human compatriots.
It'll take more than simply suffixing 'Unite' to the game's title to make multiplayer take off over here, too. Capcom Europe are, at least, aware of the problem: they've rented and furnished a building in London as a free staging area (from July until August 2009, at least) for players with a PSP and a copy of the game to springboard into the online component of the game. It's nice to see them try. Of course, there's still the decidedly unavoidable problem of the nations non-cockneys and the fact that we're all hard-wired to play multiplayer games through internet connections. You're unlikely to find anybody playing Monster Hunter in a Starbucks, at least. Third-party tunnelling software becomes a last resort, but the difficulties of such a solution and with Sony's promised PS3 software for this very task still languishing in development, it'll likely eliminate much of the potential player base before it ever has a chance to take off.
Ultimately, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite is a solid revision of Monster Hunter Freedom 2. The new monsters, weapons, quests and general tweaks (item stacking and an improved shopping system are a much-needed relief) ensure it's the definitive version of the game, but the inability to address the game's most crippling problem - the lack of an online mode - will likely ensure that the game, once again, fails to have a significant impact on the European market. A shame considering Monster Hunter Freedom Unite is one of the most exhaustive, expansive and compelling RPG experiences on the market.
85%
Comments
A great game and I am lucky enough to know people who I can play with. But no infrastructure is a bewildering feature to leave out considering every wanted it. I can only surmise it was left out due to techinical reasons.
Not really enough extra content over MHF2 to deserve any more than an 8.0 in my opinion. MHF2 was a big leap over MHF due to the extra weapons, maps, etc, but this is not much of a leap.
I call it MHF2.5
@HokeyCokey: Well, no kidding; its Japanese name is Monster Hunter Portable 2 G, and even in the West they openly call it a revision.
No one was pretending it was Monster Hunter Freedom 3. I think they're pretty open about the fact that it's a revision.
Anyway. I'm enjoying the small improvements to enemies more than anything else. Most enemies have 3-4 new attacks, and basic movement has been revised. Old attacks that were too-blatant openings or stupidly easy to dodge have been fixed and improved, it's not as easy to hit enemies when they're turning around... I've had to re-learn Tigrex's timing entirely!
And the fact that enemies spawn randomly rather than set areas? Great. Now Psychoserums are actually useful.
youll get the name later
hey the first thing i notice is that the person who made this is canadian becuase the way they spell armor
the name referances the nargacuga. all it is, is a black tigerex so it makes sense to call it a pantherex like a black panther.
i agree with with shinkada this is a great improvement but id give it 8.5-9.0
the name referances the nargacuga. all it is, is a black tigerex so it makes sense to call it a pantherex like a black panther.
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Im Loving the new combat movements, monsters and more upgrades for weapons also the new rarity lvls like 9 and 10 (i dont think the were in MHF2) plus the new maps and maps from MHF1, also the new types of quests like Hunt down a Kut Ku and Plesioth in one quest.
Loving it :)
What level do you fight That Black Panther