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Monster Hunter
By admin | March 8, 2010
The latest Capcom release, Monster Hunter, seems to have landed the company with a surprise hit. Selling circa 120,000 copies in its opening weekend, it surprisingly trumped MGS:TTS, Ninja Gaiden and Jak 2 in a hot week for new releases.
The game follows the rise of your character as a village "Monster Hunter". Starting out with no hunting skills whatsoever, you are taken through the basics required to become a practitioner of your trade, such as fishing, chopping up dead prey for meat, and cooking. Soon after the initiation levels, you are killing packs of velociraptor-esque monsters, and running from massive Wyverns - sometimes with one of its eggs in your arms.
Monster Hunter is set in a strange fantasy environment. By and large, the enemies resemble dinosaurs, with later enemies having a more mythological bent. The environments within the game ooze atmosphere. From the rolling grass plains littered with large dinosaur families, evoking memories of the first Jurassic Park, to the dark and dank jungle marshlands, everything is finely crafted. The frame rate is rock solid even with a large number of enemies on screen and the
camera for the most part is well positioned. And whilst the nvironments are fairly big, moving from one area to the next does not incur a restrictive load time - unlike stablemate, RE:Outbreak. The monsters and the hunters themselves are all interesting and are well modelled, with good animation and plenty of character.
Adding to the ambience are the background noises and the notable lack of an in-game sound track. Noises are a giveaway of incoming enemies and music is used sparsely, limited to accompanying events such as the appearance of one of the larger monsters or the completion of a quest. What music there is fits in well with the game, and the lack of music in the field, with a focus on ambient noises, only serves to increase immersion.
Create a character
Before starting the game, you must create your hunter. Creation of your hunter is a little limited. You are restricted to creating a human hunter, male or female, choosing face, hair style, skin tone and voice, with hair colour being the only totally configurable attribute. The ability to change proportion and build, found in PSO, is not available, meaning more outlandish looking characters aren’t going to be catered for. Once created, it is a simple choice of playing online or offline. Offline and online progress are one and the same, with items, cash, and equipment all carried over. Disappointingly, there is no multiplayer offline play, so for multiplayer you must play online.
Game flow
In the offline game, the main hub of the game is a small village with the usual equipment stores, item stores, a home base and quest pick-up point. This works in much the same way as the ship in PSO. Each set of quests that is available is further broken down into sub quests, all of which must be cleared (along with a
final mandatory event quest) to open up the next set of quests. Each quest is replayable so there are plenty of opportunities to collect more cash and items.
For each quest, you are given a time limit and an objective. Whilst most of the objectives are fairly standard (Collect 10 mushrooms, kill 10 animals), the fulfillment of the quests (beyond the first set of quests) becomes increasingly difficult with various enemies out to do their best to make life difficult. In both online and offline modes, the longest quest time we have witnessed has been 50 minutes. This may well change, but this further iterates the fact that this is more of a pick-up-and-play flavour of multiplayer action, rather than having
to devote hours committed to partying in games like FFXI. In reality, the quests tend to be completed within half the time limit.
Once a quest is started, you are transported to the actual game area, starting off at your base camp. This is a small tented area, complete with a bed for free recovery and an item box containing a map and other useful items for the quest. From this point, you must venture out into the adventure area to complete your quest. For collection type quests, you have to return to the base camp with the
objects and place them in the "send box" in order to complete the mission, where as "find and kill" missions end a minute after you kill the final monster that you need to dispose of.
As a hunter, you have to keep an eye on two attributes. Your health is obviously the number one concern, this will be depleted when attacked. However, our hunter seems to be impervious to damage from dropping from great heights. Running out of health does not result in death, you are collected up into a wheel barrow by a couple of cat like creatures and unceremoniously dumped back at your home
base. An amount of cash is deducted from your possible winnings for the quest and if this results in your winnings coffer turning to zero, or if you go over your allotted time, the quest is over.
The second attribute of note is your stamina. Each action will deplete a little bit of stamina, which will in turn replenish itself when you aren’t active. However, if you continually run everywhere, your overall available stamina will drop, meaning you cannot recover as much stamina and (ultimately) limiting what you can do. The management of stamina becomes important when coupled with the fact that, although you are the hunter, quite often you will become the hunted,
and if you are low on stamina, you may well become a Wyverns dinner if you aren’t able to run far enough away.
Combat
A hunter must also take good care of his weapon - constantly slamming a blade against tough dinosaur skin results in damage to the weapon. Luckily, you can sharpen the damaged blade. Each weapon inflicts different damage depending on its status, and each weapon has a different level of durability. Ranged weapons do not have this maintenance overhead, but they also deal significantly less damage than the melee weapons.
Obviously, combat plays a large part in the game and this is handled,
interestingly, on the right analogue stick. With a melee weapon in hand, moving left and right will swing your weapon, with down and up activating the more heavy-handed attacks. With a ranged weapon such as the Gunbow, left and right movement handles targeting, whilst pushing the stick down will reload when your bullets run out. Shooting is achieved by pushing the right stick inwards. This is somewhat cumbersome and isn’t entirely ideal. In all, the combat control method isn’t perfect, but neither is it hard to get used to. In fact, the way it is configured it makes panicky situations a bit more stressful than they would normally be and this, perversely, adds to the game.
The ranged weapons also have a first person shooting mode, which works very well indeed. The only down side is that you are obviously blind to what is going on around you, but with the addition of the sniper scope this mode become
increasingly more valuable for picking out distant enemies.
Fear and roasting
The game, whilst simple, makes maximum use of two elements: fear and environment. Environment plays a big factor in combat: with the open, wider planes it is quite easy to take out raptors from distance, but facing the same enemies in a tighter more confined jungle area with limited visibility due to trees and foliage becomes a whole different prospect. Each area on the map starts to take on its own characteristics, and you come to realise that it’s often better to run. Added to this is a healthy smattering of large, monstrously tough beasts such as the Wyvern. In single player these represent a very
probable quick death. This means that you are constantly listening and looking for these beasts. Larger animals will roam all over the game map from area to area, and unlike PSO, large enemies do not stay locked in a certain area. Fortunately, you can tag enemies with paintballs, which makes them visible on the map for a period of time and this at least gives you some idea as to which areas are off limits.
Mixed with the fear factor is more than a smattering of humour. A special note must be made about the cooking aspect - which is handled in an amusing manner. If your hunter purchases a roasting kit, you can spit roast whatever meat you happen to collect from dinosaurs. Using the roasting kit sees your hunter pull out a seat, sit down and turn the roast, to a comedy cooking tune. A second or
so after the music stops, you have to take the meat off the roast. The success of your cooking attempt is dependent on your timing of taking the meat of the roast. Take it off too soon, and it’s half done. Take it off too late, and it’s ruined. Whilst not crucial to the game, the tune alone will stick in your head for some time to come.
Networking
Whilst the offline game is more than competent, it’s the online implementation which is interesting a lot of players. Getting into the online game itself is somewhat cumbersome - after the lengthy sign-up process you select a server, then a city (A thru H) on each server, and finally a zone within that city. Each zone is limited to 8 players. Unfortunately, if you wish to play with 3 other friends, everyone has to be on the same server, in the same city, and in the
same zone. Once online, the game works in much the same way as the offline version. Players accept a quest, this then appears on the quest notice board for that particular area. Other players in the area can then choose to join your quest. Players wishing to restrict their quest to a group of people can password protect their quests so only friends can join. Quests are segregated based on rank. Rank appears to be an online only concept akin to experience. For each quest completed you will receive a certain amount of rank points, with ranking up occurring at a pre-defined number of rank points. This, in turn, opens up higher ranking quests. To all extent and purposes, though, so far the quests have been the same as their offline equivalent.
Communication is handled via a keyboard - either the software-based keyboard, or a USB keyboard. This has a couple of issues. Firstly, the first character that you type does not appear, this simply activates the keyboard. Secondly, typing in English requires the same few keystrokes or button presses each time you wish to type something. While not a massive issue, this is an unnecessary annoyance.
Importers should also be aware that the game does not feature an English language option for quest descriptions.
The online play itself is very smooth indeed with the action remaining identical in quality to the offline version, with very little lag to speak of. The short quests make for excellent bitesize multiplayer gaming, with some (especially the quest to steal a Wyvern egg) requiring some coordinated multiplayer cooperation. However, whilst fun on the whole, there are a couple of low level quests that will seem impossibly hard: A showdown with oversized bird creature quot;Yancucku"
causes headaches and frustration. Even with a full party pounding the beast with all they’ve got, the creature does not fall easily. To add to this, when on the verge of death, large beasts will flee and recuperate elsewhere on the map, leaving the team with extra work to do to defeat the monster.
Further frustration comes in the form of egg stealing or crystal collecting quests. Whilst the premise is good (one person carries the object whilst the others attempt to protect the carrier), it can become quite frustrating. Just one single hit against the carrier will mean the item is dropped. And once the item is dropped it is lost, meaning the party has to backpedal and repeat the process all over again. Despite the difficulty and frustration, the online game looks set to be the popular facet of the game. Perhaps an indicator that this is
indeed a surprise hit for Capcom is in the capacity and load on the servers on the second night of play. All the servers were full to capacity, with surplus players waiting patiently for an empty slot in the game areas to open.
Whilst certainly not free of issues, Monster Hunter is equal measures
out-and-out fun and out-and-out terror, delivered fantastically well in both online and offline modes. The game provides a PSO-style game for the PS2, and offering pick-up-and-play online gaming without the need to commit to hours at a time, this game certainly has the possibility of pulling in a whole new section of online gamer. I get the feeling that this isn’t the last we’ll see of the Monster Hunter line.
Now, if only i can get the damn cooking tune out of my head…. "jouzu ni yakemashita!"
Scientist: DCharlie
Topics: Reviews |