Monster Hunter
Hunt monsters for fun and profit… or, um, just kill time.
Published: October 4, 2004
Online gaming isn't exactly an abstract concept. Get a game, offer up some compelling ways to get people from different parts of the country (or, if you're lucky, the globe) and then mash them together and let them play together in a way that rewards cooperative or competitive play. Except perhaps in the case of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, this is usually best done with a simplistic approach. Adding too much complexity punishes newcomers and gives vets an unfair advantage if the game is purely competitive.
So imagine if you will the concept of pairing up with a couple of buddies to hack the crap out of prehistoric monsters of the dinosaur persuasion or hunting for various items like plants and fungi. Now, imagine doing this while thoroughly tanked and wanting nothing more than to interact with the people you're working with to bring a big ass dino-flavored monster down.
Now reach deep into your mind's eye and conjure up the image of not having any headset support to coordinate attacks, wrestling with overly complex and utterly unresponsive controls, and a matchmaking system that can force you to dive through so many menus (all of which are painfully bland) and loading screens for those menus just to find a sparsely inhabited town that you may or may not be able to link up with people once waiting to load up.
See any problems here? Indeed, Monster Hunter has the kind of promise I haven't seen since the bygone days of Dreamcast online gaming and a little gem called Phantasy Star Online, but it seems to be sporting the same kind of technology and none of the refinements made to online gaming since then. Perhaps it's the overall feel of the game, of small parties and venturing through semi-look-alike environments, but I can't help but feel like this game somehow managed to dive through a time portal and arrive about three years too late.
Here's the idea: after picking from a handful of the usual create-a-character presets (hair, basic face options, skin tone, half dozen or so "keeyaw!"-type voice effects, etc.), you'll dive into the village, a construct for your single-player adventures, and where you'll learn the ropes. If it seems like I'm glossing over the create-a-character, it's because in about an hour or three, you'll be so loaded up with armor, that you'll forget what they looked like in the first place.
You'll quickly find your quests fall into two distinct categories: the kill-some-monsters-or-hack-off-their-bits-for-trophies type or the traipse-through-the-landscape-searching-for-items bit. Actually, unless you hop online, you'll find you'll learn the ropes with the latter more than the former, but then the real meat of Monster Hunter's experience is in the former, and the game wisely chooses to save that for later, at just about the point where you're ready to just drink yourself into oblivion to stop the monotony of finding another animal bit or special mushroom.
It's here where the game gets fun -- and where things go wrong -- because you actually get to/have to use the controls, and discover exactly how little planning went into things, but how goofily fun it is to hook up with a couple of people that all have different weapons and styles of attack. Bum-rushing some poor, lumbering beast with a guy lobbing shots at the body while a guy with a huge sword, a lady with a pair of them and some newbie with his pointy metal thingie all charging into the fray is a rather fun experience...
...Until it's all deflated by a couple of huge problems. For one, the camera system is woefully ancient, forcing you to either let go of the left analog stick and use the d-pad to turn things, or re-center things with the L1 button, a nearly constant affair to make sure you're not looking at some stump when you should be aiding people in hacking away at some dinosaur's leg stump. Then there's the combat itself, which, like the rest of the controls is still, laggy and feels painfully outdated. Tapping the right analog stick allows you to utilize different attacks, and tapping multiple directions will lead to combos.
The problem here is that once you launch into any attack, the delay between actions is such that you'll need to set up your next attack almost immediately. This presents a bit of a problem if your tackling even a moderately agile monster, since they'll often just move before you start your stream of blows that cleave the very air in front of you in twain, but unfortunately don't do too much to fell a monster.
In fact, most of the game is spent overcoming the cumbersome controls and antiquated design concepts, be they the lifeless menus, the clunky movement (complete with unneeded momentum when trying to stop), the sluggish combat and combos. When you get past them, there's some fun to be had, and even a little depth in the creation of items with the spoils of your conquests and items found in the world, but it's a near-constant fight to pry fun from the claws of frustrating controls.
And what's worse, the game can at times offer quite the treat visually. Most of the game isn't especially detailed, texture-wise, but smatterings of foliage and some impressive vistas introduce a nice sense of scale to the environments that you'll spend plenty of time revisiting. To see a far-off outcropping of rock with several grazing monsters on it, massive mountain in the distance, sunlight cascading down the face, it borders on photo-realistic at times, even if the rest of the game isn't.
Texture detail and design was obviously spent on the game's namesake, the monsters often moving with some impressively detailed animation and the sense of scale on the larger monsters is even a bit intimidating. If only there was a bit more attention paid to things like collision or putting that same bit of momentum from movement into reacting to and delivering attacks.
If you were expecting something grand in scale from the audio (as the well-done intro CG sequence would have you believe), you'll find things lacking. The little flourishes that introduce a mission, and the smattering of music that pops up from time to time is certainly well-done, but it's rare at best. The sound effects are mainly relegated to clangs and pops, growls and thuds, and little else. Even the voice acting is almost cookie-cutter in its execution, usually sounding like some kind of back-masked South American crackhead. The only quips you'll hear from your character are the normal ones for weapon strikes and reactions, and little else.
If it weren't for the repetitive nature of the gameplay, the overly-cumbersome controls that you'll fight through the whole game, the insipid setup required for online play (which is really just more or less the same thing as the single-player game with a bit more confusion), and the general lack of presentation beyond the work the art team constructed, Monster Hunter may have been one of those games that you couldn't stop playing and didn't know why. Unfortunately, that laundry list of complaints I just mentioned there are the bulk of the game, and as such, there's little here to get excited about.
Perhaps the boys and girls in development at Capcom will learn from the complains the most gamers will have and deliver something that allows for the small-party-in-a-big-world design of the game to work. Expanding the environments, fixing the controls and camera, and allowing an easier matchmaking setup in the next game could mean a seriously fun online experience, but right now, what we have can hardly be called even an experience.
So imagine if you will the concept of pairing up with a couple of buddies to hack the crap out of prehistoric monsters of the dinosaur persuasion or hunting for various items like plants and fungi. Now, imagine doing this while thoroughly tanked and wanting nothing more than to interact with the people you're working with to bring a big ass dino-flavored monster down.
Now reach deep into your mind's eye and conjure up the image of not having any headset support to coordinate attacks, wrestling with overly complex and utterly unresponsive controls, and a matchmaking system that can force you to dive through so many menus (all of which are painfully bland) and loading screens for those menus just to find a sparsely inhabited town that you may or may not be able to link up with people once waiting to load up.
See any problems here? Indeed, Monster Hunter has the kind of promise I haven't seen since the bygone days of Dreamcast online gaming and a little gem called Phantasy Star Online, but it seems to be sporting the same kind of technology and none of the refinements made to online gaming since then. Perhaps it's the overall feel of the game, of small parties and venturing through semi-look-alike environments, but I can't help but feel like this game somehow managed to dive through a time portal and arrive about three years too late.
Here's the idea: after picking from a handful of the usual create-a-character presets (hair, basic face options, skin tone, half dozen or so "keeyaw!"-type voice effects, etc.), you'll dive into the village, a construct for your single-player adventures, and where you'll learn the ropes. If it seems like I'm glossing over the create-a-character, it's because in about an hour or three, you'll be so loaded up with armor, that you'll forget what they looked like in the first place.
You'll quickly find your quests fall into two distinct categories: the kill-some-monsters-or-hack-off-their-bits-for-trophies type or the traipse-through-the-landscape-searching-for-items bit. Actually, unless you hop online, you'll find you'll learn the ropes with the latter more than the former, but then the real meat of Monster Hunter's experience is in the former, and the game wisely chooses to save that for later, at just about the point where you're ready to just drink yourself into oblivion to stop the monotony of finding another animal bit or special mushroom.
It's here where the game gets fun -- and where things go wrong -- because you actually get to/have to use the controls, and discover exactly how little planning went into things, but how goofily fun it is to hook up with a couple of people that all have different weapons and styles of attack. Bum-rushing some poor, lumbering beast with a guy lobbing shots at the body while a guy with a huge sword, a lady with a pair of them and some newbie with his pointy metal thingie all charging into the fray is a rather fun experience...
...Until it's all deflated by a couple of huge problems. For one, the camera system is woefully ancient, forcing you to either let go of the left analog stick and use the d-pad to turn things, or re-center things with the L1 button, a nearly constant affair to make sure you're not looking at some stump when you should be aiding people in hacking away at some dinosaur's leg stump. Then there's the combat itself, which, like the rest of the controls is still, laggy and feels painfully outdated. Tapping the right analog stick allows you to utilize different attacks, and tapping multiple directions will lead to combos.
The problem here is that once you launch into any attack, the delay between actions is such that you'll need to set up your next attack almost immediately. This presents a bit of a problem if your tackling even a moderately agile monster, since they'll often just move before you start your stream of blows that cleave the very air in front of you in twain, but unfortunately don't do too much to fell a monster.
In fact, most of the game is spent overcoming the cumbersome controls and antiquated design concepts, be they the lifeless menus, the clunky movement (complete with unneeded momentum when trying to stop), the sluggish combat and combos. When you get past them, there's some fun to be had, and even a little depth in the creation of items with the spoils of your conquests and items found in the world, but it's a near-constant fight to pry fun from the claws of frustrating controls.
And what's worse, the game can at times offer quite the treat visually. Most of the game isn't especially detailed, texture-wise, but smatterings of foliage and some impressive vistas introduce a nice sense of scale to the environments that you'll spend plenty of time revisiting. To see a far-off outcropping of rock with several grazing monsters on it, massive mountain in the distance, sunlight cascading down the face, it borders on photo-realistic at times, even if the rest of the game isn't.
Texture detail and design was obviously spent on the game's namesake, the monsters often moving with some impressively detailed animation and the sense of scale on the larger monsters is even a bit intimidating. If only there was a bit more attention paid to things like collision or putting that same bit of momentum from movement into reacting to and delivering attacks.
If you were expecting something grand in scale from the audio (as the well-done intro CG sequence would have you believe), you'll find things lacking. The little flourishes that introduce a mission, and the smattering of music that pops up from time to time is certainly well-done, but it's rare at best. The sound effects are mainly relegated to clangs and pops, growls and thuds, and little else. Even the voice acting is almost cookie-cutter in its execution, usually sounding like some kind of back-masked South American crackhead. The only quips you'll hear from your character are the normal ones for weapon strikes and reactions, and little else.
If it weren't for the repetitive nature of the gameplay, the overly-cumbersome controls that you'll fight through the whole game, the insipid setup required for online play (which is really just more or less the same thing as the single-player game with a bit more confusion), and the general lack of presentation beyond the work the art team constructed, Monster Hunter may have been one of those games that you couldn't stop playing and didn't know why. Unfortunately, that laundry list of complaints I just mentioned there are the bulk of the game, and as such, there's little here to get excited about.
Perhaps the boys and girls in development at Capcom will learn from the complains the most gamers will have and deliver something that allows for the small-party-in-a-big-world design of the game to work. Expanding the environments, fixing the controls and camera, and allowing an easier matchmaking setup in the next game could mean a seriously fun online experience, but right now, what we have can hardly be called even an experience.