The GWJ JRPG Club - Q3 2021 - Monster Hunter Stories!

I’ve made good progress in the game. I’ve made it to the big city in the desert, and with it unlocked the 4 star bracelet after fighting a tough boss fight. And I’m happy that with the upgraded bracelet, I can now use the Diablos and Shrouded Nerscylla that I had hatched earlier but was locked out of using.

I dropped the Azuros for the Diablos which seems like a clear upgrade, and a Blue Yian-Kut-Ku for the spider. Not as sure on this one since my Bluey was good for fire attacks, but the Nerscylla can climb vines so that seems like a good traversal thing to have. I was also able to get the Diablos with a full array of non-elemental genes, so he got the Anything Bingo and the Non-Elemental bingo. And now I’m running all over the map to knock out a bunch of sidequests I’ve saved up to level up my new crew members and to get a ton of money for new equipment.

My current team is 1 Power / 1 Speed / 3 Technical. (Diablos / Barroth / Red Khezu, Zamtrios, Shrouded Nerscylla). I didn’t want to really like the Barroth since he doesn’t do all that much damage as a speed type, but he can tank with the best of them so he’s seen some good action. On one hand, I don’t like how unbalanced this team is towards Technical, but on the other hand, the Technical monsters just seem to have better field utility. And, there’s more of them.

bobbywatson wrote:

I should have said 'quest givers' (in town) and not 'quests', because the phone version also has the orange and blue markers.

So, it sounds like they're both the same.

Sounds like it; there are no quest-giver icons on the map for the 3DS version.

That would've been helpful; I recall spending more time than I would have liked revisiting towns and checking for new sub-quests.

Final boss is kicking my ass. Looks like I might have to do some gene manipulations...

I took a small break to play some other games but I played a little before bed tonight.

Reunited in the lab inside the volcano, a few of the monsters in this area were tricky!

My play time is 27 hours, and I'm starting to think this might take me a bit longer than 30-35 hours due to how much I enjoy finding good genes! Any insight as to how far I am? I'm guessing about 60-70% of the way through?

Credits rolled this morning, at around the 46 hour mark. I have thoughts, and I want to put them together, but that may not happen just yet.

Overall: I liked the game quite a bit, but the story was completely uninteresting.

bobbywatson wrote:

Who would've thought that the Great Jaggi, a very early monster in MH3 and 4, would turn out to be packing quite a punch! Damn! That thing made me lose two hearts in one battle... Time to get new equipment, I guess...

I just made it to this point and it's the same experience for me; definitely a step up in challenge!

I've been able to squeak by thus far on the Velocidrome great sword and Kut-Ku armor without spending much time in any one area, but that's clearly come to an end and now I'm grinding Great Jaggis for gear, exp, and zenny.

bobbywatson wrote:

Credits rolled this morning, at around the 46 hour mark.

Congrats!

Ted wrote:
bobbywatson wrote:

Who would've thought that the Great Jaggi, a very early monster in MH3 and 4, would turn out to be packing quite a punch! Damn! That thing made me lose two hearts in one battle... Time to get new equipment, I guess...

I just made it to this point and it's the same experience for me; definitely a step up in challenge!

I've been able to squeak by thus far on the Velocidrome great sword and Kut-Ku armor without spending much time in any one area, but that's clearly come to an end and now I'm grinding Great Jaggis for gear, exp, and zenny.

Looks like I'm caught up to that point as well. I had a similar experience, but I met the Great Jaggi and two of his little buddies, and I lost a heart in like 2 turns. And it doesn't help that the Great Jaggi seems to heavily target the player character. From that point on, I called out my Barroth and rode him as much as possible, since he was taking 2-6 damage when I was taking 30-50. He tanked his way through the fight.

I've generally kept up on my equipment so far, but that has also really drained my zenny throughout the game. I currently have L4 Barroth armor, plus a Basarios weapon. Plus a poison immunity accessory, since I was getting real tired of getting poisoned all the time. I also had a poison inducing weapon (the Venom Monster) through most of the volcano, and getting that extra poison damage in was like an extra attack each turn. Very helpful.

I'm just under 40 hours, and I think I’m getting close to the end of the game. My next objective is (putting it in spoilers to be safe, but it's not like there's much to spoil)

Spoiler:

going to get to two Kinship Ores (the really big ones) to save the world and fight the blight.

Anyway, I think I’ve settled into my full team, unless I get some late game monster that forces their way on. I have the good balance of 2 Power / 2 Speed / 2 Technical (Diablos, Brute Tigrex / Ratha, Barroth / Zamtrio, Red Khezu), and it’s worked pretty well for me for the last 10-15 hours. I have a bench I keep leveled with the Expeditions, but this crew covers everything I’ve needed up to this point. That said, you can’t use everyone all the time, so I’ve really just settled into my main three of Diablos/Barroth/Zamtrio, why covers my attack type bases, and all of which can take some hits and can mostly dish it out as well.

The Tigrex is the latest addition, and his running animation cracks me up. But he’s also highly useful, since he can climb the vines (and replaced the spider), PLUS can do an infinite dash. It helps make the overworld traversal much faster than just riding monsters.

But the real MVP of my run is that Barroth. I mentioned it in my last, but that guy absolutely face tanks every hit and shrugs it off. It’s saved me more than a few times, since I could hop on him to protect my Rider from taking too much damage. Plus, Mud Throw does water damage for some reason, which is highly effective against a bunch of monsters that I might otherwise have had trouble with. Can’t overstate how clutch this guy has been over and over.

So since I’m getting close to the end, I do think the game needs a few fixes. Mainly optimization, for the texture pop in and the long loading times and frame rate dips. I commend them for the size of the world they could squeeze into the 3DS, but it needs to be on something with more power. But, presumably these would all be fixed in the sequel (particularly on the PC). I can now see myself getting to that one at some point, to play a more polished version of this game, since the core battle system is still pretty engaging, and is enough to keep me interested. Might be an option for the club at some point.

I've started putting some serious time into it. Just arrived in the city and finally it seems those monster drops are actually worth something for crafting. Which I'd gathered was supposed to be the point of MH games (not having played one until now). Pretty lukewarm on it so far.

Technically I'm not really having many problems. Framerate seems OK, load times are about 3 seconds, not too gratuitous. I do get the delayed texture loads which results in some pretty creepy looking NPCs. I've never really liked pseudo babble as a replacement for recorded voices and it's really poorly done here. 3 syllables shouldn't equate to 2 sentences of English text, hmm. I wonder if there's a way to disable it, I feel like I looked but didn't find anything.

I like the combat in theory but remembering patterns is not really my thing. So, should I be taking notes (not convenient for a handheld game) or should I be keeping a faq open (seems to defeat the purpose)... So, usually I need to fudge through the first few sequences each time and then I'm good after that.

Finally, I did get the ability to merge monster genes (which also seemed to be a bit late to unlock), and I beefed up my starting raptor nicely. Otherwise, there don't seem to be too many genes that fit together right now (in terms of slots matching).

Of course the dialog and story are kind of rubbish, it seems like that's already been covered. I think I will probably get into the game more, it seems like a good grind-heavy podcast/reality tv game. But a bit disappointed so far.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

Of course the dialog and story are kind of rubbish, it seems like that's already been covered. I think I will probably get into the game more, it seems like a good grind-heavy podcast/reality tv game. But a bit disappointed so far.

Monster Hunter games are perfect for podcast listening. No story to pay attention to (or very little), and not much thinking to do once you're in combat. (Full disclosure: I was looking for a game to play this morning as I was listening to a podcast, and I ended up playing Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, which I recently started playing again on my computer using... the dark magic of Cemu.)

Not sure about grinding in the case of Monster Hunter Stories. If you don't want to do the sidequests, sure. In my case, I was trying to keep up with the quests that show up on the quest board, and I found that it kept me at a good enough level that I did not really feel the need to grind, except maybe in the last portion of the game.

And done, at 46 hours.

Final conclusion is that the game is cool! I like the spin on the monster collecting genre, plus how the rock-paper-scissors adds some depth and prediction to the battles. I wasn’t sure about that mechanic at first, but it turned out to be pretty engaging. And getting those hard reads when the monster switches attack types feels good, but not as good as when my Monstie picks a random attack type and I tag along, only to luck into a double attack. And the system keeps you on your toes, since the enemy monsters will absolutely change the attack types on you, which makes even favorable matchups a bit risky in ways that Pokemon doesn't manage.

I think one area where it needs to be rebalanced is making it easier to level up new monsters to the point of being useful more quickly. I had little turnover for the back half the game, and I imagine it was/will be true for many of you as well. Later monsters just didn’t have time to catch up, unless you want endless grinding. Passively leveling with the Expeditions (in real time, which was a nice QOL touch) is a backup option, but unless the monsters there were already at your team’s level when you start the Expedition merry-go-round, it’s not likely to catch up in time to be useful. Pokemon does have somewhat of a similar problem (since newly caught late game Pokemon won't have accumulated a bunch of EVs to push their stats up over the course of the game), but at least monsters you catch there are usually at a level fairly close to the trainers and gym leaders nearby, and can be caught up to speed more quickly if you want to experiment.

I’ll talk briefly about the final boss and the villains in spoilers, but as mentioned before, there’s not really much to spoil.

Spoiler:

The final boss was good. I wiped once to the big attack that does 999 to everyone, when I couldn’t destroy the head fast enough, and it knocked out me and my monstie and we were down to one heart. I refilled a heart with an item, but got hit by the attack again and wiped. Second time went better.

And the story was fine as an excuse plot, but I think the writing for the villains was painfully bad. The professor was annoying and evil for not a very good reason, and Cheval could have been an interesting contrast to our hero as someone who came from a similar place but went bad, but instead he was just an angry contrarian with no depth of writing.

bobbywatson wrote:

Not sure about grinding in the case of Monster Hunter Stories. If you don't want to do the sidequests, sure. In my case, I was trying to keep up with the quests that show up on the quest board, and I found that it kept me at a good enough level that I did not really feel the need to grind, except maybe in the last portion of the game.

Actually I usually think of optional side quests as a form of grinding so that's pretty much all I've been doing in the game so far.

Congrats Sundown! I'll go level you up in the other thread.

Definitely feeling similar feely feelings about grinding away on newborn monsties. It's getting a little frustrating having to stop progressing in the story to grind every time I have a few new monsters to level up.

Initially, I felt the game scaled fairly well. New monsters level up very quickly at first, but it's just not quite enough. Because the story is dry as a bone, too, I've found myself playing at a slower pace lately.

I'm currently on the cat island which has been a nice change of scenery, but I just couldn't give a sh*t about the plot at this point. Still a great game, but the faults are starting to show. I'm so happy this got a sequel, because it's really only some minor gripes getting in the way of me absolutely loving this. Right now, I only just really like it

I just got a monster with vine climbing ability so I could go back and explore some of the earlier areas. Also, I was wondering about getting eggs from nests. Your companion comments on how much they smell. It seems like if an egg doesn't smell you are maybe meant to try again? But, whenever I've done that, I've only continued to get eggs that don't smell until the nest runs out of eggs. A bit confused.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

I just got a monster with vine climbing ability so I could go back and explore some of the earlier areas. Also, I was wondering about getting eggs from nests. Your companion comments on how much they smell. It seems like if an egg doesn't smell you are maybe meant to try again? But, whenever I've done that, I've only continued to get eggs that don't smell until the nest runs out of eggs. A bit confused.

The vine climbing doesn't do much for the first half of the game; I think the most you would get is more Poogies and the occasional rare item. There are some good shortcuts you can use it for later. As for eggs, I think it has to do with how many spots they have for genes, and if they already have a line of 3. I didn't really look up the specifics, but smellier and heavier are generally better.

A_Unicycle wrote:

I'm so happy this got a sequel, because it's really only some minor gripes getting in the way of me absolutely loving this. Right now, I only just really like it

I was in a similar vein, and I think I mentioned this upthread. I don't think I'll jump on the sequel now, due to limited time, price, backlog, and all that. But I think it'll be eligible for the club in Q3 2022, so I'll be all on board for playing it then.

Sundown wrote:
Mr GT Chris wrote:

I just got a monster with vine climbing ability so I could go back and explore some of the earlier areas. Also, I was wondering about getting eggs from nests. Your companion comments on how much they smell. It seems like if an egg doesn't smell you are maybe meant to try again? But, whenever I've done that, I've only continued to get eggs that don't smell until the nest runs out of eggs. A bit confused.

The vine climbing doesn't do much for the first half of the game; I think the most you would get is more Poogies and the occasional rare item. There are some good shortcuts you can use it for later. As for eggs, I think it has to do with how many spots they have for genes, and if they already have a line of 3. I didn't really look up the specifics, but smellier and heavier are generally better.

I also remember seeing that each of the monsters has 4 color schemes & patterns that might appear on its egg, and those appear to be unique to each monster. So if you can remember which you've seen before, you can rule those out (unless you're trying to get monsters with better genes, I guess).

I just always tried for smelly and heavier eggs, didn't even think that the colors could influence genes as well. If that's true, there is a lot of randomness to that entire system that would be incredibly frustrating. I have kind of stalled out in the Trese Desert area, it is so big it is hard to know what I have explored and what I have not. I should probably stop dallying around and just progress the main story some more.

As for monsties, I have basically been relying on a Velocidrome I got from a rare nest early in the game. It came with a speed anything bingo so has been pretty reliable, but I think it is starting to taper off and I may need to swap to some new friends. The only problem is all the other monsties feel slower riding around the world map than it.

Edit: I do like most of the systems in the game, my only gripe with the combat is that it is pattern memorization rather than actually interpreting the monster's signals. I would love it if it was like a typical monster hunter game where the monster's movement and behavior told you what kind of attack they were going to make. Also there are so many skills that exist outside the standard attacks that I have been through fights without ever having a head-to-head, preventing me from getting those bonuses.

4 of my monsters are just for their traversal abilities (like Velocidrome). It's just convenient. And one is my beat the crap out of stuff monster.

If there was an option to leave the cat companion behind, I would take it!

Regarding those smelly eggs....BEHOLD

https://i.redd.it/s7jxkyfnvjlz.png

I'm training up a Green Nargacuga; starting all the way back at level 1 is indeed a drag.

Story-wise, I'm one or two plot beats from the end at around 17 hours on the clock.

I'm still a bit under-leveled but so far so good. Hopefully I don't have to stop and grind too much.

Ted wrote:

I'm training up a Green Nargacuga; starting all the way back at level 1 is indeed a drag.

Story-wise, I'm one or two plot beats from the end at around 17 hours on the clock.

I'm still a bit under-leveled but so far so good. Hopefully I don't have to stop and grind too much.

I think this is what expeditions are for: Stick the new monstie in an expedition (with a few other ones), and come back later. One of the expeditions I used was sending my monsties out for an hour, and they would usually go from level 1 to level 15. (I think the destination was Trese desert, with EXP as the objective.)

Thanks, I'll give the long+exp a try!

I'm near the end (I think) - ruins of Zalon or something.

I feel like maybe I've missed something along the way. I'm approaching 50 hours of gametime, with uograded Deviljo armour and greatsword, I've rotated my party fairly efficiently as to always have better monsties levelling up for new areas, amd I've been paying attention to crafting, genes, and sidequests...but I keep getting my ass kicked.

I'm around level 40 and my monsties are in the 30s, with Ratha being quite a bit higher. I can't do anything against Stygian Zinogre and a lot of the monsters on this mountain are similarly difficult.

HLTB has the average completion time at 36 hours and I cannot fathom that. I've spent the last 3 hours, at least, just grinding to stand a chance.

It's a fun grind and I'm enjoying the process, but I can't help but feel I've been doing something wrong this whole time.

Stygian Zinogre is one I had trouble with as well. The main thing with it is to get rid of the sidekicks (which you're probably doing already). I think I was a few levels higher than that by that point, with my monsties around level 40 (and Ratha at 45 or something like that). And I believe I also had upgraded Deviljho armor for this fight.

I agree: 36 hours feels very short.

You are very close to the end, so I can confirm that.

So for kicks, I fired up my game to see what level I was at once I beat it. And you can assume you will get a few more levels from fighting everyone at the end, so these numbers may be a bit inflated. But my rider was level 45, and my monsties were between 45-49, except Barroth at 53 (although he has quick growth, so he doesn't count). I don't know how much their stats change from leveling, but 10 more levels or so probably adds up. And of course, paying attention to resistances would help. I think I had some electric resistant armor plus Barroth (who had 2 electric resistance) for the Stygian Zinogre. It was still tough, though. I think the Deviljo armor is -2 electric resistance, though, so you might want to switch to something else for that fight.

So I don't know how much you rotated your party, but looking at mine, the Brute Tigrex was last monster I added to the party (which I think I got from the volcano). There was no turnover from that point on since I had the big movement abilities covered and had a 2/2/2, and so they all got leveled well. And I did an absolute ton of sidequests. I think I got a pop up saying I had done 100 at some point.

I finally made it to Albarax, cleared it out, and rebuilt the town over the weekend. I then spent some time trying to clear out the new sidequests that came up. I am really not liking these later ones to kill certain monsters since a lot of them share a spawn location with another monster and are considered "rare" so you can spend a lot of time running around and never find them. Every time I look one of them up online the advice I find is "use Qurupeco's ride action" to summon them until you get the right one.

I did have a really intense fight with the named Pink Rathian which was really cool. That was the hardest fight I have had in a long time and used both my faints during the fight since she used an AoE that knocked both me and my monstie out on the same turn.

In terms of story, not really a fan of Cheval's character. I get what they were going for, but it's not like he was completely abandoned after his mother died. I get the impression that the village took care of him and you and Lilia still hung out with him. Heck, the village even let him become a rider. If I had been in their shoes, I would have forbidden him, there were plenty of signs that he was not mentally and emotionally stable after the Blighted Nargacuga attack.

I am probably way over-leveled at this point. If you are playing the game normally, exp can be kind of hard to come by. Now that I have unlocked expeditions, sending a party to Perennial Pass focusing on exp gives five monsties 6k exp in 20 minutes. I am assuming it will only get better if I can unlock expeditions to later regions. The other good source of exp is the Barrel Felynes. You can find palicos wearing a barrel over their head and bodies roaming around the map sometimes and if you kill them, they award 10k exp prior to story completion. They only have 20 health but take substantially reduced damage. However, a Throwing Knife always does 15 and my monsties usually do at least 5 damage so I can kill them in a single round before they flee. I think they might have a higher chance of spawning in rare den extra rooms or something. But if you make a point to kill the ones you find, you should get plenty of experience.

Edit: Fixed exp from expedition, it's 6k not 9k.

I haven't posted much because I've been on the road, but I rolled the credits yesterday, yay!

A_Unicycle wrote:

I'm around level 40 and my monsties are in the 30s, with Ratha being quite a bit higher. I can't do anything against Stygian Zinogre and a lot of the monsters on this mountain are similarly difficult.

FWIW, I (barely) reached the final zone in ~24 hours and then put in another ~6 hours of grinding to beat Styggie.

My approach to grinding out the extra levels was kinda varied at first, but I settled on drawing out battles with Baggies until Deviljho interrupted the fight and then steamrolled it with my Barroth (thanks @Sundown).

I'll post a deeper recap, including a comparison of numbers between this playthrough and my first.

Malkroth wrote:

The other good source of exp is the Barrel Felynes. You can find palicos wearing a barrel over their head and bodies roaming around the map sometimes and if you kill them, they award 10k exp prior to story completion.

They also have the nice bonus of the best battle music in the game, especially the one on the beach.

EDIT: found it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XZsMpk...