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

I think (hope) I'm getting close, unfortunately turning into a bit of a hate finish. After introducing the mad scientist and more cats I'm now skipping every cut scene, which I've never done on a first play through of a game before (special badge for MH:Stories yay!). One cat was already too much! I feel bad that I ever pushed this game but glad that folks seem to be mostly enjoying it.

The story is...really really bad. It's not necessarily a terrible idea overall, but the pacing and delivery is so poor. It's just bland and predictable but not in a cozy way.

I've come pretty close to skipping cutscenes too. Mechanically, it's bloody fantastic, but the story just gets in the way for me. I'm actually surprised that I'm enjoying it this much after 40+ hours and hating the story. I mostly just throw on a podcast and have fun finding new genes to cram into my favourite monsters.

Edit: Also! Don't feel bad for voting for a game you're not enjoying! You never know until you play it. At least you're putting in the hours. I was so very keen on Alliance Alive but dropped off so quickly. Something about a handheld game on console felt really weird to me. I think JRPGs are almost handheld exclusives for me...

What is the best way to check play time? Do I need to quit my game and bring up the load screen? I think I was at 40 hours awhile ago and it sounds like I am the furthest behind on story. I haven't really been paying attention to the story at all, it is pretty bad. Like a bad children's story kind of bad.

I was dead set against playing this game when it won this quarter (mostly because I abhor the 3DS, incredibly uncomfortable to use), but the mechanics of the game have me kind of excited to try out Monster Hunter Stories 2 on the Switch at some point. I should probably just bee-line the story at this point until I hit a difficulty wall so I can wrap the game up this month and move on to something else.

It's kind of a shame for me because I thought this would be a good gateway into the MH franchise.
(RANT start)
But, except for the turn-based RPS combat (which is NOT part of mainline MH) it's pretty much trash. The game is ugly even by 3DS standards, story and setting is garbage, even the collectables seem not well thought out. I'm collecting hundreds of units of stuff that I don't need, but short on stuff I do need. I'm collecting honey and mushrooms on the plains, sure, then I'm, what, collecting honey and mushrooms in the ice cavern? At least give them some thematically sensible names. Also, I'm collecting egg fragments to make a whole egg (to do what?). But I'm close to the end and I haven't even collected enough for a single egg! And, no map markers for quest givers? And, for the armour and weapons you craft, which are the ones that look even remotely stylish?
(RANT end)
Sorry about that!

Malkroth wrote:

What is the best way to check play time?

Open the menu and view your Rider Card, then turn a few pages.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

I feel bad that I ever pushed this game but glad that folks seem to be mostly enjoying it.

I nominated Earthbound a while back, it won, and I dropped it about halfway through out of frustration. It happens to everyone, and you should not feel bad about it.

So for those of you who have finished, or are deep in: I'm still roughly at the 2-3 hour mark, mostly because at the start of this quarter I found I wasn't quite in the mood for this yet, and wanted to play something different. It seems like there are a lot of mixed feelings about this game. Should I jump in? Or just keep playing other stuff and wait for the next club game to come around?

LastSurprise wrote:

So for those of you who have finished, or are deep in: I'm still roughly at the 2-3 hour mark, mostly because at the start of this quarter I found I wasn't quite in the mood for this yet, and wanted to play something different. It seems like there are a lot of mixed feelings about this game. Should I jump in? Or just keep playing other stuff and wait for the next club game to come around?

I propose jumping in and getting ~10 hours under your belt and then see how you feel.

Aside from new environments and plot beats, you'll have seen most of the what the game has to offer.

Ted wrote:
LastSurprise wrote:

So for those of you who have finished, or are deep in: I'm still roughly at the 2-3 hour mark, mostly because at the start of this quarter I found I wasn't quite in the mood for this yet, and wanted to play something different. It seems like there are a lot of mixed feelings about this game. Should I jump in? Or just keep playing other stuff and wait for the next club game to come around?

I propose jumping in and getting ~10 hours under your belt and then see how you feel.

Aside from new environments and plot beats, you'll have seen most of the what the game has to offer.

And the plot, as has been said above many times, is not this game's strong suit. I'm with Ted: Give it a few hours, if you like the gameplay, keep going, if it doesn't do it for you, drop it and never give it another thought.

I think my positive outlook on the game was influenced by the many, many (hundreds of) hours I've wasted spent playing other Monster Hunter games, and I enjoyed seeing the new monsters and monsties being introduced later in the game. However, now that I've beaten it, I don't think I've booted it once. At first I thought I was going to go back and try to get all the poogies, but I think I've moved on and I don't expect this to happen.

LastSurprise wrote:

So for those of you who have finished, or are deep in: I'm still roughly at the 2-3 hour mark, mostly because at the start of this quarter I found I wasn't quite in the mood for this yet, and wanted to play something different. It seems like there are a lot of mixed feelings about this game. Should I jump in? Or just keep playing other stuff and wait for the next club game to come around?

I am bad at estimating location on play time as I spent over 10 hours just roaming the Pondry Hills I think. The major gameplay things you won't have seen so far are the Rite of Channeling and arena/expeditions. As has kind of been discussed recently, the story is kind of flat, and I equated it to a poorly written children's novel. The main thing keeping me going is the enjoyability of the moment to moment gameplay. So if you get through Darj Snowfield and don't really enjoy playing the game, I would say drop it at that point, but at least go that far and get the Rite of Channeling.

Looks like my playtime is 37h 28m so far.

Omg...

I checked my armour. I thought Deviljo would be the best because...well, Deviljo. I didn't realise it had a massive negative resistance to dragon, which the Stygian Zinogre and other Deviljos I'd been farming were hitting me with.

I crafted a Brachi set and used my highest resistant to dragon monstie and knocked over that boss easily.

I'm an idiot.

Not sure if this has come up previously but I found this image on reddit which has a ton of the QR codes for items for the 3DS version. I mostly used it to get a bunch of unlocks for gene slots.

https://m.imgur.com/a/UjBwt

Alright, more thoughts now that I'm at a proper keyboard.

I agree with everyone regarding the plot: it falls flat and some aspects are simply annoying. I went in expecting Monster Hunter: The Saturday Morning Cartoon: The Game and so I wasn't too crestfallen. In general, I enjoyed the breezy romp.

The premise of an evil genius in the context of Monster Hunter is really, really weird to me, though. In every mainline MH game I've played, there's a general feeling of cooperation amongst everyone in facing a natural threat. There may be some rivalry from time to time, but no one that I recall wants to defeat other people who get in their way. The evil genius is also weird because the state of civilization in MH is basically the bronze age, so the notion of buttons and switches, or even lab experiments, feels very out of place.

Mechanically, the game has some glaring shortcomings. It takes way too long to get a new monstie up to speed, to the degree that the game punishes the otherwise good idea of rotating monsties out of the main party. The expedition mechanic helps somewhat, but it always seems that the benched monsties are always behind the curve. This is particularly frustrating when we need the right monstie for a scripted fight, so it's either (a) grind up the monstie that'll really help with the battle or (b) grind up the varsity team until they can steamroll the scripted fight anyway.

Another big shortcoming is the unbalanced nature of the rider's weapons. In the first half of the game, any class of weapon is viable. But, as the game progresses, the rider's role shifts from fellow battler to support, simply because the rider's damage output pales in comparison to the monsters. At this point, the rider's skills can make a big difference in boss battles, but then we encounter the unbalanced nature of the weapon classes. The skills of great swords in particular tend to be all about offense, but that doesn't help when the rider's damage output is comparatively tiny. At the end of this run, I was using a piddly Gendrome sword-and-shield for both the paralysis effect and the SnS skills of buffing my monstie.

And finally, on a technical note, the game really chews up the 3DS' battery!

But there are plenty of aspects I really enjoyed: MH as an RPG, collecting monsties, the gene splicing mechanic, the breezy setting, silly dialog and puns, and monsters with field abilities. I'm glad MH:Stories did well enough commercially to warrant a sequel.

Between the demo and two runs of the full game, I've spent close to 100 hours with the game. There were some frustrating moments, but I still consider it time well spent.

As promised, here are some numbers comparing my first and second runs, spoilered for length.

Spoiler:
Aspect 1st Run 2nd Run ------ ------- ------- == Status == Lv 47 43 Zenny 214,505 97,248 HP 283 262 SPD 6 6 ATK 166 107 DEF 186 170 Hero's Stone 9 9 == Monsterpedia == Wild Monsters 96/108 78/108 Monsties 38/61 20/61 == Rider Card == "Don von Dumplings" "Mallet Approved!" Lv 47 43 Btl Rank E E Subquests Clear 207 97 My Monsties 74 27 My Eggs 0 0 StreetPass Hits 0 0 Monsterpedia 88% 72% - Vortex Hammer - Viper Bite - Regios Armor - Jaggi Armor - Dragon Res (S) Tal. - Antiseal + Shocking (S) Tal. Ratha Lv51 Ratha Lv49 Blue Yian Kut-Ku Lv56 Velocidrome Lv56 Nerscylla Lv51 Barroth Lv50 Pink Rathian Lv48 Green Nargacuga Lv41 Lagiacrus Lv28 Red Khezu Lv39 Stygian Zinogre Lv25 Brachydios Lv31 -- Awards 65/100 50/100 --- Story 18/22 13/22 --- Battle 23/27 20/27 --- Monsties 10/19 5/19 --- Collection 9/15 7/15 --- Life 5/17 5/17 -- Play Data Total Play Time 56:11 31:24 Monsters Slain 651 414 Eggs Acquired 84 33 Frequently used Monsties - Blue Yian Kut-Ku - Velocidrome - Nerscylla - Yian Kut-Ku - Royal Ludroth - Barroth ###
Mr GT Chris wrote:

Also, I'm collecting egg fragments to make a whole egg (to do what?). But I'm close to the end and I haven't even collected enough for a single egg!

This frustrated me, too; I didn't collect enough for a single egg in either of my runs.

I'm under the impression that the main purview of egg fragments are PvP rewards in the arena.

The fact that a few are sprinkled around the world just seems to confuse matters even more.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

It's kind of a shame for me because I thought this would be a good gateway into the MH franchise.

I'm happy to say that pretty much everything good about MH:Stories is in full effect in the mainline series, and everything done poorly is either done better or not applicable.

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8fFamDVoAE5KsZ?format=jpg&name=large)

Done!

I'll echo the good and the bad that more eloquent folk here have said. Story is poop, gameplay is incredible. Very rarely do I put 50 hours in to a RPG and not be itching for it to be over. Gene mixing remained fun until the very end.

I think the only thing I haven't seen mentioned too much is how Ratha just becomes almost better than everything else you can get from about the mid-way point. While I tried to level a Deviljo and Stygian Zinogore, and while they did do cool things, Ratha was always miles ahead of them in levels and was often a safe bet. It's likely this isn't the case with post-game content, but I think I'm going to put it down for now.

Still an A+ game. I'm excited to try the sequel after I've had a bit of a break. Maybe next year

For anyone interested in trying the mainline series on 3DS, all three titles currently match their lowest prices on the USA eShop:

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate - $6
Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate - $9
Monster Hunter Generations - $16

Of the three, I recommend MH4U for folks new to hunting.

MH3U lacks a lot of QoL improvements and the 3DS edition omits online multiplayer. (On the other hand, the game boasts my favorite premise and environments, plus the unique mechanic of fighting underwater.)

MHGen is more of a 'greatest hits' title with a lot of experimental features, and a superior version can be found on Switch.

Warning: MH4U and MHGen offer demos and I strongly urge new players to avoid them. The demos simply drop players directly into a hunt with pre-canned gear, a very short time limit, and neither context nor instruction. The demos are good for seeing how the weapon mechanics might have changed from a previous iteration but they hardly convey the full experience and are a horrible intro for anyone new to the series.

And done. Luckily I didn't have any major problems with the last part of the game. The final boss seemed like it was causing me problems because it kept respawning its body parts too quickly but I was suddenly prompted "Time for a super dooper attack yay!", and boom, boss dead. Fist pump?

I've ranted enough but if I did a game club ranking (of the ones I've played) this would be on the bottom. Yikes. The battle mechanics gave so much promise in the beginning but the game ended up falling short in every other area.

Ted wrote:

MH3U lacks a lot of QoL improvements and the 3DS edition omits online multiplayer. (On the other hand, the game boasts my favorite premise and environments, plus the unique mechanic of fighting underwater.)

MHGen is more of a 'greatest hits' title with a lot of experimental features, and a superior version can be found on Switch.

That's interesting to note. I actually already have MHGen from a previous sale so I'll probably give that a whirl at some point. For now I should probably give my 3DS a break!

Some final stats:
46 hrs
Lv 43
75055z
Weapon: Burning Prominar Lv1
Armor: Brachydios Armor Lv 2

I had the same problem as others trying to level new monsters at the later stages. I had an Ivory Lagiacrus at lv 34 and a Deviljho at lv 28 but they weren't up to scratch with the rest of my party.

My main stays were:
Ratha lv 46, Power
Barroth lv 49, Speed
Nerscylla lv 49, Technical

Otherwise, I tended to have monsters for their traversal capabilities. One thing I wasn't quite sure of was if fighting repeatedly with the same monster improved its relationship with you. Did their attack selection get smarter over time?

I finally started into the Volcano area this weekend and picked up Ratha... who is ~15 levels behind my main roster, and he's stuck in my party currently so I can't use expeditions to catch him up. Hopefully his "regular" growth instead of slow will let him catch up with the rest of the party but not impact his stats. I like that his gene slots are all open, but not that they started him with a diagonal bingo with two blank red genes. If I want to get him any bingos besides power/fire, I am going to have to swap one of these genes...

I think I am getting close to the end of the volcano which is hopefully near the end of the game. I am starting to put the combat on high speed for all the little monster fights since they are pretty inconsequential. The story is doing nothing to propel me forward and some of the characters are just baffling, like this fake rider I've run into a couple of time.

My roster has gone from having trouble fitting a power to be like 4 power monsties and now I am struggling to keep a speed monstie on my team. I know they tied their tendencies to how the monster fights normally, but it would have been nice to have a better balance in the tendencies and ride abilities. I guess now that I have flight, a couple of them are very situational in their use.

I was listening to the Axe of the Blood God podcast where they had on IGN’s reviewer of MHS2. They liked the game a lot but one of the negatives they raised was that the story wasn’t as good.
(head exploded)

Anyway, if you want more of what’s in MS, it’s there for you. However it didn’t really sound like many of my criticisms had been dealt with.

H...how could the story be any worse? I'm interested in picking up MHS2 eventually, but I need a bit of a break for now.

Sidenote, I really love Axe of the Blood God. It's a nice casual-paced podcast with 2 lovable hosts. I don't always understand Kat's sports talk, but I always smile when Nadia starts talking Final Fantasy XIV

Still chugging away at the game. I thought once I had explored every region once I would be near the end of the story, but it seems like I hit the back tracking chapters now. Hopefully I can sail through them without too much issue. Getting fights with multiple monsters is much more challenging than the one-on-ones the game starts you out with. I have noticed my player damage start to drop off as well, it is disheartening to not be able to kill the small monsters with a single attack in head-to-head. Been able to keep my damage decent by targeting the monster's weakness, but it still pales in comparison to a monstie's skill damage.

Story is still riding that children's novel line really hard. Really wish someone would just kill Dr. Menelger so we don't have to deal with his nonsense anymore.

Babda Rainforest revisit rant:

Spoiler:

How does that idiot doctor get away? He has to slowly raise the egg on a fishing line while sitting in a floating ship. We already established Ratha can fly, and quite quickly. Really wanted him to just fly up and destroy the doctor's ship and wipe that smug look off his face. The same enemy constantly escaping is getting really annoying.

I noticed that MHS is on Apple Arcade, at least in Australia.

Finally rolled credits on the game tonight, that took a lot longer than I thought. The game definitely plugged into my completionist sensibilities, making me want to collect at least one of every monster and build perfect gene combos for my main party. I definitely spent too much time doing that early in the game, especially since the only early game monstie that stuck in my party was the Red Khezu I picked up. Although that Red Khezu was pretty dang strong and its gene slots were full when I got it so I never tweaked it.

Here are my final stats:
70 hrs
Lv 50
75055z
Weapon: Eternal Strife (max)
Armor: Mosgharl Armor (max)

My main stays were:
Ratha lv 53, Power
Pink Rathian (Sakura) lv 52, Speed
Red Khezu (Rakaga) lv 52, Technical

Some of the later monsters seemed cool but as others pointed out, that late in the game its hard to level them up to a useful stage and I had already invested genes in some monsties. I had a pretty good Diablos and Tigrex as well, but them being power monsties made them have to compete with Ratha who kind of stole the limelight after mid-game.

Did anyone check out the Tower of Illusions or Labyrinth of Ordeals after beating the game? Just opened those up and they seem like they would be interesting if I was interested in collecting every monster and trying them out.

By the time they opened up I was ready to move on to something else.

Congrats Malkroth!