How I Became A Unicorn

Hello there! Conash here, and today I thought I’d talk about my  experience with Monster Hunter games, and why it is that I enjoy them  and keep referencing it in various discussions, and I promise you that  my click-bait title will be explained beyond me finding it amusing.

So, my history with Monster Hunter began with Tri, I had heard good  things about the series so when hunting for a new game I decided to pick  it up. My older brother loved it, he made some long-time friends  playing it and really got into the series, I on the other hand  appreciated it for being a well made game but just hated the controls.  It felt sluggish, and the only weapon that I was comfortable with took a  long time to kill the monsters, and I just could never really  understand it. Now, I did have some experience with action RPG games  before like Kingdom Hearts, Tales of games, and a few of the Final  Fantasy spin-offs, but Monster Hunter Tri while I enjoyed sitting down  and figuring out what armor or weapons to get in order to prepare for  the monsters, actually fighting them felt a bit like a chore to me so I  wrote off the series as not for me at that point.

Then Monster Hunter 4U came out, and one of my closest friends was  going on about it and was looking forward to it, my older brother was  also talking about how he was planning on getting it and how I would  enjoy it. I was a bit doubtful at first, but when I looked into it I saw  that they were bringing back some weapons that were cut from Tri, so I  thought that I’d pick it up and give ‘Dual Blades’ a go because I was  convinced it’d fix my issues, and it definitely did. See, in Monster  Hunter every weapon is very different, they’ve got unique strengths and  weaknesses and feels to them, a ‘Sword and Shield’ feels very  different from ‘Dual Blades’, and well without having a good weapon that  really clicked with me trying to get familiar with Monster Hunter’s  unique systems just wasn’t fun, but that little slide when you’re in  demon mode? Perfection. It was quick, effective, responsive,  and allowed me to work on learning the monsters, as if I messed up and  went in for an attack at the wrong time I had a way to quickly escape.  Eventually though, I started to get bored with them as the core loop  became pretty repetitive, so I tried out Hunting Horn and it opened up a  whole new world to me. My movement options did become more limited  without the slide, but I still had good base movement and the ability to  constantly have a ‘puzzle’ in figuring out what songs to queue up,  paying attention to their duration, preparing horns with different  setups to cover different situations? It brought a whole new depth to  the game that I still enjoy, to the point that I don’t ever want  to play another weapon. I’ll still pull out DBs against some monsters  that HH is a really bad matchup against, but well, being basically one  of the 5ish people playing Hunting Horn I’ve come to embrace my inner  unicorn (you can find run into people who use it in the right circles,  but good luck running into them randomly online).

Now, that’s my experience with Monster Hunter more or less, but probably the more important question here is why  do I enjoy it? Well, I do enjoy these sorts of Action RPG games like  TWEWY, Crystal Chronicles, Tales of, or Kingdom Hearts, so Monster  Hunter does fit right nicely alongside those games, but you don’t see me  trying to push NM to dress up an HC character in say a Sheena costume  or something, so I should probably explain what it is that Monster  Hunter offers over many of those other games. One of the big things I  did sorta get into while talking about my history with Monster Hunter is  the vast variety of options, see in Kingdom Hearts you may be able to  change your keyblade and skills to get some different combos, but you  will always have the same basic options available to you, you will  typically have similar timing to your attacks and defense, and you’re  always ultimately playing the same character. In Monster Hunter however  each of the weapons are so unique that their play styles greatly differ  from one another, the philosophy behind the weapon changes entirely, the  difference between a ‘charge blade’ (a giant sword and shield that lets  you put the shield onto the sword to become an even bigger axe) and  ‘sword and shield’ isn’t as simple as one is bigger and stronger while  the other is faster and can use items all the time, when it comes to  sword and shield you are paying attention to when to get in mounting  damage, KO damage, what element sword you want to use, when to throw a  flash pod, when your teammates need a life powder, what have you, while  with a Charge Blade you’re paying attention to charging up your vials,  you’re paying attention to how long your shield buff is active, you need  to be aware of when to guard vs when to dodge, not to mention when to  throw out your ultimate attacks or assess if you will have a big enough  opening for your next attack, it’s a fundamentally different mindset and  while the enemies and a lot of the core systems are still the same it’s  feels more like comparing a rogue to a magus rather than a warrior with  a sword to a warrior with a bigger sword, and because of this variety  you’ll almost always be able to find a weapon that matches your  play-style, and all of them are good weapons, even the  ‘worst’ weapon generally will really only see any significant difference  if you’re competing for world records (and even then the biggest  difference comes not from the weapon but how people who compete for that  stuff will gravitate to the weapon with ~5% higher DPS in optimal  circumstances). Giving players a nice variety of choices that all feel  so vastly different while still being competitive makes a huge  difference in just keeping the game accessible in general to people like  me who get tired of say just following the same pattern, to me the  Hunting Horn offers a constant barrage of mini-puzzles where I have to  pay attention to the team’s buffs, the duration on the buffs, what we need  for this enemy and what we don’t, and what would be the best way to  work in those songs given the enemy we have to fight and I just love  having to constantly juggle all of these ever changing variables in my  head, while other weapons are far more straight forward. Each weapon is  incredibly distinct from one another and there aren’t any ‘bad’ weapons,  just ‘bad for you’ weapons.

That said, variety alone isn’t the only thing that sets Monster  Hunter apart, after all I use Hunting Horn as much as I can, so that  doesn’t explain why I will gravitate towards pulling out Monster Hunter  for some fun fights instead of Kingdom Hearts or some other game that  I’m comfortable with, and to that end I’d honestly say that probably the  biggest difference is the interactions between the players and the  monsters. See, in the Tales of series one of the key things that you  need to pay attention to (on the harder difficulties) is knowing when  you can safely attack and when you can’t, knowing not only how but when  to stagger an enemy to stop their attacks, and in some rare cases  knowing the attacks in question to respond in kind, but a big problem is  that with how fast the attacks are rarely ample to respond to specific  attacks and have to just drill into yourself reflexes on how to respond  when ‘this’ enemy guards, when ‘that’ enemy is staggered, and it just  makes the challenge of the fights generally boil down to muscle memory  rather than any real thoughtful exchange between you an the enemies.  Kingdom Hearts goes a bit above this by having a lot of the enemies  telegraph their actions more, or visually display when they’re immune to  attacks from the front or when they’re weak to the fire element, but  even then it absolutely pales in comparison to the level of detail that  you find in the interactions in Monster Hunter. See, Capcom has just put  so much detail into the monsters AI, their movements, their movesets,  all of it, that in some cases when you see them shifting their weight to  their back legs you know they’re going in for a pounce, so if you’re a  Lance user you might need to guard to avoid taking the hit, or maybe you  need to dodge out of the way. Did Teostra just suddenly jump into the  air and you hear that sound effect for him gathering in power? Well then  you need to decide right then and there if you’re going to run, block,  or throw a flash pod to not only interupt his super-nova but also knock  him out of the sky so that everyone can get some free hits on him. See,  Monster Hunter telegraphs the enemies movements well in advance that you  can respond with the options that you have, but you need to pay  attention to how they shift their weight, the sound effects around you,  the attacks they did recently, the distance between you and them, and  then it comes down to your ability to respond quickly. In Tales of  Symphonia, it’s incredibly frustrating when I made a guess to back-step  from an enemy to dodge their attack but they were quicker than me so I  should have guarded instead because I had no way of knowing which attack  the enemy would use in advance, in Monster Hunter when I get hit it is  always my fault, maybe I got overeager and I dodged too soon, maybe I  got greedy and was attacking the monster when it wasn’t safe, maybe I  thought that I was out of reach of it’s attack but I was in reach  (though Lunastra’s tail swipe should get it’s hitbox checked). Heck, I’m  looking forward to the Iceborne expansion coming up where they’re going  to bring back a monster who was infamous for having an attack that hit  roughly 80% of the screen you were on for massive  damage, because even if that one attack could easily fail you the  mission if 3 of your teammates didn’t know how to survive it, learning  how to deal with that massive attack (which had a big wind-up to it) was  a lot of fun in of itself, and when you managed to learn how to dodge  it? It felt amazing to walk up to this monster and know  you would be walking out with some new boots that boost your handicraft  (assuming RNG provided), because winning is never about RNG, it’s never  about ‘guessing’ if you’re safe or not, you know when you are  safe once you learn to read the monster. Sometimes hitboxes are a little  wonky, sometimes damage is bullshit, but the game always tells you what  to expect, and whether your response is to have the Insect Glaive user  get onto the monster or your SnS player to drop a pitfall trap in the  middle of battle, there are always tools at your disposal to respond,  and that level of telegraphing goes a huge way in making sure  the game always feels fair. This plays a big part into why I try to make  sure that players are always given information to respond with, why I  try to make sure if a huge attack is incoming that the enemy is  ‘focused’ first, or why when I got the go-ahead to put in a Monster  Hunter based enemy I went out of my way to make sure they only ever got 1  attack but the end of the turn you’d get a message telling you what  they did so that you could respond to it in kind (granted I need to add  in more ways for players to respond to these telegraphed attacks),  because that’s the biggest advantage Monster Hunter has over it’s  competition if you ask me.

Well I also really enjoy sitting down and planning out new armor  sets, figuring out how to get really good skills that take advantage of  what I want, that sort of puzzle solving is a really big draw of Monster  Hunter to me, but the core gameplay loop focuses on ‘Hunting’ the  monster more than anything else! Hope all of you were able to get  something out of this ramble, whether it was maybe getting an idea if  you want to try out Monster Hunter sometime (I’d suggest getting  Iceborne if you’re interested, World is a lot friendlier to new players  but the lack of monsters can really hurt it after awhile) or if you  might be able to take a few of the things that I talked about and bring  them to projects you may work on!