I’ve never played any of the Monster Hunter games. Despite their immense popularity, it was just something I never got around to. Thus with Capcom bringing Monster Hunter Generations to E3, and building an impressive booth for it no less, I decided now was the time to dive in. As always though, let me explain some basics.
The Monster Hunter games revolve around the idea of banding together with a bunch of friends and hunting giant monsters. The easiest way I can explain it is to consider each monster as basically a giant boss fight. You can certainly try on your own, but you’re going to have a much easier time if you team up with others and that’s where I can certainly see the appeal of this game. Thankfully, three others would be playing along with me during the demo. I selected a character that wielded twin daggers, opting for a hack and slash style of fighting and let the attendant set me up with a beginner’s loadout for my skills. With that all done, we were thrown into our first hunt.
While my teammates ran off ahead, the attendant helped me get used to the controls and after a few moments I rushed off to catch up. Once there I could already see everyone battling a rather large dinosaur. Understanding my role was to basically rush in and do some quick damage before running away, I played a very evasive game. My character came with two skills that would charge up over time. One was a series of powerful slashes, and the other was apparently an aerial dive. However, I could never get it to go off properly and ended up missing most of the time. I’m going to chalk this up to my own inexperience rather than the game, as everything else worked perfectly. My attacking strategy was pretty solid and I found myself able to contribute to the team effort. The beast ran off to another area after a bit, and we chased after it.
After a few more rounds of this I had settled into a pretty steady rhythm. I would attack swiftly when I saw an opening, wail away whenever we knocked the boss over, and if I noticed the team getting low on health I’d pull away to administer a team healing item. I wasn’t the only one healing others though, and I found that my teammates we’re pretty attentive at keeping our health levels up. We had some good synergy going and after a few more rounds of chasing the boss we finally killed it and cleared the mission. A job well done, we all congratulated each other and the demo was over. I took a few minutes afterwards to process my experience and came to a few conclusions.
This is very much a team game and I can imagine getting together with a bunch of friends in a room would not only be quite enjoyable, but also would make for much easier communication and strategy planning. In regards to the combat itself, I really feel like I only scratched the surface here. There’s a lot of different characters to choose from, and on top of that there’s different styles. It makes for a rather deep and complex experience that’s still easy to get into. If you’ve played Monster Hunter, then I think you’ll know if this is for you or not already. For anyone new like myself, I’d recommend finding a group of friends and diving into this hunt together. Also if you’re at Anime Expo this week, be sure to check out the demo at Capcom’s booth.
