Finally decided to play a Monster Hunter game after being aware of the franchise for a few years. Decided to just go with the moust famous one one Steam, Monster Hunter:World. Its advertised as a fully co-op campaign playthrough so that was a big sticking point for me. Didnt really know anything about Monster Hunter other than its a long running franchise dating back to PS2 and theres lots of them, and that the general idea is that almost the whole game is a series of long lasting big epic boss fights and its a third person action RPG type game. Sure, sounds good enough for me. It took me awhile to decide to actually install it and play through it after purchasing it, though, because I had heard the game is like 50+ hours long so its definitely a commitment once you decide to sit through it.
The game starts off having you design a characters appearance, then surprisingly you get to choose your pets appearance. Then you get into the game and get introduced to the main hub-world and all the various quirky characters. The story is...I dont really know. The characters are just not captivating or endearing really, its mostly annoying and hard to get into. I tried to care about the dialogue and writing for the first few hours, but eventually everything was so whimsical and zaney that I lost interest. Like the characters are rediculous. You have the main quest girl that is like your waifu companion that follows you around earnestly hyping you up being an almost personal caretaker, shes got a really high pitched cliche stereotypical like Japanese anime girl voice that gets grating after awhile. Then you have all these random cat characters like the Cat chefs that cook food for you and play elaborate cutscenes of making food, which are unique and memorable at least, but the whole world comes together to be a giant mishmash of "So Random!" rediculous bullshit that it found it kinda hard to get invested in and take seriously. Theres this one Goku looking guy that shows up and its just like, what the hell am I playing? It doesnt help that the dialogue is just super drab and dull and generic. They never say anything interesting and the voice acting is sparse and few and far between, its mostly reading lines of text. They just say basic things like "Theres a big monster coming this way, hes super bad and evil and we gotta stop it!" for pages and pages. I dont know, the story is just not engaging. And its funny because I heard this is the one Monser Hunter game where they really put emphasis on the story and apparently the other games are more light on it. Well it was a pretty big miss. At least the characters are sort of memorable, but not for the right reasons. It doesnt really come across as having its own distinct personality, but more just a mishmash of random Japanese cliches and fantasy pop-culture.
Its no big deal though, because no one really plays Monster Hunter for the story or super deep engaging dialogue, do they? Nah its all about the epic boss fights and getting new powerful gear. Well I played the ENTIRE game co-op with a friend. And let me tell you, it took a long time for us to wrap our heads around how the hell this convuluted shit system works. Its bad, real bad. The co-op experience is abysmal and I cant fathom what the fuck they were thinking when they strung this together in such a way. For starters, you have to invite your friend to join your party. Ok, simple enough, I'm in. But that doesnt do anything, you cant see eachother walk around town. You can see eachother type, you can see youre in the same group, but its seemingly pointless. After a bunch of hours we finally found out that theres a place called "The Gathering Hub" where you can go to actually see eachother walk around outside of a quest, but why cant we just see eachother everywhere? Why design it like this? They werent competent enough to program it in? It sucks. If I go start a quest, my co-op partner doesnt automatically come with me, or even get asked if he wants to join. Nope. One person has to host a quest from a Quest Board, and then the other person has to go find the Quest Board and go through about 6 menu's to find the quest and press OK on the various prompts. THEN the Host has to wait for everyone to ready up, then you can start together. Great! Except no. There's a catch. You cannot join eachothers quest until you EACH view various mission cutscenes at least once. Essentially what this means is every single time theres a new mission, you both have to start it in single player, run around aimlessly for 10-20 minutes looking for the next path towards progression and then a cutscene, then it will say something like "SOS Flare available!" meaning you can now return to town and host the quest from scratch and then both start the quest together. Sometimes it wont even say "SOS flare" but if you leave directly after the cutscene it will work anyway. Its a mess. Why is it programmed this way? Why cant we just start every mission together and watch the cutscenes together? Why cant we see eachother walk around in town? Why does the co-op partner have to keep flipping through handfuls of menus just to join each quest, why cant it just automatically join when the host starts a quest? It all comes together to turn into this draining, annoying process that really drags down the game. For the first 10+ hours we barely understood WTF was going on and had to keep googling stuff to try to piece together why the hell we are kept getting barred from joining eachother. The advertising that its a "fully co-op experience" is almost false advertising, it feels so half assed and fucked up its amazing. Eventually we got an understanding of how to do it, and we could almost sift through it in a coherent manner, but it still sucked.
Once the initial hours of frustration figuring out the co-op system were over, we got into the core loop of the game. At the Quest Board, you have various categories. Main quests, optional quests, Investigations, and Events. The first two are self-explainatory, then you have Investigations which are a series of seemingly randomly generated quests which you can manually select from an NPC which allow you to specifically target farm/hunt certain monsters. Events are these more special quests that usually unlock something back at the base or some new feature. The basic idea with pratically every main quest in the game is that you enter some big open map, and need to run around (at first aimlessly) tracking down a specific monster it wants you to hunt. You do this by collecting clues in the form of footprints, mucus, feathers, dung, etc. By doing so, it fills up a meter, that once leveled up enough times reveals more and more details about the monster, eventually even automatically putting him on your minimap to find hassel-free. In theory it sounds good, and makes sense. Of course you have to track the monster down, like a real hunt! but the execution can once again, feel like a chore and become draining. The problem is the extent at which you have to do this. Sometimes you will be running around doing nothing but looking for footprints for upwards of 15+ minutes at a time. Then you fight the boss, but they always fly away or run away and go through these chase+hunt phases. More running around looking for him. It makes the overall pacing of the game feel like it has way too much downtime. At first I was kind of getting into it, enjoying the slowburn, but since the game is so long, the whole process becomes arduous and not something I look forward to. Even with the fact that once you collect enough evidence you dont have to track them anymore, the problem is that every second or third mission you come across some new monster that you have to do it all over again and it makes the pacing feel really dull. Theres no exciting moment to moment gameplay. Its like one moment youll have a decently engaging part, then the next youre bored again. It's just too much.
The actual maps and level design is varied, they arent gigantic open worlds but more like medium sized open maps. You can walk from one end to the other in probably 5 minutes. You start off in a typical grassy fields or tropical island type place, but as the game progresses you unlock more maps that inhabit different creatures, and as the game goes on these maps get more and more fantastical. The graphics and designs are intriguing and strange, some parts do a good job depicting this otherworldly almost alien environments with the weird purple and blue environments and strange looking spores growing everywhere. Theres a more mountianous, rocky lava map towards the end of the game that feels more threatening like a crescendo of the games difficulty and hostility. The main problem I have with some of the games maps is that they are just too vertical. You'll spend more time climbing up and down left and right than actually doing anything else. One moment youll fight a boss, and then he'll be flying away up 20 flights of vines and other things you have to climb across. And the minimap doesnt usually do a great job trying to indicate where youre supposed to go, so it makes navigation feel more like an annoying chore than exploring an exciting well crafted environment.
As for the actual combat of fighting the monsters, its hit or miss. There are two categories of monsters. Small, and large. Small monsters might as well not even be in the game, they are so inconsequential and irreelvant they basically just stand there doing nothing only serving to richen up the visuals or to be standing loot pinatas to skin for resources. But fine, the game is all about the big boss fights. The game is a third person action game, and the controls are pretty similar to Souls games actually. You have a roll button that you need to use constantly, theres a lock-on system that is completely worthless and actively fucks you up that I never used, there are strong and weak attack buttons, theres health potions coupled with a long drawn out animation each time you sip them, and the combat is fast paced and skill oriented demanding good reflexes and strategic fighting. You can see damage numbers when you hit the enemies, but you cant see their health bars, which is an interesting design choice, instead the only indication of how weakened the boss is, is visually looking at if hes limping or if youve broken off pieces of him. I didnt mind that you cant see the health bars, its unique from other games and keeps you guessing and makes you never let your guard up. There is about a dozen categories of weapons, and surprisingly each one of them has drastically different controls, button combos, movesets, and even modes of play. Some of them like the Great Sword will not allow you to jog around with it equipped, but does big damage. Long swords have a system where there is a gauge on the top left that you must fill by doing various combos. Other weapons like Switchaxe lets you switch between Axe and Sword modes at the press of a button, coupled with its own gauge. But really, I have to admit I never found any of the weapon types satisfying or enticing to me. Particularly because the designs of them and visuals were just not that appealing. They artstyle and tone of the game at times isn't really my cup of tea, its too over the top and Final Fantasy-esque. Gigantic weapons, nonsensical designs, and so on. At first I used the Great Swords, but it annoyed me how slow it was, and no jogging. I tried the Long sword but I hated having to rely on and learn convuluted weapon combos like some fighting game. Eventually I switched over the plain and simple Hammer. This is just a big two hand hammer that lets you jog while holding it, and doesnt rely on complex button combos, but still does massive damage. Its the most simple and easy to grasp weapon type. It has satisfying animations where you can hold Rt to charge up three different times, each with its own corresponding move. The third charge lets you do a whirlwind spin attack, which is fun to use. You can also tap B fast to do a sort of repeating "Bonk" move where you just slam the hammer down vertically over and over, which I used to great fun on bosses heads. So atleast I eventually found a weapon type I enjoyed using --- But there is sadly a crippling and frustrating aspect to the combat that I could just never overlook or come to terms with. The stuns. There are way too many fucking stunlocks in the game, and of various types. First you have Screaming stuns. The bosses can scream, which due to loud noise, makes your character stand around holding his ears and you lose control. The next stun is simply called "Stun". This is a move where you get hit too hard, or knocked down a certain way, that your character will stand up and have stars spinning around his head and you have to spin the stick to regain control of your character. This shit can last like 15 seconds. Then theres Paralysis, a kind of stun that happens due to electricity or something. Theres even fucking SLEEP stun where some bosses can literally put you to sleep and your character will fall to the floor not responding to controls. ITS TOO MUCH. I felt like half of the fucking time during combat I wasnt even playing the game but just waiting for my character to recover from constant stunlocks. To make matters worse it takes so long to use a healing potion you'll frequently go through these cycles where you do nothing but walk up and attack the boss once, take damage, run away and do a 10 second long heal, run back hit once, take damage, run away use 10 second heal, REPEAT. Its just so annoying. Why is everything so slow and tedious? I got so fed up with the constant stunlocks ruining the enjoyment of the game that I started to google if theres a way to mitigate it, because the game does such a poor job of explaining its systems. Well it turns out theres a Skill system where pieces of gear have various skills attached to them, and you can stack these skills together by equipping more and more pieces of gear with the same skills. So there is equipment with "Stun resistance" which gets rid of the stick-spinning debuff, and theres also "Earmuffs" which gets rid of the screaming debuff. The entire game I was desperately trying to rank these two skills high enough just to be immune to most of the stuns. It wasnt until probably halfway through the game that I finally got Stun resistance to maximum which made me immune to the stick spins, and it wasnt until the last quarter of the game that I finally got immune to Screaming debuffs via Earmuffs stacking. What the fuck! This stuff should of atleast been easier to obtain, or been massively reduced because it made the combat so damn frustrating. I cant think of another third person action game that has so many stuns, why is it like this? Theres so many more that I didnt mention, so many things from simply bumping into the boss will knock you on your ass, tripping over rocks, getting tapped by a small explosion, almost every piece of damage knocks you on your ass and plays a long drawn out animation. You cant even cancel attacks mid-animation. Once you let an attack happen, its committed. Other action games if you do a 4 second long attack animation, you can atleast cancel it, but in this one its very common to commit to a giant animation and just be stuck doing it until its over, despite your best attempts to stop it and get away. It makes the controls overall feel clunky and bad to control. I understand that there should be a consequence to your button presses and your actions should have meaning, but the combination of shit here comes together to at times make a really annoying experience.
The combat isn't all bad, though, there are plenty of times where it feels really great and satisfying to take down these big beasts. There are plenty of moments when there are multiple monster bosses on screen at once, sometimes triggering a "Turf war" where the bosses fight eachother. They cant actually kill eachother, but they do get weakened to make it easier for the players to kill them. Its an amusing spectacle to watch, the animations are well done, and the graphics and model and texture design is striking a lot of the times. It can be a pain in the ass if you just want to get away from one of the bosses and take on the main one yourself sometimes, though, they follow you around the map for ages and at times seems even scripted to do so, which is kind of a bummer. The visceral feeling of the combat shines through at times, I played the game with a controller and the vibrations in particular make everything feel impactful and weighted, lining up a good combo and striking the bosses in their various weak spots feels impactful and fun. As you collect tracks and various clues your Monster Guide updates and you can even go in and look at a detailed account of each boss, telling you their weak spots and what kinds of rewards you might expect. So it does a good job making you actually feel like a Monster Hunter. In the heat of battle there are all sorts of temporary buffs, potions, herbs you can use to give yourself an advantage. You have this hotbar you can select items with the D-pad, mostly I just used various health potions (And mega health potions) but you can also use things to increase your health temporarily , and antidotes for poison. You also get these Mantles which is like a cloak you put over yourself to give yourself a temporary buff. Theres a few of them, One is for vitality mantle that makes you tank free damage for awhile, the other cures all ailments, others let you sneak better, and so on. We just used the Vitality mantle for the whole game, so it was fun to try to wait for the perfect moment to put this cloak on and then go full DPS race on the boss tanking damage for a short time. Though, like other downfalls in the game, all fun things must come to an end. Because as youre having fun fighting the bosses, they will frequently run away, requiring you to chase them across the map over and over and over. Sure, this sounds fine on paper, and makes it more like an engaging hunt where you have to keep progressively fighting and then tracking down the monster. I don't have a problem with that. The problem is that its done to excess. They can run away from you 10+ times before you finally take them down. Requiring at times 20+ minutes of doing nothing but running around randomly in between battles. Its just so much downtime. A common problem the game has is that the moment-to-moment gameplay, overall, is just dull and boring. It feels like a lot of busy work, chores, and meandering, before you finally get to the good parts. And the good parts are few and far between. Theres just too much filler!
Each of the bosses has their own kind of gimmick, like some of them will poison you, others will make you bleed requiring you to stand still and crouch, others will put you to sleep, others will barrel under ground and arrive ontop of you, others will spin around at you, others are based on various elemental features like lightning,fire, etc that you'll have to find a way to deal with. Which is fine, they each force you to adjust your playstyle to figure out a proper way to deal with them, so they each feel distinct and like youre not just fighting some copy paste monster the whole game.
As for the boss variety themselves, its mostly dragons/monsters with wings, and more grounded dinosaur monsters, thats...basically it. I was a little disappointed when I came to realize this. Its not really a grand creative spree of exciting and varied monsters, its more like variations on a theme. They're okay enough, I guess, and are memorable in their own ways. You have guys like Pukei-Pukei which is this big green bird that spits poison at you, youve got Anjanath which is like something out of Jurassic Park, youve got Tzitzi, which is this little dinosaur guy that screams constantly but is kinda a pushover, theres a Barroth which is this big guy encased in a thick armor shell that you have to keep breaking pieces off, theres this big white fluffy Bat guy that puts you to sleep, and theres a Radobaan which is this like spinning porcupine type boss that can be a real pain in the ass. Theres also another boss we called "Dig-dug" that does this move that keeps burying himself under the ground and then popping out ontop of you, dealing massive damage, and stunlocking you for 15+ seconds. This was the boss that made super frustrated with the constant stun-locks and made me google a way to get stun resistance. It was awful. Theres a lot more than these, but yeah theres a big list of unique monsters to fight but their designs arent particularly creative or anything. Its not like youre fighting Demon monsters or any crazy creatures, its more like Dinosaurs, Birds, Dragons, more naturalistic kind of beasts. Which is fine, I guess, but after awhile the 'woo' and 'mystique' just got lost on me. It was like "Oh, another different colored dragon" "Oh, another bird" "Oh, another dinosaur". and it can be especially annoying because it seems like most of the bosses in the game have wings and constantly fly away from you mid battle, like the previous problem I mentioned it just gets annoying to have to keep tracking them down.
The main quests arent really that varied, they all have the same formula. Its just go find this new monster and kill him. They arent really like hand crafted levels or missions or anything. They are all kinda the same thing...The main and side quests almost feel exactly the same, other than the fact that side quests involve monsters youve already killed. There was like one single main quest that involved this big hulking monster called Zora Magdaros which is like a Godzilla type guy where you do nothing but shoot at him with cannonballs or walk around ontop of him (which is just looks like youre walking around on a big rock) and have to destroy his Lava cores, then you go back to shooting at him with cannonballs for 20 minutes. Eventually you win and he just crawls away under the sea, I didnt really understand the point? Theres even an event that keeps popping up like "You can go kill zora magdaros again, only lasts for 3 quests!" like its this big important thing. Well we did grind him out a few times, and crafted some of the pieces of armor, but it wasnt really that useful or last that long. Kinda weird that there was only really one main quest in the entire game that had any sort of difference to it or hand-craftedness/scripted events. Other than that one quest I cant really remember anything else that was substantially different.
Speaking of tracking things down, there is this green dotted mist orbs that appear around you, acting like a sort of guide to help you find things in the world. This thing took so many hours to understand what the hell it was trying to do or show me. Its just not very intuitive, lots of things in the game arent. From a UI standpoint, from a design standpoint, just a lot of the things in the game are confusing to understand whats happening. The green orbs, by default, just point to whatever is nearest to you to collect (I think?) so it will try to lead you towards a random herb, a rock, an ore, some tracks, etc. However, you can click the stick to manually select a thing for the orbs to focus on. This works pretty horribly, and is a confusing mess, the green orbs constantly get messed up and resets the path, frequently making you walk in circles doing nothing. You can put a pin on an object on the minimap , but it wasnt until halfway through the game that I realized that on the minimap there is a tiny green dot that shows that this is what the green orbs are trying to lead you to. Ok, so once you find the boss you can Pin him on the minimap, and then follow the green orbs confidently knowing it will take you to the right spot. The problem is the pathing or coding of this thing is frequently awful and will keep throwing you in the most random places, only to just stop abruptly and do nothing, forcing you to run around randomly until it "rethinks" and readjusts where to go. Its just bad, even after dozens of hours I was still complaining and struggling with this damn system. Im glad theres something in the game to try to give you a helping hand in guiding you through the big open maps, but the programming on this thing just sucked.
So besides the loop of accepting main quests, being unable to start co-op together until you each go inside and manually watch the first cutscene, backing out, and restarting, fighting the varied main monsters, etc - the game is still chock full of different features, mechanics, and things to do. Almost so much so that its like they just threw everything at the wall and wanted to see what stuck. I dont know about other Monster Hunter games, or if this game just gave into the survival game craze trend of the times, but theres all sorts of resource gathering/mining you have to do in this game. Every moment youre walking around in the game maps you can be spamming the B button to pickup anything you walk by. Herbs, flowers, ore, rocks, mining, random bugs, honey used for crafting mega potions, bonepiles and so on. You use these resources back at the base in a variety of different merchants. Theres a Melding guy that lets you meld items together, which I didnt really bother using. Theres another NPC that lets you grow a little farm of sorts, cultivate various different herbs and grow your own things like honey, health herbs, antitdotes etc. Theres various merchants for buying basic supplies. There is an NPC you go to which lets you pick from a long list of Investigations to do, and turn in Bounties which are various tasks you must complete to get rewards. There is a research center guy you talk to which you bring your monster clues to and then he updates your Monster Guide with more information. Theres the Chef's that let you eat all sorts of food with various temporary buffs. You even have your own room and house-servent cat which you can send on these Safari missions to bring back stuff for you, but I never really used it much.
But most important of all, you have the Forge and Blacksmith location. This is where the main hook of the game is. In between fighting new monsters and bosses, you come back here to unlock brand new sets of armor and weapon upgrades you can craft. Since the game has no real Level up or Skill system, all of your character power comes from simply buying and upgrading your gear. There is a (HR) hunter rank level system, but it serves no more than just a symbol of basically how many quests or bosses youve killed, it doesnt make you stronger, only lets you accept certain quests. So there is all sorts of armors and weapons to make in order to get stronger. At first, you can only craft very basic weapons. Iron, and bone. And for many hours into the game, I was so confused why I could still only create Iron and Bone weapon categories, despite in the upgrade tree seeing all these crazy new weapons I cannot access. Well like I said previously, the game isnt very intuitive at times. the UI and various menu's do a bad job explaining themselves, at least to me. It took me maybe a dozen or two hours to realize that while you can craft very basic weapon categories, the way the upgrade system works is that you must start from a basic weapon, and then upgrade into another tree. There is a white line on the upgrade tree showing you various 'crossroads' where you can decide to stay on the same weapon category, or upgrade into a completely different one. Once I realized this, my frustration with the lack of weapon upgrades and boring weapon selection was mostly alleviated. It opened up so many possibilites. Now I can have a strategy and plan to upgrade my shitty Bone Hammer into this epic Lightning hammer or crazy Anjanath hammer that does fire damage, etc. The equipment are mostly based on, or modelled after the bosses youve fought. So it can be an exciting and rewarding feeling to discover a new enemy, with the knowledge that once you take him down you can use his resources to craft stronger equipment. I suppose thats the main draw to the game, and what keeps people coming back. Its overall a very simple idea and system, but its engaging and keeps you looking for the next upgrade, keeps you wanting to grind side missions, farm for resources, etc. So I like that RPG side of it. Its simple but not too simple. I eventually ended up going with the Lightning Hammer weapon tree and sticking with it until the end of the game so I think it served my purposes well. As for the armor, there are dozens and dozens of different sets. You can even visually preview them before crafting them. Lots of them look ridiculous and over the top, but some of them are more typical knight equipment. The designs are atleast weird enough to be memorable. The armor is simple, you just buy whatever increases your Defense as well as elemental resistances (if you need them for the current boss). Each armor piece also has a Skill attached to it, these can be things like slightly buffing attack damage, even things like "Wide range' which lets you heal your partner whenever you use a potion, and all sorts of other skills that I didnt really care much about. Because like I mentioned previously, as soon as I found out there were Earplugs and Stun Resistance gear, my main and only goal was to maximize these as much as possible to reduce the annoying fucking stuns. So there was no other room to care about other skills, which is, for me, a pretty sad flaw overall for the equipment system, that I feel so forced to stack these skills that all the other skills became pointless, because without them, the combat is just that much more annoying. You get armor shards from optional quests and various tasks, and these are used to further upgrade and increase the gear youre wearing. At times it became mandatory to go and farm these things to make ourselves just that little bit stronger to be able to try to finish just one more main quest. But it was fun constantly upgrading your characters equipment regardless and something to look forward to.
Something really stupid is that the game throws all this blatantly overpowered equipment at you. Called Defender and Guardian equipment. They explicitally say this equipment is solely made to speedrun through the game as fast as possible and is basically cheating/easy mode for people that want to speedrun to the Expansion pack. Well it was extremely confusing for the first few hours. "Why the hell is this gear so good?" "What is this Guardian and Defender stuff"? We sadly used it for a couple main missions, maybe the first 3 hours. But we thought "This cant be right, lets look it up" and found out that yeah, this stuff is basically cheating. We forced ourselves to never use it. Its a shame that the game even has this stuff in it and is so poorly explained as basically being a cheat code for speedrunners. There should of been a giant disclaimer, or make it harder to obtain this stuff, I think a lot of noobs and newcomers to the game probably ruin their experience by using this gear without even realizing. There are a lot of instances of poor design choices and unintuitive annoyances like this to be found all over the game.
So there is a lot to dig into here with Monster Hunter, the game is LONG. It took me and my co-op friend like 3 weeks to finally beat it. We would play daily for sometimes 3-6 hours and some days barely make progress, or not even complete a single main quest. The game is difficult. There are no difficulty selections, you have to be ontop of gearing yourself properly or the next main quest will destroy you. You can only respawn 3 times total per main quest, if you run out of lives, you go back to town and have to start over. I'm glad theres a penalty for dying like that, I have no complaints there, it definitely made the game more intense and our lack of skill feel meaningful. Theres nothing worse than games with no penalty for dying, that makes you feel like the whole thing is pointless, or theres no room to improve because it doesnt matter anyway. But yeah, the game progressively gets more and more harder, and we would find ourselves smacking our heads against a wall unable to progress unless we stopped trying and went and grinded a bunch of side quests, just to get some more resources to get just that little bit stronger. And the side quests are really nothing novel or interesting, they are mostly just repeats of the main quests. Just fighting bosses youve previously killed. Or the few side quests that are awful such as carrying eggs back to base, and its really easy to drop the eggs and start over. Or stupid quests like go collect a few herbs. Theres other side quests like Capturing a boss, which is waiting until he starts limping and then throwing a net/trap at them to capture them, those were a nice change of pace. There are other side quests that take place in an Arena that let you chose a loadout that is nothing to do with your own equipment, its cool it lets you test out different weapon styles here, but the rewards didnt really seem worthwhile. But really its almost false to say they are "optional quests" because to us it felt pretty damn mandatory to grind these things out just to become just powerful enough to progress the story. The game is really long and drawn out, it took us 72!! hours to get to end credits. Because half of that time is just grinding side quests of bosses we've already beaten again and again. I think my main complaint with the game is theres just too much filler, its too long, too repetitive, too many chores and in-between annoyances, the combat can be frustrating as hell with the clunky controls and constant stunlocks...uninteresting story. Towards the end of the game we were struggling pretty hard, sometimes multiple hours long sessions where we make virtually zero progress, failing main quests, having to grind out side missions until we finally unlocked another piece of gear with Earplugs that made us immune to screaming. As soon as we did that, we barreled through the last few remaining main quests. The third last guy is this lava dragon that will randomly explode, sometimes one shotting you, We failed on him for a few days, until we decided to grind out side quests to get stronger. After we got earplugs though we took him down first try. Second last guy is like this poison dragon thing Vaal Hazak that does this move that instantly halves your healthbar, requiring you to use a Nulberry item to get your health back. Once we went back (and did chores) to grind out nulberries we took him down first try. Last boss is a big Ice dragon (The arena and boss looks very much like Seath the Scaleless, is it just me seeing Dark Souls everywhere or is this game just influenced by it a lot?) and we actually managed to kill the last boss first try. It was an epic fight, taking place in multiple phases and arenas, but you basically just have to run around and avoid his fire beams and smack his hands over and over for 10 minutes. Then you get some ending cutscenes showing everyone happy at the base partying eating food and drinking (even the cats are getting drunk) and you get end credits. Horray. Finally. I was begging for end credits around the 50 hour mark, by 70+ hours It was hurting. After the end credits the 'end game' seems like it just raises all the difficulty of side quests/investigations where you can go grind for better equipment and fight upgraded versions of the bosses, I dont know, wasnt really interested. I walked around town for a few minutes after end-credits to see what was new and to my surprise I somehow triggered a cutscene involving fucking Geralt from the Witcher...What? I dont even know what to say about that, I was kinda just shocked and awe'd. Then you start playing a mission as Geralt. At this point I literally just quit to desktop and uninstalled. Thats enough for me. Okay theres some goofy fourth wall shit after the end credits, great whatever.
So thats Monster Hunter World. Great co-op game? Not really, still cant wrap my head around how they made the co-op experience so annoying. Even if the co-op system was more seemless the game has a lot of annoyances to still be amazing for me. Would I play other Monster Hunter games in the series? Yeah I'd give them a try, out of curiosity, to see whats different from this one. Theres an expansion, Iceborne, I might entertain playing that in like 5 years. But for now thats more than enough Monster Hunter for me.
6/10