I Am Bad At Monster Hunter

It is a truth universally acknowledged, but never commented on. I am terrible at  Monster Hunter games. I have been playing them for a decade now, as of 2019, and I still cannot quite do the things it wants me to do.

For the uninitiated, Monster Hunter is a series of games made by Capcom, which have spanned consoles from Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. These are third person action games, with very specific controls - for each action you do, you cannot stop it. Should you stop to sharpen your weapon (essential as it depletes its sharpness over time) your character is locked in a 7-10 second animation of sharpening, during which time, of course, you can be attacked. The games themselves may vare, but each of them is defined by a few simple ideas.

1) You will get better the more you play - more on this later.
2) The game is desinged to be replayed and replayed - as you kill monsters, they issue 'drops' which are specific items. Players will often 'farm' (replay) monsters to try to get specific items, which may show up as little as 1-3% of the time.
3) The monsters themselves have no health bars, or no otherwise explicit indicators as to how they are doing. The player is supposed to 'read' the health of the monster by looking for signs such as - deterioration of their scales on sides / tails; limping, particularly in combination with heavy breathing (shown by steam arising from their mouths) ; the running away of a monster, most likely towards a place it can sleep and restore energy.

The most recent title in this series is Monster Hunter World. This was released last year on Xbox, PS4 and PC. As such, it diverted from the previous place these games were published - the Nintendo systems, most notably the 3DS. As a result of this, I have had far less time to play the game due to not having it on transit
This excuses nothing. I am bad at Monster Hunter. 

Monster Hunter World (Capcom, 2018) 

The game is due to have its first massive expansion next year, known as Iceborne. This follows a tradition of games where the concept of 'G Rank' re-releases exists - you've destroyed all the monsters, let's add another 10-20 and they're REALLY hard. 

So it was that in advance of this, I returned to World this morning. I discovered I was seriously lacking behind, with several important plot points in front of me. And then I hit it. Paolumu. 

Paolumu is more fun to describe than to actually post a picture of. Imagine a bat. Now imagine its an albino bat. Now imagine that when it gets angry, its neck fills with air like a puffer fish and it uses this to attack you. Paolumu is cool. 

Unfortunately, it also exposed a glaring weakness in how I play the game. When I play Monster Hunter, in the varying ways a character can organise themselves, I always go for power. A weapon called the 'dual blades' is, well, exactly that. Thus it was this morning that I sprang into action and was thoroughly routed. There is a system called the 'SOS Flare' on the game - hit it, and it allows other players to join your game and try to destroy the monster together. No one came.

There is a type of game made in Japan, that Monster Hunter falls into, that I have never managed to engage with. These games prize player skill over gaining reward after reward. In these games, such as Demons Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, the reward for the player is the knowledge they have earned - they have learned their enemy's patterns, they have mastered the 'tells' of their attacks. Knowledge is power. And Monster Hunter falls into that category. Whilst your character may increase their armour against particular foes, their health will never significantly increase. In the game, the ability to read each monster's tell becomes power. 

And I have never mastered this. Every journey I have made in these games was through brute-force, or relying on the support of people far better than I. I adore the Monster Hunter world. It's fun, funny, and always full of surprises. But what the title tells me is that my own skills lie in games that reward the individual - here, take this perk that makes X enemies do Y. It's a world beyond me. Again, or so I thought until I considered what I would play next - Mario Maker 2.

The game I love most, Super Mario World, also fits into the Dark Souls/Monster Hunter category. In Mario titles, Mario's move set is incredibly defined - it's very likely that people unfamiliar with modern games have a strong understanding of the mechanics of how the Italian plumber operates. Every move is co-ordinated, and in his world, every mistake that is made is one of the player.. It's a distillation of the concept of 'fairness' into videogames. Yet part of me cannot extrapolate that into other titles - Bloodborne remains and interesting enigma, I spent an hour once trying to find a ladder in Dark Souls. I will stick with Monster Hunter,  through thick and thin, because the game world,. and the sense of discovery far outweigh my own failings. 

Please help me complete Iceborne. SOS Flares are at the ready.