When you first start, you create your character with an almost unbelievably small number of customisation options. Think five faces, five skin colours. Luckily Mr or Mrs generic will be hidden under the far more customisable armour and weapons soon enough. In a regular online game, you wade through various screens and select server and town, then head to the market place or pub. After chatting with the others there, you ask the chief about what quests are available, then head off with your new buddies to kill some beast or other. Unfortunately the game is text chat only, but it works well enough with a compatible keyboard. Don’t even bother trying with the onscreen keyboard, though.
Luckily you can hide the generic character models under piles of armour.
The offline part is basically the same - it's just a bunch of single player quests. It’s a way for an online game to function without other people. A neat touch is that that single player is set in a small village, rather then a town, so you’ll be their own local ‘monster hunter’. It still has a shop and a smith, but the item selections are sometimes quite different, so it’s worth checking out every now and then. You play the same character online and offline, so it can obviously be useful to learn some techniques or earn some money and items while your sister is using the interweb to google her own name.
The control scheme in Monster Hunter is a little different from what you’d expect. You move with the left analog stick, and all attacks are mapped to the right stick. Different directions and motions on the stick give different attacks, depending on the weapon. It works quite well and frees up the buttons for menu related tasks, but it’s often quite difficult to manage a series of hits in a straight line. Your character lunges forward during many sword attacks, often pushing you to a spot where you can’t get another hit in. The d-pad controls the camera – meaning you can’t move and manually adjust the camera at the same time, which can also get annoying. Pressing R1 drags the camera behind your character Zelda style, which you’ll find yourself doing more often then not. If only they’d gone with that thought and added lock-on z-targeting….
The face buttons work as a quick item select system, where X is ‘use’ and circle and square cycle through your equipped inventory. To begin with it’s a bit awkward, and you may lose some items by accidentally using or discarding them. But eventually it becomes second nature, and it quite a good system for situations where changing items on the fly is important.
Speaking of items, depth and replay value are added to the game courtesy of the deep item collection system. At towns you will find both standard shopkeepers along with a weapon smith – who can create armour and weapons out of objects you find throughout the game world. After killing most dinos you can gut the corpse, usually giving you some life replenishing meat, but sometimes you’ll get a rib or some hide which can be used (in conjunction with other items) to create many hundreds of exotic new weapons and pieces of armour. You can still buy pre-made armour and swords, of course, but pretty soon you’ll be leaving those behind for your own creations. There are a huge number of animals to kill and plants to hack, and the system encourages exploring the land and experimenting with all the items you can find. And you can literally wear your triumphs! This ‘customisation by experience’ feature is probably the game’s strongest point.
Nice Dinosaurs..................now gimme that rib!
Monster Hunter impresses with its graphics. The environments are expansive looking, clear and filled with life. Tight jungle corridors are lush with vegetation; huge climbable mountains have nice rock textures and plenty of detail. The dinosaurs that populate almost every area are fairly detailed and animate well while standing alone. Big boss monsters are espescially impressive. The animation of the humans and monsters when moving and fighting is pretty standard fare, but does the job well. Some of the lighting is impressive, too.
But you start to see the graphical flaws and shortcomings fairly quickly. No effort has been made to combat clipping, so feel free to walk right through that dinosaur’s tail, just as they can walk right through each other. The expanses in the distance are just bitmaps, and any animated life beyond the immediate area has about 2 frames of animation. Nonetheless, it's a great looking PS2 game, and considering the open-ended nature of the world and the online component, the graphics engine remains impressive.
run!
So how does it play? Well, apart from the sometimes-awkward controls, pretty well. Just exploring by yourself can be quite fun, hunting down a rare beast for it’s bones even moreso. The correct use of tools makes you feel intelligent in the way you catch or kill something – even when you’ve had it explained to you by the chief.
Hunting down a large beast with three others is where it’s really at, though. After working with others to leave dragon bait all over the place, then receiving the message ‘over here, we need swords now!’, rushing to the place, then working together to take down key hit zones (like the legs) can be as epic as this scentence is long. Maybe it’s just that you don’t want to let other real people down, but because of the involvement of others, it feels more real then single player games of it’s type.
Of course, there are problems too. The biggest one is that text chat is of no use in the heat of battle. Another problem is that after a fight you have to rush in to collect your share of the bounty – which can be unfair if you’re further away for some tactical reason like sniping. And while you can’t harm other players, you can knock them out of the way on the way to a valuable item. Finally, you’ll almost certainly end up going on missions you’ve already completed, simply because someone else in the group needs to do that one to progress. A local problem is that the game is on USA servers, and they’ve had the game for almost a year – expect to be captain noob for a while. But overall, the system works quite well.
So if you’re after a 'pick up and play' online game that’s co-operative, rather then competitive, this one’s quite good. Don’t bother with it for offline only play – unless you’re seriously into dungeon crawls and fetch quests.
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