BAD REVIEWS SUMMER CAMP: Monster Hunter Mini Review

Prompt: Write about an apex predator in your world. How does it hunt and survive?

Apex Predator: That got me thinking about a game where you deal with nothing but predators. 

Monster Hunter is more of a hobby than a video game, and sometimes it can feel more like managing a spreadsheet than a game about fighting monsters.

Me managing my inventory

But despite its clunky mechanics and the difficult learning curve, I find Monster Hunter to be a rewarding experience. My friend first introduced me to monster hunter when he gave me his copy of monster hunter generations for the 3DS and I was completely lost on how to play it. I think my first experience with monster hunter involved me wandering around the first level aria, fiddling around with the sword and shield, and then abruptly ending the first quest.

I was thinking, “Wow this is a boring game,” and then I didn’t touch the game for about a few years. Then Monster Hunter World released which got because I heard a bunch of hype around it. I tried it out, was confused, and then conducted research on how to play Monster Hunter and eventually got into it.

Despite having such a big barrier for entry, I find that playing Monster Hunter is a really rewarding experience. It has a perfect game-play loop where you fight monsters to make gear from those monsters and then uses that gear to fight stronger monsters, stronger monsters net better gear and the game-play loop continues until you collected all of the armor and weapons and by that point, you will have passed enough time to wonder how the heck there is a pandemic all of a sudden.

2019 to 2020

Monster Hunter also has the weird administration appeal to me, where I almost find joy in managing my inventory and collecting all the different armor sets and weapons. It is like being a middle manager and there is some weird joy in that. Lastly, Monster Hunter can appeal to all different gameplay styles. Each of the weapons has a different style for fighting so you can go from a basic hack and slash to say a third-person shooter or to a rhythm game. The difficulty is also adjusted based on how much you prepare for combat. Like say did you collect the items that buff your stats, did you get the complete armor sets for the skills and did you upgrade your gear. All this affects the gameplay.

High Tier Armor

All in all, Monster Hunter is a unique and tightly woven game franchise and I will probably be using it to social distance even after the pandemic dies down.

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