Club Benefits
Monster Hunter is a legendary series, known for its addictive gameplay loop of chasing down monstrously tough enemies and slaying them to obtain resources and upgrade your gear. It has plenty of dedicated fans, but also a reputation for being difficult for beginners to get into.
In 2016, Monster Hunter Stories was released on 3DS — this spin-off took on a cuter, more kid-friendly aesthetic, and also let you collect monsters and fight alongside them as a team. The spin-off series is now heading for its third outing with Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection, and I was able to take an early first look at the game on Nintendo Switch 2.
Pokémon wishes it looked this good
Spoiler alert: I had trouble getting to grips with Monster Hunter Stories 3’s battle system. But I’ll go over the positives first, because this game has an awful lot going for it.
Article continues belowThe biggest reason to play Monster Hunter Stories 3 is its fantastic presentation. There’s no two ways about it, this is a truly gorgeous looking game. The outdoor environments are lush and packed with creatures roaming around, both monsters that you can battle and other kinds of wildlife that interact with the ecosystem.
The cutscenes in Monster Hunter Stories 3 also look breathtaking; I don’t remember the last time I saw video game cutscenes on a Nintendo console that looked this good. Whenever I was watching story events play out I was so immersed that I felt like I was watching an animated movie. There is definitely a Ghibli-esque vibe to the characters and natural landscapes, and some cutscenes also move near-seamlessly between gameplay segments, which is awesome to see. And even though the in-battle special attack animations are lengthy, I could never bring myself to skip them because they always got my blood pumping.
“Story” is in this game’s name and while I’ve only just dipped my toe into the game’s narrative, I am well and truly hooked. It’s a high fantasy setting with multiple kingdoms at war, and there are already some interesting characters with questionable motivations and loyalties. There’s also a focus on conservation and repopulating a damaged ecosystem, which only gets me all the more excited. Not only do I get to battle monsters, but I also get to save them from ecological collapse and extinction? Sign me up.
A beautifully confusing battle system
Everything I mentioned previously about Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection had me on board. But getting stuck into the gameplay was a rocky endeavour.
I roll my eyes every time I start a new Pokémon game and sit through another tutorial. “Do they have to take it so slowly? This stuff is obvious.” I always think. But now I get why every Pokémon game drip feeds information to you so slowly; the alternative would be something like Monster Hunter Stories 3.
This game does have a tutorial, and this stuff might be blindingly obvious if you’ve played the first two Monster Hunter Stories games (or any of the main-series Monster Hunter games), but to this newbie, it was mind-boggling.
There’s a lot to get your teeth into right from the beginning of the game. You start with three monsters and three weapons in your possession. You have access to all of them at once in every fight — so you’ll need to figure out what all your monsters can do, what weapons do what, and which attacks you can actually use at any given time (there’s both a charge meter and a stamina meter to contend with that determines which ones you can use).
There’s also a mechanic called a kinship gauge; filling it up means you can ride your monsters to execute attacks as a pair. If your NPC partner rides their monster as well, you can all attack at once.
Even if you know which attack you want to use, there’s still a lot more to it; every basic or special attack can be executed in three different ways (prioritizing power, technique or speed,) and you can either try to deplete a monster’s health bar or their Wyvernsoul gauge (don’t ask me what that is, I have no idea.)
In addition to this, you can aim for different parts of your opponent’s body, like their head, torso, legs or wings. Monsters will change forms and behave differently depending on various factors, like if they become tired or enraged. And there are boss monsters that you’re not meant to attack in certain ways because they’ll unleash a devastating counter if you do.
There are text tutorials to explain all this, but you can’t re-access previous tutorials during battle, only when you’re in town or out on the field. Each tutorial monster I fought felt like an onslaught of more and more mechanics on an already confusing pile.
The best advice I can give you is not to rush through all the tutorial battles at once. I fought a bunch of grunts to get a better idea of what was going on, and it was the only thing that made me feel comfortable going forward.
I can’t blame the developers for not making a more beginner-friendly introduction to the third entry in a spin-off game series, but the last game released five years ago on the original Switch — surely I’m not the only person who’s jumping onto the Monster Hunter Stories train with this release.
On the upside, there were things I did enjoy about the battle system. You don’t need to worry about healing outside of battle, as your health bar is refilled at the start of every fight. But you don’t have a lot of health to rely on, and this makes each individual battle feel vital and intense, like it could all be over at any moment. It’s unique compared to most JRPGs I’ve played, which usually focus more on making you manage healing resources over long stretches of multiple battles in a row.
I also wasn’t expecting there to be stealth elements to this game, but I had fun trying to sneak monster eggs out of enemy nests. Mainly because I knew I would get battered once again if the monsters caught me.
Verdict
I’m not afraid of a challenge. Okay, I actually am — that’s why I haven’t jumped into the mainline Monster Hunter series before now. But I’m interested enough in Monster Hunter Stories 3’s story and beautiful graphics to continue. I want to see what cool new creatures I can add to my team and I want to understand the writhing behemoth that is this battle system. I’m hoping that as more players hop onto this game, there will be more community support and guidance I can look to from other people who understand it better than I do.
If Monster Hunter Stories 3’s battle system has you feeling intimidated, Monster Hunter Stories Collection on Switch might be a better introduction to this series for beginners; it compiles the first two entries in the Monster Hunter Stories franchise into one package. However, you do miss out on the gorgeous movie-style graphics for a more cutesy aesthetic.
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