Monster Hunter World - 10 Hours In Impressions

Holy Jesus Butt Baby Batman! I love me a good grind every once in a while, and between grinding out all the achievements for Fallout 4 (LATE TO THE PARTY BUT STILL ROCKING IT!) and getting all of the stuff done for Final Fantasy 15 (No DLC stuff at the moment, or the Royal Edition stuff either) I felt I needed something else to add to my already full plate. And until I can get my grubby mitts on the new Sword Art Online game (Which I hear is kinda crap, but I wanna play and see the waifus) I decided to lean towards Monster Hunter World.

I am roughly ten hours into the game, and the grind bug bit me hard. I find games either fun in the first few minutes, or a real drag to play. Meaning: Fallout 4 is fun, if you mod it. If you do not mod it, the intro takes ten hours and nothing fun really happens, outside of frame drops for the Xbox because god rays. Final Fantasy 15 is fun, but the world is just a little to big for me. I don't like riding a giant chicken to the middle of nowhere to try and get a non damaged horn from a oversize emo unicorn (I'm talking about you Sturdy Helixhorn, which I have grinded for a total of three hours and still have not gotten) which never works. I felt like they all missed the one thing that defines this game for me: A sense of actually accomplishing something, for just having fun.

Where do I start with this game. First off, I think I have played one monster hunter game in the past, and it was one of the ones for 3DS. I hated it on there. I was actually paranoid about this game at first, but after a friend of mind told me it was a more forgiving dark souls (More on that in a bit) I decided to sign up and dig into this bad boy.

You make a character with a pretty decent character creator. Nothing to crazy, but you can customize to get whatever style you are going for. Then, and oh my god my wife loves these things, and so do I, you get to make your very own Palicoes. To anyone who has read the Cinder Spires series by Jim Butcher, think that level of cats that can talk and actually save your butt if you are like me and play on solo. They are adorable, and I swear that me and my wife spent more time making the creature than making our respective character.

I won't talk about the story, as I feel it seems to take back seat to the star of the game, being the hunts, but I will touch on a few things. You do not have a lot of hand holding in some regards. Traps, fishing, picking a weapon to use in a brutal method of trial and error, and the cooking are all things that you kinda learn as you go (And I can hear you typing "But fishing has a tutorial when you first play it telling you what buttons." Yes, I am aware that there is a tutorial kinda for it, no I did not read it, fight me.) The main thing I will say is the wiki for the game will be a life saver, and play around with the type of weapon you think you will like most in free roam. I usually play a DPS build, but this game I am playing solo. You can use a great sword to fight solo, but you do not move all that fast, and some fights feel way to brutal for it to be fun, and for me anyway ended in frustration. Hell, I'm still experimenting with my character, tho the insect glaive has been my go to. My wife, however, is a wizard with the bow and arrow, and I cannot wait until we can play together so she can help me kill everything out there. But I digress.

The real star of this game is the hunts, ranging from dragons to dinosaurs, hell even pigs and birds. Any animal you find can be killed and harvested for parts that you use to upgrade your gear. Gear has upgrades it can have as well, and each one feels unique in it's own right. I have not gotten to far into it, but I have the bone armor set fully upgraded, and most of my time in free play is killing Jagras and other smaller creatures to make armor and sell. I plan on doing a better rundown of what I think after I put more time into proper upgrading and not trying to be over powered from a early stage, which is impossible by the way.

One final thing: Playing solo can be fun, dodge rolls are like they are in the dark souls series. They even take stamina! So use them and learn to dance with your prey. You cannot back stab or anything else, but some of the monsters can be killed if you stay light on your feet and hit their vulnerable spots. I remember I nearly killed Anjarath first time facing it, cause I have a superiority complex and I needed to fulfill it. I died, but I gave it hell. Learn to dodge, watch attack patterns, all basic stuff for a souls player.

Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to read my blog! I know this one was different than the previous, but I decided to have more fun writing these things. Thank you so much for reading and I hope to see you all again very soon!