Monster Hunter feels like a game of plateaus, sprinkled with randomness.  There’s something to be said about hunting a dragon for 45 minutes, then taking it down with a fraction of life remaining.

The randomness first.  Enemy behavior is based on code.  They have specific move patterns, and those patterns can change based on a few factors, mostly environmental.  If there’s another large prey around, expect a battle between them.  If they are under 25% hp, expect them to enrage and use a different skill set.  Some movement patterns are restricted due to the space on the map – space between you or space to the wall.  The randomness is which of these skills are used, against which target.

Diablos has 2 killer moves – a quick rush and a burrow attack. Both pick a target, beeline to them, and can shift a few feet left/right.  They can also trigger this move without a whole lot of warning.  Or you can stumble on a rock, or a bush.  Or just run out of stamina and get stunned.  Or, you can take a minor hit that knocks you down, and then he’ll charge you for a quick trip back to base.  That’s a bugger.

Randomness at low percentages plays against you the longer the fight draws on.  Say it’s a 5% chance of a tweak to a move that can kill you.  If he uses that move every 30 seconds, then your odds of seeing that tweak are a lot higher after 30 minutes than after 2.

WeaponTiers

Weapons have a clear tier structure, and each increases some portion of power.  For the quarter of the game, it’s just numbers.  More damage = quicker fights.  After that point, elemental damage plays a much larger role.  For the 4 basic elements (ice, thunder, fire, water) it’s pretty obvious that the damage is welcome.  Dragon is a bit different – enemies that deal that damage are usually weak to it.  This is weapon #6.

Why have a normal damage weapon?  For quests that require you to take down more than 1 enemy, who have competing resistances, and for times when you need to explore a map and don’t know what you’re going to find.

There’s a fair chunk of grinding to get the pieces needed for each item.  Thankfully there are wishlists that let you know once you have all the parts.  Still.. having to take on a 20 minute hunt for 2 items, and only 1 drops at a time, that’s a bugger.

Armor

Oh what a fun thing you are.  They say “defense wins championships” and that is certainly the case with MHW.  There are some fights where you will simply die in a single strike.  Diablos is one.  Pink Rathian is another.  It is not possible to avoid all damage due to the randomness listed above.  You can certainly avoid the big hits for a long time, but eventually you’re going to get hit.

There are 3 ways to reduce the impact of the damage – armor, resistances, and buffs.

Armor is pretty straightforward.  You have 5 slots, each with a number.   If you are in starting gear (for the skills on the gear), then you likely have ~30 armor total.  You need more like 150 to take a hit from Diablos.  I am at 171 now and I’m sure I could use a boost to something better.  But then I’d be giving up a lot of skills, which is a tough trade off.

Resistances are a pretty straightforward % decrease to specific attacks.  You want more fire resist to be able to take a fireball hit.  This is tough enough since a piece with a decent armor score and a decent skill may have a negative resistance score.  I find that the most important two are Fire (burning) and Thunder (stun).

Finally buffs – either from armor (defense boost), food (defense (L)), or nutrients.  These are extremely useful.  The downside to food and nutrients is that they are temporary, and food buffs cannot be reapplied for 10 minutes.  In the 2nd half of the game, there’s a chance that the mission will not start at a camp base, meaning that you really should be eating before leaving.  It’s a bugger when you die before that timer is done.

Breaking a Wall

There are two parts here.  Damage is what you need to kill a monster before the timer expires, and to reduce the chances of having a bad random event.  You need to have the best weapon possible, based on the available list, with the appropriate damage type – at the very least the “neutral” damage weapon should be always at max.

Armor is what you need to survive those bad events.  It allows you to experiment with new tactics and figure out how to optimize future runs.  If you are dying in 1-2 hits, then this is where you need to invest.

The more I think about this, the more I think about training wheels.

Great games have a large amount of complex, intertwined systems that allow for player agency.  You can pull a string here, and then something way down the road changes – EvE is a good example.  Amazing games have the ability to simplify this complexity, allowing for a “easy to play, difficult to master” gameplay model.  It’s a tough balance though, as often times the simplicity takes precedence and the complex under-systems get cut (looking at you WoW).

Further, many games have a tutorial (either in name or in practice) that gate the complex content until further along the process.  I don’t mean power gating, where your attack power or defense gets improved.  More like moving from ground combat to air attackers, or putting in active dodging.  The content available is typically linear, so as not to drown the player in complexity.  Smaller drips and tests, then move on.  A few games have systems that are so complex that they just put it all out there to start (most survival games).

Monster Hunter takes an interesting approach, in that the intertwining complex systems are generally available at the start.  You have 14 weapons.  You have armor.  There are tons of enemies in the first area.  Nearly all the quest types are available.  From there to the Anjanath, it’s a fairly gradual skill progress.  There are minor systems, but nothing terribly obvious or complex.

Then you open up the other half of the game after a couple missions. The maps turn vertical. Charms show up.  Environmental damage.  Modified armor and skills that stack. A very large weapon tree. I recall the start of the game going about 4 hours before understanding even the basic items, then it sort of worked out.  I feel that this is quite similar to a system dump of options, bordering on overload.  It gives that feeling that you have to do everything rather than focus on what’s important.

Compounding this is the concept of optimization.  Often, you move from one mundane task into more complex ones.  Finding a way to stop doing the mundane.  For example, in UO I spent a lot of time mining to supply my blacksmith with materials.  After a while, I had enough money to just buy the ore and produce at a much larger volume for the same time investment.  Other games have power curves, where enemies simply die faster since you are stronger – orders of magnitude stronger.

That is much less evident in Monster Hunter.  The first time you take on any big game it’s usually a 20 minute battle.  Your power goes up sure, but you’re still not talking about taking down a TRex in 5 hits.  The monster will still run away, evade attacks, you’ll get knocked down.  You can still die in a few hits if you’re not paying attention.

I guess that’s part of the complexity.  Your skill is as much a factor as the power and tools at your disposal.  And the factors you need to take into account just continually grow over time. I certainly feel like I’ve improved dramatically since the start.  I can read tells, avoid specific areas, spot beneficial items at a distance, know when it’s a smart move to sharpen the blades…all tiny things that combined make a large difference.

I have to say, I’m continually impressed after every session.

The gate has been breached.

The concept of “the zone” isn’t a new one. It’s been used in professional sports for some time.  For most people, the closest we get is when we roll 2 Yathzees in the same game.  Something in the air just lines up perfect and boom, things are going your way.  I’ve had sequences in D&D where the rolls were just non-stop crits (off-setting the times where I couldn’t hit a barn).

The seems to be more common in games with an element of chance.  For multiplayer games, this chance is the other people playing with/against you.  Maybe they all line up for a group headshot.  Maybe your team sequences their special attacks to put up a wall of invincibility & death.  A pre-made group has better odds of this, as you’re reducing the number of chances for negative outcomes and more of the positive.  I get the adrenaline rush of this, and counter, I understand why the toxic side comes out when random is random.

But single player games… woo.  The game number crunching is where you need to fit.  In some places it’s about learning the timing (Ninja Gaiden), in others it’s about the stars aligning with the pebbles on the beach (most open world games).  We’ve all seen some of the Zelda/Switch videos… where the open world allows for tremendous experimentation and super fast runs.  Awesome Games Done Quick is an event that celebrates speed runs, and is predicated on every second being in the zone.

But for mortal folk, we pray to the gaming gods for that one event, that one single run where everything goes perfect and you are more of a passenger than a participant.

T-Rex Attack

I upgraded a few bits and went back in with some bombs. I took it a bit slower once I found him, hoping to surprise him.  Which did work out.

There’s a particular move set that only occurs when you are above your prey.  You jump on their back/head and go saiyan. I managed to do that.  I was riding a T-Rex like a bucking horse.   It was glorious.

After he finally threw me off, he decided to run away.  I tried coaxing him back for the same type of attack but that wasn’t in the cards.  I did end up hitting him a few more times in the legs, enough for him to run off.

Right into a Rathalos.  A giant flying, fire breathing, poison striking beast of an enemy.  He picked up the T-Rex like he was a doll, then threw him on the ground (cue music).  Great.

He ran away, I jumped on his head once more and then he was limping off.  I had not realized where he kept his lair in the past.  Always too dead to make way there.  Anyhow, he ends up in the large tree area, where there are multiple floors, each acting like a trampoline.

For some reason he decides to take a nap.  Great time to lay out some bomb barrels.  A few explosions and he’s in the death throws.  Now, a few-ton T-Rex moving on a trampoline means that I am not moving.  It took another 5 minutes before I could find solid footing.  And once I did, a single hit to the back of the leg was what took him down.

Now, I’m not saying every dice roll was a natural 20.  But I am saying that I didn’t roll a single 0, and that once I did roll those 20s, it was glorious.

Now onto collecting some bugs.

The quest – loot – upgrade cycle is underway.  I cleared out the main quests until Anjanath, the giant T-Rex with wings.  I upgraded my weapons as far as they could go.  I took out the baddies.  I looted and crafted and stabbed my way through a fair chunk of events.  I was taking out the mud-fish Jyuratodus with good efficiency.  Even the lightning-flying squirrel (Tobi Kadachi) wasn’t too bad.  T-Rex time!

I died in 2 hits.  1 hit that bit me, the other was a charge that took out 70% of my hit points.

Back to the drawing board.  Anjanath is big, and fire based.  So fire resistant armor and water weapons seems logical… let’s see.

Capturing Monsters

Capt Mud-fish is water based and I needed some loot from him.  Figuring out the loot dropped from him the first place was more guessing than anything.  I checked the investigation board for a quest and all I could find was the capture line.

Captures require you to drop them to ~80%, drop a trap, then stand in front of their heads and throw smoke bombs at them.  Then pray it works and they don’t eat you.  Oh, and you need to craft the traps and smoke bombs from environmental loots.  Well, not exactly true – you need a trap tool that’s bought in town, and can only carry 2 of them on you (more in your stash).  Anyways, long story short and my first capture was a complete failure until I understood those points.  Second attempt worked just fine.

Back to Leg Attacks

I really like the speed of dual blades.  The damage potential is amazing, if you can get everything to hit.  The full demon-mode super swing is like 20 attacks in a row.

The downside is that everything is always moving and hitboxes on legs are quite small.  It’s that age-old DPS simulation issue.  If everyone was Patchwerk (nothing but a meat wall), then dual blades would dominate everything.  If I can knock down something, then it’s insane the amount of damage that can be pumped out.  But that doesn’t really happen.

I tried another 3 times (max per quest) and wasn’t able to get much farther.  I’m going to have to do some more studying of this bugger and likely further upgrade my armor with speheres to take more hits.  It really isn’t that he hard to read, it’s that you can’t really make a mistake.  And mistakes are bound to happen due to the trees/cliffs/junk strewn about.  Even a wandering monster is enough to muck it up.

So that plan — shore up defenses, find a better spot to fight, try a better in/out attack pattern, and maybe, just maybe, load up on fire barrels.

I still don’t really know what I’m doing in Monster Hunter World. It’s fun to play and experiment with the mechanics, but I am quite lost.

I can see that I can upgrade my weapon to something better, but I can’t tell what pieces I am missing to make that upgrade, or where they drop.  I just end up going with the flow of the game.

I can see that I can craft a whole bunch of items.. traps included.  Not why why I need them just yet though, or how to better manage my inventory of all the things I’ve collected.  Do I need spiderwebs?

There are quite a few quest types.  The main mission ones (assigned), optional ones (I think I can repeat them), investigations, deliveries, bounties and then open world exploration.  They are offered by different folk, with different criteria, for different rewards (that I don’t quite understand yet either).  Quite honestly, this game could be in a completely different language and I don’t think that would matter.

I will say that the act of Monster Hunting is a lot of fun.  I’ll see if I can get a video of it up.  I use Dual Blades, which are a very close ranged weapon, with set animations.  These animations cannot be cancelled, so you may end up pressing a combo that locks you for a second or two… and then the big monster hits you.  Timing becomes extremely important, as well as understanding hit boxes.  I’ve become partial to a slice and dash combo that does decent work.  And when I see the monster setting up something large, I go for the 6 second demon slash combo that just looks like ginsu knives.

I will say that this is the first time I have ever been in the middle of a fight with a giant monster and been distracted by collecting footprints.  That is very weird.  One second I’m slicing away, avoid jaws of death, and then “ooooh, a doodle” and off I go.

Anyhow, in terms of main quest the Pukei Pukei is down. A giant flying T-Rex appeared in the middle of that fight.  I did what anyone would do, and ran away.  Which was cool, because more footprints/mucous/doodles!

If all of this seems like the ramblings of a mad man, yes.  That is true.  I feel like a madman.  I barely understand how all the pieces fit together and that’s just fine be me.  It’s a level of fun I haven’t had in some time.  And that’s the main reason I play any game.