Zero Punctuation: Monster Hunter Tri

[GermanPsyOps]

I "guess" you could call Monster Hunter Tri a JRPG and we all know Yahtzee loves those.

It lacks everything Yahtzee hates about JRPGs though, or even WRPGs for that matter

- No cutscenes other then initial map intros and monster intro bits later, both of which are short 15 second deals
- The story is just an aside and the game isn't all that linear
- You, the hunter, has no development at all except for becoming progressively more badass. There's no backstory
- No level-up system, no exp grinding
- Emphasis on player skill over weapons/armor/etc., everything else is just there to give you a bit more of an edge or to collect.
- Not turn based, no magical damage numbers popping out of enemies heads when you hit them, you don't even get a lifebar for monsters you hunt
- No amazingly cheap tactic will help you win this game, except maybe barrel bombing but that's not even remotely easy to pull off.

It's nothing like a typical RPG. It's not even like an MMORPG. Sure there's 2 hours of gathering at the beginning, but then you never have to do them again, and you get to enjoy the remaining 58 hours fighting giant monsters.

 

[Enlong]

You know, by not playing through more of the game, Yahtzee really did miss out on a lot of things he dould've made a good rant about.

Like the monster missions. He could've been ranting about getting your nipples ripped off in the time it takes to flex after drinking a health potion.

Or the sidekick character. He could've had so much fun ranting about Cha-Cha.

I actually would've enjoyed watching him rip into that stuff, even though I like the game and enjoy those aspects. I'm just peeved because I don't think he ever got to those parts of the game.

 

[GermanPsyOps]

You know, by not playing through more of the game, Yahtzee really did miss out on a lot of things he dould've made a good rant about.

Like the monster missions. He could've been ranting about getting your nipples ripped off in the time it takes to flex after drinking a health potion.

Or the sidekick character. He could've had so much fun ranting about Cha-Cha.

I actually would've enjoyed watching him rip into that stuff, even though I like the game and enjoy those aspects. I'm just peeved because I don't think he ever got to those parts of the game.

I really wanted to see something about the archaic combat at least, like lack of lock-on system, drawn/undrawn weapon woes, so many things. There was gold for funny critique here. This review was sorely incomplete.

 

[Deletemyhappyass]

I made an account to say but one thing:

Watch the videos online. Yahtzee played approximately 1.5% of the game (of which the average player puts about 200-400 hours of time in, and no, it's not all hunting mushrooms). The 'gigantic fucking sea monster' shows up to scare the piss out of you so as to encourage you to get better so you can actually fight the damn thing. Look up the following Youtube videos:

Monster Hunter Tri~ Barroth by Yomoska
Monster Hunter Tri~ Royal Ludroth by Yomoska
Monster Hunter Tri~ Lagiacrus (repel) by Yomoska
Monster Hunter Tri Online - Rathalos [HD] by earvcunanan

These are just a few. The game is called 'Monster Hunter' for a pretty good reason. I had a hunch Yahtzee wouldn't give the game a good review, because it's not a game you can get 'into' without actually reading the in-game information material. (For instance, had he read the information in the game, he would've known that you can tell if something larger than your weapon will show up is indicated directly underneath the mission details. The exception was that mission with Lagiacrus (the sea monster), because it's been tradition in every game for them to sneak something ridiculously out of your league in the first few low level missions since the first Monster Hunter on the ps2. They did it with Rathalos in the first game, Tigrex in the second, and Lagiacrus in the third.)

There's a good reason professional reviews of Monster Hunter games turn out low scores whilst 'unprofessional' gamer reviews turn out higher ones. One group isn't being paid to grind through a game each week.

This game isn't technically the third in the series, however, when you consider:
1) Monster Hunter and the expansion, Monster Hunter G
2) Monster Hunter 2
3) Monster Hunter Portable (and Portable G) (Freedom in the US, G wasn't localized)
4) Monster Hunter Portable 2 (and 2nd G) (Freedom 2 and Freedom Unite in the US, respectively)
5) Monster Hunter Tri (this one)
And since there's already word of the rest, let's not forget:
6) Monster Hunter Portable 3 (which is a port of Tri for the PSP)
7) Monster Hunter Frontier Online (an Xbox 360 online version).

Yeah, totally unpopular game that has nothing going for it! *thumbsup*

 

[Enlong]

Thank you for confirming my fears of what this game would be when I chose to buy an older game proven to be more interesting

If Yahtzee told you to eat shit you probably would judging by this post.

Whats the matter? Too busy playing Go look for mushrooms for half a week? You seem a little tense, girlfriends usually help with that...sorry you see to be hopefully in that department so good luck with your sad existence

Nah, I've got no time to go mushroom-hunting. Too busy dodging lightning breath while I'm trying to stab this sea-monster to death and turn is broken carcass into armor.

Or perhaps another lance. Stop hitting yourself!

 

[SAMAS]

Wow, 16 pages of complaining that he missed the point and that anyone who takes his word on it is a sheep.

Positive or negative review doesn't enter into it, the game is about Monster Hunting, but at no time does he actually talk about hunting monsters. If he talked about how long it takes to get to your first big monster hunt, then went into about how much he did or didn't like it, there wouldn't have been anything to talk about here. But he doesn't, and as a result we got the most half-assed ZP in recent history.

It's not just about this game. Have you ever watched or read the reactions to movies like The Core or The Day After Tomorrow from people who actually know climatology or geology? Whether the piece was positive or negative, at the very least we expect him to actually do the work if he's gonna make a video about it.

In short: This was a shitty video. It doesn't matter what game it was about. He could've done this about Drake and the 99 Dragons, and if he did as little as he did here it would still be shit. Yahtzee is better than this.

 

[Ildecia]

Wow, Yahtzee completely missed the point of the game. Me thinks he didn't play long enough to fight some of the bigger monsters.

i agree with you on this one. seems like he only got around 3-5% through the game...

 

[EliteFreq]

I love MH with all my heart but I'd have to agree. It's a game that me and some of my friends love and spend far too much time on, whereas the rest of my friends find it too tedious and would rather shoot shit in the face.

 

[FallenMessiah88]

Sad....this was actually one of those games i was thinking about getting if i ever bought a wii.

 

[Bullhorn]

When will you be reviewing Dwarf Fortress? I really think you'll like it.

 

[Raioken18]

The thing that has annoyed most people is Yahtzee obviously didn't play this game for more than an hour, if at all. A lot of the things he complains about become irrelevant later on and are more to do with tutorial like missions for new players. There are plenty of legitimate things to complain about, lack of monsters not really being one of them. Also, you should never have to grind unless you suck, in which case grinding may help you to suck less as well as collecting shiny parts.

It's just a pathetic review of what is an awesome game if you give it a decent chance. I don't care if he was bored, he played FF13 for 5 hours he should have at least shown Monster Hunter the same respect. There's not even any angsty teenagers.

NOTE:
This game has very few RPG elements, it's a J-Action/Adventure game.
There are some very violent monsters that will tear you a new hole.
There should be a lot more blood! Damn censorship.
The camera controls do suck on a Wii remote.
If they upgraded the graphics and had this on a PS3 or X360, it would have rocked!

 

[Forsooth and Pi]

I heard many great things about this game from online friends, and asked a real life friend to bring it over so I could give it a try, and after 2 hours I gave up out of boredom. I reported this to my online friends, and they responded that I couldn't get past the "tutorial" phase and that the real fun comes later (like how many of the fans here are declaring).

I can't deny that the game is more fun later on, but the introduction does not do a good job of inspiring me to play through the game. I found it difficult to "slow walk" over to talk to people in town without running and staggering past them, and later my online friends told me that I don't even need to TALK to the townsfolk, and in fact they encouraged me to ignore them and just jump right into the heart of the combat. They also told me that I should just ignore the offline single player mode and only play online.

Now, don't get me wrong, but if I need people outside of the game explaining to me how to ENJOY the game, something is terribly wrong with the game itself.

I'm not trying to rag on Monster Hunter specifically, but a whole list of modern games that seem to do this. Nobody would complain if Yahtzee played one hour of Pac Man before reviewing it, but with a game like Monster Hunter that is unacceptable, and that reflects the game more than it does Yahtzee or ourselves. Games are changing, and as I get older and have less free time for myself, I want games that either jump straight into the action (Classic Mega Man, Classic Mario, Team Fortress 2) or integrate "tutorials" with the level design itself (Portal, Plants vs Zombies).

Still, that's just my personal preference. As a critic/reviewer/humorist, it behooves Yahtzee to play as much of a game as possible so he has more information to deal with. He could still easily joke that he "only played 4 hours" before he got bored and quit where in reality he played through the entire game (in some instances I think this may be the case, but it's only a hunch).

So as far as Yahtzee's job is concerned, I think he should play as much of a game as possible before critiquing it, but as far as the game itself is concerned, we as gamers should not have to suffer through "boring" parts in order to get to the "fun" parts. There already exist games that are fun from the first moment we start it up, so we shouldn't have to settle for less. I think this is something that fans and non-fans alike can agree upon.

-Pi

 

[Kadamon]

Monster Hunter 1 = Awesome.
Monster Hunter 2 = The fuck is it? Only in Japan?
Monster Hunter (whatever the fuck in PSP) = But no one HAS a PSP!
Monster Hunter 3 = ...seriously? The fucking Wii?

Isn't Capcom amazing?

 

[AdamG3691]

there is one other thing he completely forgot, the Arema mode
the one where you are locked in a small room with the HUGE FUCKING MONSTER TRYING TO STEAMROLLER YOU!

because I played this series before,the first thing I did was to go into the arena, and fight qurupecco, to get some rust of my metaphorical gears, if he wanted monsters instantlyasinNAO!!11!, he should have fought there.

yahtzee, everyone seems to have noticed that you didn't play anything after the tutorial, why dont you try for a bit longer, and then actually post on this thread, preferably with some ACTUAL REASONS.

 

[Waif]

I Must say that the cover art looked pretty encouraging, at least in the capacity that the game would be fun. Though if it is a game about collection and improvement of non essential things, I can't see it being very fun. For this reason I can see why the connection was made with MMO's. Though a single player MMO would not be very fun in my opinion. I like to play MMO's, and I don't mind the grinding aspects. Though part of what makes the grinding in MMO's fun are the friends you play with. It benefits them as well as yourself, and the adventure doesn't have to necessarily end. Great video all the same ^~^!

 

[t_rexaur]

I love how people keep asking "why is this on the Wii" as if somehow Capcom putting the game on the biggest selling console this generation is a monumentally bad idea.

 

[KelsieKatt]

I like to play MMO's, and I don't mind the grinding aspects. Though part of what makes the grinding in MMO's fun are the friends you play with. It benefits them as well as yourself, and the adventure doesn't have to necessarily end. Great video all the same ^~^!

It's not a single player game. Yahztee just refuses to play online games and forgets to mention this fact. The game is primarily designed around 4 player online cooperative boss fight missions against huge dragons and what not.

As for the grinding part. That's not really true either. The vast majority of the game consists of huge boss fights, which can last anywhere from 20-40 minutes to kill. At most, one of the few things which could be considered grinding is you might play the bosses multiple times in order to gain some items to upgrade something, but the bosses are complex and varied enough to prevent it from becoming tedious. (At least in my opinion, I found the bosses to be entertaining enough for that. Although, that may vary from person to person.)

The gathering thing is almost completely irrelevant. The only reason why he was gathering stuff is because he never played past the tutorial. The tutorial introduces you to the most basic mechanics and tries to ease you into them very slowly so you don't get confused, which basically involves them telling you to pick things like mushroom because it wants to demonstrate how you can use these items for combining into things like potions and what not, which is never actually required later on, and is more a means of teaching you survival skills to assist in fighting said gigantic dragons, etc, as you can whip together some sort of item really quickly out of the environment, which might vary from something like a trap, bomb, gun ammution, potions, sharpening stones, etc. That's about it. All the other items you need come primarily from killing the bosses.

Unfortunately nobody would actually realize this from watching Yahtzee's 'review', considering he never mentioned a single word about the boss fights or anything else for that matter, to the point of blatant false advertisement.

 

[mike1921]

I made an account to say but one thing:

Watch the videos online. Yahtzee played approximately 1.5% of the game (of which the average player puts about 200-400 hours of time in, and no, it's not all hunting mushrooms). The 'gigantic fucking sea monster' shows up to scare the piss out of you so as to encourage you to get better so you can actually fight the damn thing. Look up the following Youtube videos:

Monster Hunter Tri~ Barroth by Yomoska
Monster Hunter Tri~ Royal Ludroth by Yomoska
Monster Hunter Tri~ Lagiacrus (repel) by Yomoska
Monster Hunter Tri Online - Rathalos [HD] by earvcunanan

These are just a few. The game is called 'Monster Hunter' for a pretty good reason. I had a hunch Yahtzee wouldn't give the game a good review, because it's not a game you can get 'into' without actually reading the in-game information material. (For instance, had he read the information in the game, he would've known that you can tell if something larger than your weapon will show up is indicated directly underneath the mission details. The exception was that mission with Lagiacrus (the sea monster), because it's been tradition in every game for them to sneak something ridiculously out of your league in the first few low level missions since the first Monster Hunter on the ps2. They did it with Rathalos in the first game, Tigrex in the second, and Lagiacrus in the third.)

There's a good reason professional reviews of Monster Hunter games turn out low scores whilst 'unprofessional' gamer reviews turn out higher ones. One group isn't being paid to grind through a game each week.

This game isn't technically the third in the series, however, when you consider:
1) Monster Hunter and the expansion, Monster Hunter G
2) Monster Hunter 2
3) Monster Hunter Portable (and Portable G) (Freedom in the US, G wasn't localized)
4) Monster Hunter Portable 2 (and 2nd G) (Freedom 2 and Freedom Unite in the US, respectively)
5) Monster Hunter Tri (this one)
And since there's already word of the rest, let's not forget:
6) Monster Hunter Portable 3 (which is a port of Tri for the PSP)
7) Monster Hunter Frontier Online (an Xbox 360 online version).

Yeah, totally unpopular game that has nothing going for it! *thumbsup*

After seeing those videos, all of yahtzee's complaints seem minimal or when compared to the question "Are there any decently fast weapons?"


Unpopular? Who gives a shit how popular it is?

I like to play MMO's, and I don't mind the grinding aspects. Though part of what makes the grinding in MMO's fun are the friends you play with. It benefits them as well as yourself, and the adventure doesn't have to necessarily end. Great video all the same ^~^!

It's not a single player game. Yahztee just refuses to play online games and forgets to mention this fact. The game is primarily designed around 4 player online cooperative boss fight missions against huge dragons and what not.

Does this mean the wii finally works online without being laggy as all hell?

The tutorial introduces you to the most basic mechanics and tries to ease you into them very slowly so you don't get confused,

Wow, it seems like all the worst parts of the game will be revealed by people trying to defend it.

yahtzee, everyone seems to have noticed that you didn't play anything after the tutorial, why dont you try for a bit longer, and then actually post on this thread, preferably with some ACTUAL REASONS.

Yup, judging by the people defending this game, the complaints about it being a boring grindfest will no longer even be noticeable.

 

[KelsieKatt]

Does this mean the wii finally works online without being laggy as all hell?

I've never had any issues on Monster Hunter 3, so I would say so.

It's also one of the few games I know of which completely bypasses the entire friend code system and uses Capcom's own private servers to play on. On top of that, the monsters themselves don't seem to be really based exclusively on the server to begin with, nor does your own character, so whatever actions you perform just seem to flat out register no matter the circumstance.

At most, I've seen other players in my group teleport for half a second ahead of where they were standing, but it almost never happens and doesn't cause any gameplay issues, as you don't need to know exactly where your teammate is 100% seamlessly, though it's rarely happens to begin with.

Wow, it seems like all the worst parts of the game will be revealed by people trying to defend it.

Well, it's not exactly a simple game by any means. The first Monster Hunter game on PS2 pretty much dropped you straight into fighting stuff with little explanation and people got really upset because they had no idea what they were doing.

As a result, Capcom made a fairly slow paced tutorial in order to ease people into how the game functions this time around. Which has resulted in people complaining that they're bored.

In the end though, if you can get past that, or for that matter, you could simply ignore it and just jump into online play right off the bat, or arena mode, it's a very different game than the initial impression it gives after the first hour or so.

 

[mike1921]

Wow, it seems like all the worst parts of the game will be revealed by people trying to defend it.

Well, it's not exactly a simple game by any means. The first Monster Hunter game on PS2 pretty much dropped you straight into fighting stuff with little explanation and people got really upset because they had no idea what they were doing.

As a result, Capcom made a fairly slow paced tutorial in order to ease people into how the game functions this time around. Which has resulted in people complaining that they're bored.

In the end though, if you can get past that, or for that matter, you could simply ignore it and just jump into online play right off the bat, or arena mode, it's a very different game than the initial impression it gives after the first hour or so.

So, it has an hour long tutorial? Since when is that "fairly slow"? That's unimaginably slow. And I'm assuming you only saying you could ignore it and jump into online play or the arena mode means you can't just skip it and do the other single player parts?