Developer/Publisher: Capcom
Genre: Action/RPG
Price: $29.99
Verdict: Pass, unless you have a lot of friends also interested in the game, or love games that make you intensely grind repetitive and inane tasks for a long time to get to the fun parts. If not, then go find something else to play.
Pros: Supports DPL2 audio for getting simulated 5.1 audio if you hook the game up to your surround sound setup; There’s a lot of content to dig into if you’re willing to invest in it.
Cons: Combat and camera are very clunkyl the game is incredibly boring for its long introduction to the gamer, when it should be putting the hooks in you to make you enjoy the game.
There’s a commercial running on TV for Monster Hunter Freedom Unite that shows a young man, looking at the ground, seeing huge monster tracks, and then showing footage of the game where the heroes fight huge monsters. It looks like incredible fun. What the commercial doesn’t tell you is that there’s a very heavy price to pay to get to this point. One you may not be willing to pay, as the road to what seems like fun is frought with intense boredom. Never have I thought that a game called “Monster Hunter” could be so unentertaining, but this game has done so.
Monster Hunter Freedom Unite’s story puts you in the role of a monster hunter sent to a snowy outpost villiage to protect it from, well, monsters. However, you pass out and you have to get rescued, and admittedly, the villiagers aren’t quite sure right away if you’re a credible monster hunter. If you play as a female monster hunter, then you apparently lose most of your clothes as well. It’s on to training, which you clearly need since you wound up falling off a cliff and losing your clothes. This is where the game starts to go horribly wrong. See, the name of the game is Monster Hunter, and that apparently means not just killing them, but skinning them, cooking them, digging up herbs…and scrounging around for random items just anywhere you can find them. The training is boring and drags on for far too long, but is quite necessary as you really will have no clue what’s going on with anything unless you complete the boring tutorials and learn how to use the weapons.
Because showing off screens of picking herbs just aren't quite as entertaining.
The beginning of the game isn’t much of a great omen for the rest of it – once you start doing ‘real’ missions, you’re doing either “Kill X number of creature Y” or “Obtain Z number of Plant R”. Why exactly is the MONSTER hunter the town hired to obstensibly protect it from MONSTERS going around digging up FRIGGING PLANTS? Why do I care? I’ve been playing this game for hours, and I have yet to have anything resembling fun. The combat is clunky and unintuitive, which in a game called Monster Hunter worries me. Phantasy Star Online was far more fun in its combat, and that game is going on 9 years old now, and there’s even Phantasy Star Portable now, and this game’s combat at times makes that game feel like Devil May Cry in terms of how smooth and intuitive the combat is.
Fighting enemies just isn’t fun. And this is a game called Monster Hunter. Fighting various beasts should BE FUN. But no, you’re constantly fighting the camera, and if you need to line up an enemy to throw an item at them, good luck. The controls require you to do finger acrobatics in order to pull out your weapon, then put it away, and you’ll often find yourself early on using an item (usually a healing potion you’ll need) when you just wanted to put away your sword so you could carve the skin off of the beast you just slaughtered.
This may be one of those games that gets far more rewarding the more time you put into it. But with all the time I put into it while reviewing it, I can’t think of a moment where I had much of any fun. Most of the time I was thinking, “I’d rather be playing something else. This just is boring.” There’s not really a lot going on in those critical initial hours that hooks you at all. Maybe at some point you get to fight those big monsters Capcom is perfectly willing to show off in screenshots and in footage of the game, but you gotta go through the boring crap first in order to get to that, apparently. Look, this is a game. I play it for enjoyment. This is an entirely manmade universe – there is little to no reason for a game to bore me with excessive mundane elements like going out and gathering plants instead of letting me go out and slay mighty beasts after a short training period, instead of making me grind for materials and killing the same creatures over and over again for some reason that I can only think of as a game designer’s cruel joke to see how much you can bore someone while convincing them that they’re having fun. I just didn’t fall for the charade at all.
Maybe it’s the view of what Western gamers expect versus what Eastern gamers expect – this game is inexplicably huge in Japan, for reasons I can’t fathom. Perhaps the fact that Japanese gamers live in more urban environments, and can effectively exprience the multiplayer aspects of the game. Maybe these boring mundane tasks are more fun when it’s a collective experience and you get to the actual fun parts of the game. Unfortunately, I expect my games to hook me more effectively, and I’ve seen games like the Phantasy Star Online series that manage to hook you and get you playing even past the beginning parts, because they’re at least reasonably entertaining early on. Monster Hunter seems set out to bore you, or to at least weed out the players unwilling to endure what it throws at it. I just want to play a game to have fun, and Monster Hunter provided none of that.
I understand this is a long review and I should show more images - but all the screens we have available just aren't as representative of the true experience I had with the game, so these screenshots posted are only shown as a general representation of the game to give you a feel for how it looks.
Also, Capcom, this is my first foray into the Monster Hunter series, but I know the series has been around for a while now, and has lacked true online play. In a genre where multiplayer is a large part of the fun factor, not enabling gamers to easily experience that when you’ve had time to develop the feature for American audiences is inexcusable at this point. Yes, we know that Japanese gamers are big on the local multiplayer. American culture is different, and many people live in communities where they’re not around other PSP gamers to play these games all the time. America is no longer playing second fiddle to Japanese games – there’s no reason to not develop this feature for American audiences at this point. Maybe if the game did have online so I could experience the multiplayer elements, maybe the drive to actually continue in this game and try to reach a point where it’s as addictive and enjoyable as millions of Japanese gamers apparently find it to be, then I would actually find some enjoyment in it. But because there is no online play, I can’t.
Monster Hunter Freedom Unite is just one of those games where I just didn’t get it, perhaps. I spent so much time with this game, trying to somehow enjoy it and give the game as fair an opinion I could of it. I wanted to think that I could play it and find the quality that others have found – but I couldn’t. The game is just so…boring. And I have an axiom – if a game is boring, then there’s no reason to keep playing it. Games are meant for enjoyment, not to feel like mundane, repetitive work for seemingly no reason other than someone else’s cruel design. That’s why I have a day job. And I at least get paid for it. Monster Hunter Freedom Unite did little to reward me for the time that I put into it at all. I can’t find much of any reason to recommend Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, unless you’re a HUGE fan of games where you have to put the shoulder to the plow for a long time in order to get somehow rewarded later on. And you know what, I bet if you do, you might find some enjoyment in slaying the giant monsters that they so gleefully advertise in order to sell you on the game. But I’m not willing to pay that price when there are dozens of other games that provide so much more consistent enjoyment without making it feel like work at all. Because that’s what this game felt like when I played it; A chore.
Popularity: unranked [?]
