Spielzeit:
178 Minuten
The first part are some personal notes because that series was my childhood and youth<3 (you can skip to ___ if not interested). I once really liked this series. It felt like a grindier, more punishing Souls-like experience where you fight big monsters. Back in Monster Hunter Freedom Unite or Monster Hunter Tri, weapons had only a few moves and very limited actions. Monsters were simple but hit hard. The game was very accessible but difficult to master. At the same time, you could play the entire game with a naked character—it was never necessary to wear specific armor or have certain skills. Everything was skill-dependent (from your skill as a player).
I liked that simplicity. Call me a boomer, but I don’t like what the series has turned into over the last few years. Weapons don’t need endlessly long combos for which you need to watch Youtube Tutorials or have a PDF sheet, bosses don’t need undodgeable one-hit KO attacks (that force you to hide), and attacks that can only be avoided with specific skills or DPS-check quests don’t add to the experience. I’m also not a huge fan of environmental gimmicks (like flooding a monster away), mounting monsters, or wombo-comboing them in button-mashing quick-time events. None of this was ever necessary, and it takes away the intensity that the older games provided during fights.
It feels like, over the past few years, this series has entered a power creep loop between giving the hunter more power while making monsters and quests increasingly ridiculous.
I used to love the slightly ruined, almost post-apocalyptic world Freedom Unite placed you in. There was just a small village, and in the questing zones, you’d often see ruins—remnants of an old civilization. Aside from the few people you were protecting from various threats, there weren’t many other characters around. It really felt like you had to fight for your place in a monster-filled world. It reminds me of a Souls game in that way. There wasn’t much direct storytelling (aside from the usual Monster Hunter formula: “That monster is threatening our village… Oh, wait, it’s actually an Elder Dragon, go kill it”), but there were so many implications of a bigger story behind everything, especially in Freedom Unite.
Now, there are cutscenes, unskippable story events (slowly riding through the map), annoying characters, and other distractions before you can even start questing—or that actively prevent you from doing so. Even your Felyne talks to you now. Back then, they just made noises and gestures, which I really liked. Now, they talk more than the actual human characters (and have less character depth than in MHFU), and I was already annoyed after two hours in. This series never needed an elaborate, direct story. Freedom Unite handled it perfectly. In a game like this, the places you explore and the atmosphere tell a story on their own. Less is more.
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So the main reason why I can’t recommend this game yet is because how poorly it runs. I think I have a good PC, everything in my Steam library runs at the highest settings. But this game feels unoptimized. For how the series looks graphically, it shouldn’t have such high system requirements. These games used to run just fine on the PSP and Wii consoles. Graphics were never the selling point of Monster Hunter. So why does it now demand so much on PC while feeling so unoptimized and basically still look the same as 20 years ago (which is good)? The Monster Hunter PC games don’t even look good enough to justify these high requirements.
Then there’s the price: 70 bucks for a (partial) Monster Hunter game? Because let’s be real, the endgame with the G-Rank will be a separate DLC and is basically at least 60% of the whole experience. And 109 bucks for a single game bundled with some cosmetic BS? That's criminal. We should never normalize this. Other games offer an Ultra-Premium Deluxe Edition and include the future first expansion for that price tag, even Starfield did that. And even then, I’d complain. And on launch day, there were already 65.32€ worth of cosmetic DLCs in the shop. The Monster Hunter Steam page might as well be an in-game store. The only thing missing now is a battle pass… It’s sad how this series has been shifting more and more into a live-service model.
I know I’m the minority here, but I think Monster Hunter should have never gone full AAA. Just give me my simple Monster Hunter game I described above with okay-ish graphics and a fair price tag in which I can kill Monsters with my friends and some clunky online mode like Tri had. (Still hoping for a Freedom Unite/Tri Steam rerelease with an online mode) Memberberries hit hard on this one:( guess I'm just not any longer the target group of that series.
Edit: Also it always wants to optimize shaders after starting the game which always take 5-10mins. Just let me play the game....
👍 : 23 |
😃 : 3