Monster Hunter Tri – Hands on impressions

Edit: I know a lot of you are going to try and pick up the demo as soon as you can, but I think it’s only fair to warn you that most (probably all) Gamestop locations are requiring you to pre-order the game in order to receive a demo. At my location, they assured me that if I didn’t like the demo, I could get a full refund, but I’m not sure if that applies everywhere.

As many of you already may know, demos of Monster Hunter Tri have been distributed to many Gamestop/EB Games a few days early, with many locations already having them in stock. When I heard this, I called up my local Gamestop and asked if they had received their copies. Much to my delight, they did, and I immediately headed out to give it a shot.

When I popped my copy into my Wii and got comfortable up on the couch, I got a little excited. I had never played a Monster Hunter game before, and I had heard a lot of great things about them from fans of the series. Unfortunately, my excitement waned a little bit when I looked at the instructional poster that came with the demo. There were 8 classes represented on the sheet, and each one had a very different style of control. Now, maybe I’m a minority here, but I prefer my games to be kept pretty simple and straight to the point. I’m not a big fan of having to learn long strings of combos or complex controls just to be able to play my game’s tutorial. Regardless, I shoved aside my preconceptions about how much I’d enjoy it and let the title screen roll.

First, I’ll just get the basics out of the way so I can get to the fun part:

-There are 10 classes to choose from in the demo, ranging from your standard “Sword and Shield” to “Hammer” to “Great Sword”.
-Each class has a distinctive look, weapon, and control setup.
-There are two quests to choose from: One that looks like something from Jurassic Park, and then another where you fight a large plant… I think.

I kept things simple to start by choosing the sword and shield class. You can’t get much more basic than that, right? With the two quest options, I immediately jumped at the one that measured fewer stars on what I will tentatively call the “difficulty measured in stars” scale and got into the game.

The scene opened up at a camp looking out over a sea, the sun reflecting serenely in the water. Visually, the game looks pretty good. I can’t give Capcom a massive score for art style, but in terms of tech, it’s a good looking Wii game. Controls were pretty basic it turned out: Attack with “A”, block with “Z”, move with the control stick, etc, and I didn’t have much trouble finding my way around the Wiimote/Nunchuck combo to navigate my game. Now it was time to hunt. My target? A large purple dinosaur and his friends.

It wasn’t long before I found him, and the battle began. I mashed the “A” button, waggled away, blocked whenever I could, and overall thought I was doing pretty good. He got a few hits in, but a quick press of the “1” button allowed my to drink a quick potion and fix myself up. After a bit, however, I began to notice some flaws in the combat system. The camera was a bit difficult to control with the d-pad, and the entire game would have benefitted greatly from a lock on button. Additionally, the waggling to attack (though optionally replaced by the “A” button for seemingly weaker attacks) was clunky, and not as intuitive as one would hope. Not a game breaker, by any means, but definitely something to keep in mind. After a couple of minutes to get used to these flaws, however, I was right back into the game and tracking this dinosaur like there was no tomorrow.

Something that surprised me about how you battle in this game is that it isn’t as button-mashing heavy as I would’ve guessed. It’s more about retreating, dodging, then getting a few good attacks in, rather than just running up and smashing “A” until it dies. While I would’ve been fine either way, it was a nice touch that I actually had to think about what I was doing during the battle.

I’d follow him from area to area, getting a few hits in here and there, then he’d flee again, leaving his little goons (herein referred to as “compies”) to clean me up. They weren’t much trouble, but they were frustrating. Another thing that surprised me about Tri is that it isn’t really about an open world, per se, but rather a set of arenas connected by short loading screens. I found these loads much more bearable when I thought about it like this, since my original impression was simply that they sacrificed one big load for better graphics. My enemy was a smart dinosaur, that’s for sure, but I was smarter. Or so I thought, until my next encounter with him when he swarmed me with his compies and succeeded in completely massacring me.

I immediately restarted, filled with rage, and charged at him again. Things went almost exactly the same as the time previous, only instead of dying I ran out of time.

“Okay.” I told myself, “You have an idea of what you’re doing now, and you really underestimated your enemy. Give it another go with a stronger class and take this guy out.”

So, I restarted the demo, scrolled through classes, and picked the one with the biggest weapon: The hammer class. I wasn’t gonna waste any time this time around, so I went straight to the source and began swinging away with a massive hammer that looked like it was made out of a dragon’s head. This brings me to something I really, really like about Monster Hunter Tri, which is the sense of weight. All of the weapons physics are spot-on, and really give you a sense of power when you go around swinging a hammer that looks like it weighs as much as a house at a dinosaur that’s the size of a small house.

This time around, things went a little more smoothly. After only a few separate encounters and a billion potions, the guy went down and I let out an internal cheer. It really felt good having finally taken this guy down, especially when it takes a good 8-10 minutes of heavy swinging and frantic potion swallowing to do so. Unfortunately, in my haste to scribble down a few more details and congratulate myself, Mr. Dinosaur’s compies took a big bite out of me and I was wheeled back to camp in a crude ambulance driven by small cat-people.

I didn’t spend to much time with Tri, but what I did I really enjoyed. It’s not quite like anything I’ve ever played before, the closest comparison I can make being World of Warcraft, but it’s a game that I can tell I’ll get lost in for hours. I played for a good 45 minutes, and it felt like it has been somewhere closer to 5 or 10. Is the game perfect? No, of course not. Is it fun? Yes, it’s very, very fun if you’re the right type of gamer.

Impressed with:
-Strategic battling, rather than button mashing
-Great sense of immersion
-Sense of weight
-Solid gameplay
-Genuine sense of accomplishment after you complete a quest
-Music is quite good

Disappointed in:
-Graphics lack much originality in the fantasy genre
-Lock-on button would’ve been appreciated
-Camera control can get a little clunky (will probably be fixed with addition of Classic Controller Pro)
-One or two loads seem jagged