I’m writing this at 4 in the morning. Like fellow blogger Brainygamer, I fell under the spell of Monter Hunter Tri. It’s a weird game.
It boils down to the obsessive collection of various items and ingredients to enhance your equipment, craft supplies and upgrade your home village. The game features various systems that provide and require items. You control a farm run by cats, you send out ships to do fishing, you trade with ships from different cities, etc. Those systems ensure that there is always some kind of reward waiting for you somewhere. It’s a perfect “just one more turn”-setup.
But it’s not just a cheap trick. So for example, the game’s interface may have a few flaws and it certainly looks daunting. However, it comes with very useful and well thought-out features. Your character has a limited inventory and you have to store items at your house. When upgrading weapons, the weapon smith automatically uses items from you house, without the need for you to fetch them. It reminds of Demon’s Souls in this regard. Small detail but such things get often forgotten.
But here is something I haven’t seen before – in every menu, you can use the Wiimote to put any missing item on a kind of a “shopping list”. Whenever you find an item from the shopping list, you get a special sound as a reminder. The list even mentions why you are looking for the item in the first place, in case you forgot (like I always do).
The battle system is much simpler than Demon’s Souls. However, it’s still very good. For example using different weapons is REALLY different. Each type of weapon comes with a very district fighting style. It’s so fundamentally different, the buttons sometimes do entirely different things. Using a sword or a great sword you can block pushing the R button. When you equip a hammer, you won’t block. Instead, the R button charges is a hammer-specific special attack.
Yet, there is one disappointment. I went online for the first time today. It seems like the US, Japan and Europe all play on different servers. So because I live in Europe, I can’t play with anybody from the US. I wonder why Japanese developers never seem to get online play right. I haven’t played much online yet but if you live in Europe and are interested in joining forces, you can find my under my usual Name – Krystman (ID: 5EKMPQ).
