Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate has thus far been 60 hours of The Adventures of Me and My Cat. Weâve had some great times. Once, my cat got stuck under the claws of a Rathianâyour average fire-breathing dragonâand I had to whack it in the head with a hammer to get it off. Another time my cat took one look at a Gore Magalaâa darkness-spewing night-black hulk of evilâand ran away, leaving me to deal with it alone. (That didnât go well.) He once saved me from being eaten by running over and bonking me on the head to wake me up after a giant spider sent me to sleep.
You need a friend in Monster Hunter. Not just to distract whichever giant monster is currently giving you the evils, but to help you out at the beginning, when you donât know whatâs going on. Monster Hunter 4âs feline companions are great in a fight and provide welcome levity, but what you really need is another person to show you the ropes, recommend you a weapon and show you how to use it, complement your fighting style, and remind you to take paintballs and whetstones with you on a hunt.
If youâve got a friend, you can bypass all of Monster Hunterâs earnest but totally ineffective attempts to educate you with screens of unhelpful text and tutorial missions and skip the worst of the learning curve. Single- and multiplayer Monster Hunter are two halves of the same whole: when you hit a wall in the single-player quests, itâs finding a group and taking on the multiplayer quests that gets you through (and that gets you better equipment). From watching other players, you learn how a monster behaves and what techniques work best against it. Itâs like Dark Souls, in that way.
This is my sixth Monster Hunter game, so figuring out the basics was not a problem that I had, but I still remember my first ten hours with Monster Hunter Freedom in 2006 and how frustrating and impenetrable it was. Nowadays, thanks to online hunting (which works very well in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate), wikis and the increasing popularity of Monster Hunter outside of Japan, you donât have to be alone. Iâve played a few hunts with Monster Hunter newcomers this time around, and itâs only by observing their bafflement that Iâve remembered how off-putting Monster Hunter can still be for beginners, with its dense menus and forests of icons and stats.
A couple of hunts in, though, that fades into the background. When youâve felt the rush of toppling something twenty or fifty times your own size and fashioned hats out of its carcass, Monster Hunterâs strengths come to the fore. This is, by now, an impressively honed action game, with 14 distinct and balanced weapon classes and some of video gamesâ most impressive, intimidating enemies to kill with them. Changing weapons completely changes the gameâs tempo. If youâre a gunner, itâs all about staying back and firing until the last second before sprinting away from a monster, whereas lancers and hammer-users get right up in a dragonâs grill.
I used to alternate between the Gunlanceâwhich is a huge lance that fires shells from its tip, amazinglyâand the longsword, a zippy, technique-led weapon, but Iâve been won over by Monster Hunter 4 Ultimateâs two new classes, the Insect Glaive and the Elite Blade. The glaive is a twirly stick paired withâstay with meâa robotic insect-thing that you can fire at larger enemies to collect their âessenceâ, and the Elite Blade is a sword and shield that transforms into a gigantic greatsword, kind of like the Switch Axe. They are great fun to use, a welcome change from the Monster Hunter weapons Iâve been relying upon for years.
The Glaive highlights one of the main changes in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate: you can now climb everything. You can scale walls and icicles and even the monsters themselves â if you leap onto them and attack, you can cling onto them for dear life whilst they flail and roar, stabbing them in the quiet intervals to damage them.
The monsters themselves, fittingly, are still what make Monster Hunter so enjoyable for me â theyâre right on the line between believable and fantastical. When you see them out in the wild, in their habitat, they look like they belong there, whether theyâre a hulking stone-covered Urugaan stomping around volcanic plains, or an elder dragon sitting majestically atop a mountain. Monster Hunter 4 puts all its best new monsters right up front, and there are some incredible fights here. The final low-rank single-player quest had my heart in my mouth for the whole 30-minute fight, despite the fact that Iâve done this many times before at this point. Felling a real bastard of a monster gives you a headrush, especially if itâs after a few failed attempts. Some are so majestic that you feel bad for killing them.
Facing lots of new monsters right from the off really helps the pace of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. There are very few tutorial quests, boring gathering expeditions, or fights with familiar monsters, which make it feel more exciting from the start. The story also moves at a much snappier pace, and instead of being chained to one hub-town, you move around between several places that differ significantly both in character and appearance. Thereâs a town at the foot of a volcano, a paradise island thatâs home to about forty cats, and a village in the clouds. Moving around these different places helped keep me motivated.
Itâs helped enormously by the quality of the localisation, too. Monster Hunter is full of goofy puns and entertaining dialogue. Even the cats have their own dialect. Thereâs such attention given to this translation; itâs a world away from the dry, functional prose of most of Monster Hunterâs competitors. These games are known for being toughâand they areâbut theyâre also funny and sweet and never too serious. Even when youâve just failed a quest because a pink gorilla caught you up against a wall in an unlucky death-combo, you canât help but smile when youâre returned to your village and see a little pig wandering around in a sombrero.
I canât help but wish Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate was on a bigger screen than the 3DSâ. It looks goodâespecially on the New 3DSâbut sometimes a whole monster canât even fit on that little screen, and youâre left hacking away at a leg or a tail without being able to see whatâs going on. 3 Ultimate might not have been the best-looking game on the Wii U, but a bigger screen accentuated Monster Hunterâs sense of scale. Plus, there was more room for all those menus.
After a certain point, Monster Hunter is as much a lifestyle as a game. It requires dedication from you, and doesnât offer up its best fights until youâve made the effort to get to know it. Extraordinarily, you wonât face some of its most impressive monsters until youâve played for a hundred hours, but itâs perhaps just as extraordinary that Monster Hunter still has new things to offer after that time. You could play Monster Hunter for 30 hours and enjoy it hugely, but if you really get sucked in then it becomes almost its own subculture. Your head fills with all this weird knowledge about decoration stat bonuses and skill activations. You donât need to dive that far into Monster Hunter to get a lot of fun out of it, but I really revel in the dorkiness of it all. Itâll entertain you for about as long as you want it to, whether thatâs 10 hours or 300.
After 60 hours, Iâm only at the beginning of my time with Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. Once the gameâs out in the wild, there will be new quests every few weeks, new people to hunt with, and new Nintendo-themed costumes for my cat. Having slowly converted almost all of my friends to the Monster Hunter cause over the past eight years, Iâve already got people to enjoy it with, but 4 Ultimate is good enough to bring a lot of new people in to join us.
