Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Highly addictive"

Monster Hunter is a series made by Capcom and is more of a Japanese series than American. The game has been brought to America several times and has brought fun and joy to all. The game has singleplayer and multiplayer components. The game rewards those that are willing to constantly dive into monster quests, it will challenge people with brutal combat and unpredictable monsters, and it will allow you to go solo with the story or go online with friends and play as a group to kill monsters.

Monster Hunter Tri's story is about your hunter. You travel to an island in hopes to become a skilled hunter and hunt the most viscous monsters. You are able to design your character the way that you want. When you arrive on the island you go through monster quests to eventually fight more brutal and frightening monsters. As you kill these monsters you must carve them if you kill them or capture them to get parts to make armor and weapons. The harder the monster the better the gear (usually). You must also learn to combine items and craft, to do this you must live off the land by gathering and taking time to search for bugs, fish or plants to give you an edge over the monsters. You are usually timed to kill monsters, but usually time isn't a factor. The brutality of the monsters is usually the deciding factor if you fail a mission. You can only die on a mission 3 times before you fail it. Sometimes the monster will feel normal as the game is being merciful, others will tear you apart and will destroy you until you pull your hair out. The game offers challenge and enjoyment. Each quest will feature different monster or environments. From deserts to frozen wastelands.

A hunter can specialize in one or all weapons as there is no classes in the game. The weapons are Bowguns, Longswords, Greatswords, Sword and Board, Hammer, Switch Axe, and Lance. Each has their own special attacks, strengths and weakenesses that a hunter must learn to overcome and master. Making it a challenge for all that wish to find their weapon of choice. Some weapons allow you to be more defensive such as lance and sword and shield, while others make you more offensive like Hammer and Greatsword. Whatever the hunter chooses may change over the course of the game. Armor is like the weapons, you craft the different pieces using animal parts and gain different skills that will affect your hunter in all aspects of the game.

Hunters are also given the oppertunity to play online with their friends to tackle monsters out in the wild or accpet the challenges in the arenas to test their metal agains one or two monsters at once. Hunters usually must use teamwork to bring down monsters, but killing can get done faster than oflline play due to the hunters having at least 4 players hunting the same monster. Different event quests are brought in every weeks or so for hunters to attempt larger or more powerful monsters to test their skill and metal. Some event quests are more rewarding, but are far more merciless than normal ones.

The game has its annoying moments when lag may effect online play or you die because your hunter flexes everytime you use a potion, but the game is a challenge and a rare gem that is hard to find these days in the gaming market.