7th - Monster Hunter 3
Developer: Capcom
Release Date: April 20th, 2010

If you think about it, the gameplay of Monster Hunter 3 does not exactly sound appealing when simply described. You control a hunter, you go out into the world to locate a gigantic monster, you face the creature on a battle that extends for over forty minutes, and if you die, you have to restart the hunting once again, losing a whole hour of progress as punishment. However, whether it was because of the wonderful execution performed by Capcom, or simply because each of those eighteen fascinating creatures provide such a daunting challenge, Monster Hunter 3 becomes an incredibly addictive battle of grind, sweat, blood and perseverance. As ridiculously hard and punishing as it may be, it is just impossible to put the game down, even if you are defeated by a monster six times in a row after many one-hour long battles.

The central fuel of Monster Hunter 3, which is a result of the game's great implementation, is the feeling that despite all frustrating losses, players will constantly feel like they are actually getting better and crawling ever closer to the desired goal of downing one of those gargantuan creatures. The game has a huge learning curve, and each new monster provides a true challenge, from the human-sized Great Jaggi to the powerful and aggressive Deviljho. Monster Hunter does not get progressively harder; its level of difficulty is so mathematically precise, that challenge is constant, and every new monster that appears is the equivalent to going back to ground zero and having to relearn patterns, think about strategies, pack the correct items and forging new armor and weapons by regressing a few steps and farming for the same titanic beasts that, not too long ago, were a seemingly impossible to defeat. Monster Hunter 3 makes players earn every rewarding victory like no other game.

In addition to a truly engaging single-player campaign that extends for over forty hours of epic battles against threatening creatures in impressive and hostile scenarios, the game packs what is the very best online experience in the system. In fact, Monster Hunter 3's online mode is so full-blown that players can simply choose to play the entire campaign online, paring up with other hunters and facing monsters - whose power is adjusted to the side of the party - in both missions that are exact replicas of those that are offline and other tasks that are so outrageously hard that they are exclusive to the game's vast online mode, as they can only be properly tackled by a team of hunters. The Nintendo Wii was the system that brought forth the terms "casual" and "hardcore", and even though it is debatable whether or not those expressions are valid, Monster Hunter 3 can undoubtedly be dubbed a true hardcore title: it is grinding, tough, huge, tense, frustrating and demanding. However, it is also unbelievably rewarding.