I "like" how un-"monster hunter" everything before chapter 4 is.

[Mister Magician]

Everything spread out between generic rpg pop-up cities, locked into certain areas for story reasons, a solid 75% of the experience is "walking simulator" sections, railroaded into back-to-back fights, insufferable checklist characters, heavy limitations on gear and weapons. The theming and imagery itself is right out of final fantasy. The game even has jrpg-style hallways for "maps."

Even the final mission is titled "monster hunter" just like the final msq of a ff14 expansion name-drops the expansion title. In fact, A LOT of the "story" part of the game reminds me of post-shadowbringers ff14. The last three main bosses even have mmo mechanics, oddly in the same style of a ff14 boss.

I wouldn't be shocked if the employees laid off after the failure of dawntrail didn't end up at capcom. There was a mass exodus of veteran monster hunter staff after rise, so it lines up too for all the new hires. It's like how wow's "shadowlands" and "dragonflight" expansions felt like guild wars 2 expansions instead, as that coincided with both a lot of employees leaving / being laid off from anet and a lot of employees leaving blizzard.

However...

Once you get to chapter 4 (which is supposedly high rank), the game has an IMMEDIATE genre shift back to a monster hunter game. you're even given a horde of tutorials for new systems that all other monster hunter games had at the start but yet were absent here for the "story" section.

Also, progression is on fast-forward after the story, as if they were trying to make up for the lost time not engaging with said systems during the "story."

What a mess!

[Toyosatomimi no Miko]

Still waiting for that citation about a mass firing/mass Exodus that you never gave me in either of those two past threads on the issue.

[Jad The Taff]

I actually agree.

[Misery1ndex]

Definitely agree. After the credits, so much more freedom to hunt and explore, gather materials and just fun beating the ♥♥♥♥ out of monsters. The story was kinda meh, and i ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate Nata lol

[Mister Magician]

Originally posted by Misery1ndex:

Definitely agree. After the credits, so much more freedom to hunt and explore, gather materials and just fun beating the ♥♥♥♥ out of monsters. The story was kinda meh, and i ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate Nata lol

It really isn't a monster hunter game until chapter 4. Ironically, that's also when the game gets very easy with how fast you gear up.

[Mister Magician]

Originally posted by GamingWithSilvertail:

Originally posted by Mister Magician:

It really isn't a monster hunter game until chapter 4. Ironically, that's also when the game gets very easy with how fast you gear up.

World wasnt hard even with elder tempers. =)

I think you are missing the point on purpose. Even without mods you can get geared in hours here.

[The DudeBro]

Originally posted by Misery1ndex:

Definitely agree. After the credits, so much more freedom to hunt and explore, gather materials and just fun beating the ♥♥♥♥ out of monsters. The story was kinda meh, and i ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate Nata lol

yeah, Nata was a really dumb plot point! They gave him WAY too much screen time. He should have been the same as the little girl you save in the beginning, a couple lines and then you only talk to her again when you want to change your birds colors.

[Frostea]

Originally posted by Mister Magician:

Originally posted by GamingWithSilvertail:

World wasnt hard even with elder tempers. =)

I think you are missing the point on purpose. Even without mods you can get geared in hours here.

The fact that you said “hours” is too short for a grind says a lot lmao.

[Coinkydink]

SInce you are familiar with FF none of this should be at all surprising. It is called "trying hard to be artistic" and there is also the added layer of being a coporate product for a mass market whose only idea of art is anime culture.

[BeautyBounce]

Fully agree with OP.
A bit disappointed tbh.
All I've got left to do now is get Gold crowns for all monsters or wait for a title update,
and I've been playing really slow to purposefully drag out the game time.

[Mister Magician]

Originally posted by Frostea:

Originally posted by Mister Magician:

I think you are missing the point on purpose. Even without mods you can get geared in hours here.

The fact that you said “hours” is too short for a grind says a lot lmao.

charms are crafted now, and can be upgraded to +3 with no rng.

you can get 100 decorations and 100 weapon parts in the melding pot INSTANTLY without needing to do meaningless hunts per 8 like in rise.

the gem pool also seems to be very shallow this time around, so you can feasibly get one decorations of each type per each 100 meld.

In previous games, you might never get charms or decorations due to rng, and you didn't get 100 results in seconds without hunts in between.

artisan weapons can not only guarantee status / element type (even to the point that bowgun normal rounds can apply statuses and elements now (!) ), but you can easily get 30% affinity baseline.

if you know what you are doing and wait until HR 55 to try to make artisan weapons, and have lots of parts/tickets lying around, you could get your full endgame set of decorations and a rank 8 artisan weapon in a few minutes.

[Nightfall]

Gameplay is fun, but Capcom defintely went full ♥♥♥♥♥♥ with this iteration.

[Peelyboy]

I'm only in chapter 3 so far but I've definitely been feeling this. Every 'hunt' is sit on chicken as it auto-walks you until you reach a cutscene, which inevitably ends in a stare-down between you and the monster to save <insert persons name here> from themselves after them doing some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I did not play Rise so I have no idea how it was in that game, but I appreciated the light-touch investigating you did in World to track a monster to its location, before you'd fought it enough times that you'd level your monster knowledge so that you just knew where it was from them on.

They forgot the "Hunter" part of Monster Hunter