Now it’s time to party

I was very excited last week when I heard that the Catherine demo was available for my enjoyment. Alas, it was for Gold members only, so I was stuck waiting for it until… Tuesday I think? In any case, it’s available to the general public now, so I downloaded that.

Let me start by saying that I was interested in Catherine before it was cool. Because I’m super hip. The kids over at Talking Time were all abuzz about it when the first trailer was announced, because it seemed to be a Shin Megami Tensei spinoff of some sort. SMT, and the Persona games in particular, are a big thing over there, so a sexy spinoff was big news. Turns out it has little to do with SMT, and is not even branded as part of the series, but after playing it I can see that there are a few similarities.

Catherine is a puzzle game. Technically it is a falling block game, but not in the “match-three” way that falling block games are. In this one, you must climb a tower made of blocks before they fall out from under you. It’s a little more complicated than that, but such is the basic premise of the gameplay. Also, there is a story that plays out in between the tower-climbing. And this is where it parallels SMT, or Persona 3, at least. During the daytime, you walk around and talk to people, affecting your relationships with them as you go. And then at nighttime, it’s tower climb time. This is the same formula that P3 follows, except that in that game there is an RPG instead of puzzles during the night segments. Again, that’s a very basic summary, but it gets my point across.

After playing the demo, I’m not only interested in Catherine because the Talking Time crew told me to be, but mostly because if you ignore the fact that it is not technically a Persona game, it’s a Persona game I can play. I really would like to get into the series, but from what I’ve heard, they seem to have an issue with requiring perfection. Having to memorize enemy weaknesses and switch up your party all the time to take advantage of them is a little more than I want to deal with in a standard RPG. In a tactical RPG? Sure, that’s part of the genre’s charm. But coming off of Final Fantasy XIII, where your characters learn weaknesses and exploit them automatically, having to tweak your characters/party for each encounter? Too much work.

So Catherine here, the other reason I want to get into it is because the social element and story really interest me. Your social interactions appear to have an effect on how the story plays out, even if it just results in whether your character (Vincent) picks the blond (Catherine) or the brunette (Katherine) in the end, it looks like it’ll be a fun ride. Of course, me being me, I’d definitely do everything to rope Vince into marrying his longtime girlfriend. It’s nice to feel like you have that choice, anyway.

I do want to play the full game, but I’m wondering if it’ll be worth the entry price. $60 is an awful lot for someone with so little disposable income to pay for a game about climbing blocks. I’m sure that I’ll enjoy the daytime segments and the story more than enough to justify the price. It’s hard to say whether I’d play it more than once though. Maybe it’d make a good birthday gift? It is only a month and a half away… Then again, I did play Silent Hill: Shattered Memories several times, and that game was even less about gameplay than Catherine is. I suppose it’ll probably boil down to whether I have enough self-control to avoid buying it or not, though I know how guilty I’ll feel if I do. Huh. Listen to me ramble about finances. Not exactly the most entertaining thing to blog about. Point is, the demo is good, but not $60 good.

In a related story, I’m highly considering getting SMT: Devil Survivor Overclocked for 3DS next month. This one is a tactical RPG, so that’s perfect! I love tactical RPGs! Which reminds me, the PSP port of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together has been sitting on my floor unopened for at least a month now. Probably should put Dissidia down for a while and start hacking away at that.

(At this point, you’re likely trying to reason out exactly why I think I need to buy more video games.)

It started somewhere in my chest

Hmmm… Updates are coming fairly often these last couple weeks, aren’t they? This could be trouble. But at least I’m getting my thoughts out of my head and onto paper, unimportant though they may be. I mean, almost everything I’ve blogged over the last few months has been about video games. What happened to my ability to blog about slightly less stupid things? Not that Marshmallow Mateys or girls with fake blue eyes are much more interesting. So I’ll try to come up with more random/entertaining things to post. In the meantime, vidja games!

I bought the Bit.Trip Runner soundtrack on iTunes a while back (like… January?), and the game itself before that, but I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned them here. Which is a shame, because they’re just the best.

Well, that’s a mouthful, but Runner is definitely a solid game, and it’s a real shame that I don’t really play it. I guess that might have something to do with the steep difficulty curve, but that in and of itself might only be a problem because I have a big stupid ape brain. The game is about learning button cues and having the reflexes to execute them in different orders at different speeds. It’s laid out as a man running across various terrain, with a multitude of objects that will impede his progress. Every object requires a different action. For example, you simply jump over small obstacles like rocks and elevated ground, but there are two coloured balls that fly at you in a wave pattern. One will always end up high, which you have to slide under, and one will always go low, which requires a jump. It’s your job to remember which colour goes high and which goes low.

Really, the game is essentially a guitar (or any other kind of rhythm game, for that matter) game, except your notes are obstacles instead of a cue that literally tells you which button to press. And the rhythm game comparison goes even farther than that, because every action makes sound effect that mesh in with the music. There are two types of collectibles scattered throughout each stage: gold and powerups. The gold is just a “try to get them all” thing, so it can be safely ignored. The powerups mostly just boost your score, but they also carry the much cooler benefit of altering the background music, layering on additional melodies and instruments every time you pick one up, which is a super cool effect.

As I mentioned before, the failing here is that the game is hard. Like, I was “stuck partway through world one” hard. Only after playing that particular stage for hours did I manage to memorize it well enough to make it through. Now I’m almost to the end of the third world and hit another brick wall. It’s still a fun game, but you can only fail the same stage so many times before you move onto something you can be more successful at. The nice thing is that while even a nudge from an obstacle will halt your progress, it really only rewinds you. Commander Video is sent back very quickly to the beginning of the stage, and you’re back up and running after a short countdown. No “you lose” screens, no waiting for the level to re-load. It’s all very snappy in pace, and I love that.

Did I mention how much I love the music? I think I might have, but it bears repeating. Man I love the music in this game.

I highly recommend giving Bit.Trip Runner a shot. It’s the only Bit.Trip game that I’ve found compelling enough to try, and I’m glad I did. Even Stephanie had trouble putting it down the one time I made her play it. It’s available on WiiWare ($8) and Steam ($??), and if those are too expensive, there’s a game on the App Store called Action Hero which is a very simplified version of the same game style. I’m sure there are other ones too, but Bit.Trip Runner stands head and shoulders above the rest, if only because its music meshes in with the gameplay so nicely and transparently. Plus the bonus stages are based on Pitfall!, so that’s pretty rad.

Gimme the honky tonk blues

MegaMan Legends 3 was cancelled yesterday. This is absolutely heart-wrenching news for me for a lot of reasons. Obviously, because I’m a MegaMan fanboy (though I’ve been somewhat less vocal about that recently), but also because that’s the 3DS game I was waiting for. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s the reason I bought my 3DS, but it would likely have been reason #2 if I had an enumerated list of reasons why I bought the machine.

It’s also sad because the Legends series is far and away my favourite incarnation of MegaMan. The platformers are great and all, but not one classic MegaMan game had the charm and personality that Legends exuded. MegaMan Powered Up! certainly tried, but even with its cutesy style, it still lacked the pure soul that makes Legends so unique.

While the graphics in the Legends games are blocky, they still look damn spiffy for PS1 games. Hell, these games are partly defined by their colourful palettes and Miyazaki-esque art direction. There wasn’t exactly a great wealth of PS1 games that made such good use of so few polygons. Not to mention that the characters’ faces were all fully animated in cutscenes. It’s not so impressive today, but was definitely a Big Deal in 1997. The only other game I can think of that had complex facial animations (defined here as more than a hinged jaw) in that generation was Turok 3, and that was in 2000. I’m sure there were more, but those are the only two that spring to mind.

Moreso than the graphical prowess though, the characters and worlds really popped and brought the games to life. Every major character in MegaMan Legends (the first) is lovable. I could go on to describe all that in great detail here, but why do so when there is a perfectly good article already written about the same subject?

Point is, Capcom may have figured it was a lost cause because all that matters is profit, but I think it would have been a fantastic game. The people working on it were committed to the project, and there was a fairly huge community surrounding and supporting it. It likely wouldn’t have been a million-seller, but maybe it would have been the 3DS game to own. Now we’ll never know. And we’ll never have closure to that cliffhanger ending in MegaMan Legends 2. Goddammit.

Just sleep

I was going to write a post yesterday ranting about my lack of sleep and how I hate being tired all the time. It’s good that I didn’t get it finished though, because it was really stupid and I spent most of it blaming everyone else for sucking up all my free time. And that would make me a dick. What it really boiled down to was that if I want to watch FullMetal Alchemist or play Half-Minute Hero, I have to do it in the time I should be using to sleep. This causes problems for me in the way of me being exhausted all day long, but it’s still my choice, and I consistently choose leisure over a proper rest.

In actual news, I played the Duke Nukem Forever demo. Glad I did too, because I don’t see anything there worth picking up the full version for. Firstly, the gameplay is not Duke Nukem. Maybe the full version is different, but in the demo the levels are pretty linear. No exploring or backtracking necessary. I suppose that kind of game design is outdated, but I’d really prefer if you kept your Halo out of my Duke Nukem, please. It would have been much better if Gearbox had just dressed up Borderlands in a Duke skin. Everybody likes Borderlands.

The other -and possibly more important- thing that threw me off was the difficulty level. Maybe the demo stage is at the end of the game or something, but I chose easy mode and still died every time I encountered enemies. I’m pretty sure I don’t suck at FPSes, because I don’t die all the time in Borderlands or… okay, so that’s the only real FPS I’ve played in recent memory, but I don’t suck at it!

The good things about it were… nothing. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but there surely wasn’t anything that impressed me. I kind of liked that you can see Duke’s body when he falls down or you look where his feet should be, as opposed to other FPSes where you’re a disembodied hand. That little detail is something I want to see in every FPS from now on. It really should have been standardized years ago. Other than that, I suppose the full version promises boobies, but that’s not a good reason to buy a game. Last time I bought a game because of boobies, I ended up with God of War, which I found so incredibly boring that I didn’t even suffer through half the game before I traded it in. So yeah, Duke demo did not impress me, and I’m glad that I wasn’t one of those people hyped up for the game enough to buy it blind on launch day. I’ll stick to Duke Nukem 3D, thank you very much. Or even better, one of the old side-scrolling Duke games.

It’s all in how you disappear me

Huh. I typed a lot of words about Portal 2 there, didn’t I? Played a little Friday night, and the surprise at the beginning of Chapter Four was fantastic. If it had turned out any other way, I think I may have stopped playing. I <3 GLaDOS. And test chamber 19 almost got me. It was a brilliant puzzle, and I don’t think any game will ever match Portal 2 in terms of sheer puzzle awesomeness. I kind of wish I hadn’t waited so long to play it, but I having the other $30 still in my bank account makes me almost as happy.

I’m also investing PC gaming time in Sanctum, which is a first-person shooter, but also a tower defense game. Yeah I know your mind is boggled, but it works. I love it, and if my computer was able to run it without turning off the graphics and knocking the resolution down to 800×600, I’d probably spend all my time with it. I really do love tower defense games, but I can never seem to convince myself of it until I’m playing them. Plants vs. Zombies, for example, I actually didn’t buy until Stephanie got herself addicted to it.

Sanctum mixes it up a bit. Whereas most tower defense games have you build while your invaders are on the way (PvZ, My Life as a Darklord), or let you set down your defenses then start the wave and watch the massacre play out (Crystal Defenders), Sanctum has a build phase and an extermination phase. Like the latter type of tower defense game, you have a nice calm period in which to build and upgrade your defenses. This lasts as long as you want, letting you concoct the best setup you can muster, or just to bounce around and explore the surprisingly large and detailed levels. Once you’re done, extermination phase removes your ability to build and upgrade, as well as starting the enemy wave. BUT! Now you have guns, and rather than sitting and watching your towers rip them apart (though you can do that), you’re able to jump into the fray and pop caps in monster asses. My play style mostly sees me trying to snipe targets before they get to my turrets but around wave five or so (depending on stage and difficulty) even if I’ve spent all my resources on upgrading my sniper rifle, the enemies bulk up enough in HP and numbers to necessitate a line of defense.

Like any other tower defense game, I’ve spent a lot of time trial-and-erroring my way to perfect victories, but as of this post, I’ve yet to earn one on any difficulty higher than easy. Which is a shame. The multiplayer aspect is pretty awesome too, though it does seem to be considerably harder. Even on the first map, I’ve yet to survive an entire round in multiplayer. Super fun though, and I’ll likely stick with it. Not even because I just want to get as many cheevos as I can! That gets an exclamation mark because I usually only stick with games longer than I should for the achievements.

We cannot afford to be afraid anymore

Portal 2 was on sale for half price last weekend, so guess what I spent the said weekend doing. Not Portal 2, that’s for sure!

Actually, while I spent most of my weekend playing Sanctum and being murdered by Gigantuars in Final Fantasy XIII, I did set aside a couple hours for Portal 2, and I even booted it up for a few test chambers before bed last night. So far, I am not disappointed in the least. Everyone else figured this out months ago, but wow, Portal 2 is awesome. I’ve just finished up Chapter Three, and I am about as anxious to keep going as I am with a good book.

The thing I think I’m most amazed about (so far) is the difficulty level. With Portal I spent at least a few minutes solving each test chamber. Some, like the one near the end where you have to launch yourself from tower to tower took significantly longer, though now that I think about it, that one in particular took a long time because I had trouble executing my solution. I don’t recall many of the puzzles requiring you to make portals on the fly as you bounce around in the air, so that one always sticks out in my mind. The point is, I was certainly not as good at Portal while I was playing Portal as I was once I had finished Portal. Common sense, no?

Portal 2, on the other hand, is a breeze. At least up to Chapter Four. For almost all the test chambers I’ve passed through, it only took a cursory glance at the room and the tools I had to work with before I knew exactly what to do. It the case of one of the last I played, there was a light bridge, a laser and a companion cube. The cube sits on the bridge, blocking the laser which, when unblocked, would raise a platform to the exit. The cube would also have to be placed on a button to open the door. Trouble was, once the cube stops blocking the laser the lift is up and you can’t get to the door. Tiny spoilers ahead, because I’m going to describe the solution.

What you have to do here is get up onto the light bridge and make a portal at the end of it, then another one on the opposite side of the room, so the bridge goes through and creates a second one parallel to the original. You’ll then set the cube on the second bridge, positioned directly above the button. Here, it will also continue to block the laser. Then you run onto the lift, and create a new portal somewhere else, removing the second bridge. The cube will fall on the button, leaving the laser unblocked, making the lift rise and the door open. Victory!

This isn’t even the trickiest puzzle I’ve encountered so far, but it is the only one I actually had to stop and think about for a minute. Solving it did provide a very satisfying sense of discovery, and that’s what I love about both Portal and it’s sequel. I usually don’t have the patience to puzzle out solutions in games, and will often end up on GameFAQs after five minutes or so. Normally I much prefer the sense of progression to figuring out puzzles on my own. But Portal’s puzzles aren’t like those in other games. There are no obtuse puzzles that you need to keep notes for. Trial and error is minimal, and it never takes long to come up with and implement a new solution if your first didn’t pan out. If you’re poking around the rooms, it’s not because you’re looking for clues, it’s because you’re looking for secrets and enjoying the detailed environments. Mind you, I’m still not very far in Portal 2, so there is potential for it to get significantly harder, but this is the trend I’ve seen so far.

Otherwise? The narrative elements have been fantastic up to this point, and I can’t imagine it won’t hold up to the end. I can easily see how Wheatley is supposed to be the new star of the show, but I have to say that I slightly prefer GLaDOS’ abrasive sincerity to his goofiness. After Portal, GLaDOS earned the rank as one of my favourite video game characters, and her Portal 2 appearance (which really shouldn’t be a spoiler to anyone) only serves to help keep her there. Her writing is top-notch, and the fact that she is totally bitter about the first game’s ending is great. I have kind of an idea of how I think things are going to play out, and if it’s even close, I think it’ll serve the character very well. My hypothesis is a little cliche (hero and antihero team up to defeat common enemy), but GLaDOS is a psychopath, so it’s pretty unlikely. And the hook at the end of Chapter Three is eating away at my soul, killing me a little for every minute I’m not playing. Like I said, it’s gripped me like a good book and I can’t wait to dive back into that world and see how things unfold. I might have to completely ignore Stephanie tonight and hammer away at this game. At least get half an hour in. My goal is to be finished by Sunday night, anyway.

Eyes of flame

Got me some of the second degree of those new (for a limited time, most likely) Doritos, the Firey Buffalo flavour, and I was not at all disappointed. It was a while back, so I don’t entirely remember how they tasted, but the description was pretty accurate. They were a super-hot version of buffalo-wing flavoured chips, and I found them much more in line with my tastes than the jalapeno variety. Still not exactly a kind of chip I would buy regularly, but there’s more to that than only decent flavour.

These motherlovers were hot. Like, insane amounts of spiciness lived within these chips, and I honestly could not manage to finish the entire bag in a single sitting – and this is one of the small bags we’re talking about. Luckily, I did not manage to buy a Pepsi Lime again, so I had a slightly more effective and much less disgusting glass of water there to help soothe the burn. Though it didn’t. Because they were so hot! I won’t say I’m a connoisseur of spicy foods, but there were definitely up there on the list of the spiciest foods I’ve eaten.

The odd twist to this story, however, lies in the 3rd degree burn Doritos. I’ve been looking for them since I polished off the second half of this bag, but I cannot find them! Perhaps I need to search convenience stores situated a little bit father from my house, but they seem to have disappeared right off the racks. Now I can’t believe that the hottest of these chips is the most popular, because I could barely stand the second level of them, but they can’t have been pulled or recalled because Frito-Lay still advertises them on their website. Perhaps the Scorchin’ Habanero was subject to a very small production run? I may never know for sure, but that may be okay, because I’m fairly confident that eating those chips would quite literally set my mouth aflame. Aflame, I say! I really love getting the chance to use words with a’s tacked onto the front of them. It makes me feel all dramatic and whatnot.

You’ve given me some hope

Geez, I’ve been bad at blogging lately. A week and a half off work and not even a crappy filler post? Shameful.

So during said week, there was quite a lot going on (at least for me). My one goal for the week though, was to get to the end of Final Fantasy XIII. It may have been on Monday, I don’t quite remember, but I did beat it. Hooray! There used to be a time when it would have taken maybe two weeks for me to power through to the end of it, and not two and a half months. Hell, even that’s pretty speedy for me these days. I am so not done with the game though, as there are still a good two dozen marks to hunt, and plenty of achievements to earn. Maybe some aren’t so worth the necessary time/grind investment (the one for having every weapon and piece of equipment, for example), but I think it’s a fun enough game that I’ll stick to it for a while at least.

I’ve also been very slowly plucking away at Final Fantasy on my phone whenever I have five minutes to spare. And actually, now that I think about it, I’m currently playing through 5 different FF game. The aforementioned two, as well as Dissidia, Final Fantasy IV DS (wherein I am brickwalled at Rubicante), and Final Fantasy XII (wherein I stalled out again because my PS2 isn’t hooked up). I think I may have a problem. Especially considering that I intend to move into both Dissidia 012 and Final Fantasy II once I finish their predecessors. Can you believe that there was a good four- or five-year period where I was opposed to RPGs?

In other news, Resident Evil: the Mercenaries 3D is exactly as addictive as the Mercs mode in RE5. Only it’s free to play online! Hooray!

Like a bullet from a gun

I bought my 3DS on launch day, and sadly, while Super Street Fighter 4 and the included apps were neat and kept me busy for a while, I pretty much didn’t use the machine until the eShop launched a couple weeks ago. And now that I have both The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D I see no lack of 3DS usage in my future. Haven’t played Mercs yet, but I have thoughts about Zelda!

Firstly, wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game where the graphics are so… inconsistent. At least where it wasn’t done on purpose. Yeah, the textures are cleaned up, the pre-rendered areas are completely remade, and character models look better, but not all of them! I’d need to stick them side-to-side, but most nameless NPCs still look very N64, and I suspect that maybe the bosses weren’t touched at all aside from a brightened colours? Maybe it’s not so drastic, but you can certainly tell that the game was just touched-up and not truly remade. The game looks spectacular in 3D though! It’s just a shame that you have to keep it at that perfect angle though. Oh well. Glasses-free.

Also, I’m surprised that I immediately took to the tilting mechanic for aiming. I didn’t think I’d use it when I read the reviews, but it just happened instinctively. Of course, doing so with 3D on usually makes a blurry mess because I don’t think to move my entire body in relation to the screen, but whatever. It’s cool, and almost as immersive as aiming bows and hookshots with the Wiimote.

It would seem that I’ve forgotten the locations of several heart pieces and gold skulltulas! This is crazy, because I used to be able to 100% the game without even a glance at a FAQ or map. Old age is starting to catch up with me, I suppose. And was there a stone of agony in the N64 version? I assume it used the rumble pak instead of an onscreen cue, but I don’t remember it at all. Possibly because I never had my rumble pak plugged in. And as I final note, after 13 years I just got the “skulltula” pun (skull + tarantula). Never clicked before. I’m stupid.

 

Monster Hunter: Dynamic Hunting

I don’t think I ever even gave it a passing mention here, because I’d basically abandoned the blog for the duration of 2010, but when Monster Hunter Tri hit the Wii in April last year, I developed a sickening obsession with the game. And I mean that literally. I gave up a lot of sleep for Monster Hunter, and my health suffered for it. Then it got worse when I discovered Monster Hunter Freedom: Unite for PSP. I mean, my PSP was happy because it was actually getting some use (Dissidia: Final Fantasy has had the same effect), but Stephanie did not, because I had access to Monster Hunter wherever and whenever I wanted. At least with Tri, I was only able to play while in my room.

If you haven’t heard of the Monster Hunter series, get on the bus, man! It’s the only reason I’ve ever been compelled to play video games with people online for reasons other than novelty, and aside from Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, it’s been the only one since. The premise is that you, with up to three other hunters, march around in various environments with gigantic swords (or axes, if you’re cool) and track down even bigger monsters. You then proceed to attempt to slay or capture said beasts. Most of the time you will be slaughtered. These monsters are exactly as powerful as they are huge, and most of them are fast, too. Your only hope is to use monster loot and precious stones and whatnot to craft slightly stronger armor and weapons. Even the strongest armor will only keep you alive through a handful of hits from the bigger beasts, though, so it’s more about learning the monsters’ weaknesses (physical and elemental), patterns, and tells. Knowing when to strike is far more important than the next weapon upgrade.

The downside to the game’s process is that while it’s fun, hunts can tend to take a long time. If you’re really unlucky, you can spend your entire time limit (each hunt it timed, BTW) just trying to find your mark. It’s a less common problem in MH3 than MHFU, because monster start points  seem to be randomized in the PSP game, but the beasts still wander the environments fairly randomly in both games. Monsters can also take a lot of damage, and since they have no visible life bar, you’re stuck wondering until they start to limp around and run away from you in hopes of recovering a bit. I think that in the context of the game, this is fine, but in the real world, you can’t just sit down and run a few quick hunts. Unless you’re playing solo runs of the weakest monsters, you have to make a real time investment when you play Monster Hunter.

And that’s where Monster Hunter: Dynamic Hunting comes into play.

Dynamic Hunting is Capcom’s newest entry in the series, and is the long overdue first iOS Monster Hunter title. Give how big the series is in Japan and that it’s gaining some fairly good traction in North America, I’m surprised that Capcom, the house of a million sequels, took so long to get this out. I’m glad they waited and crafted an excellent mobile spin-off of the series, though, instead of rushing out a quick cash-in app.

So like I said, I think MHDH is pretty fantastic. It’s got the spirit and personality befitting of a true Monster Hunter title, and it’s extremely accessible and quick to play too! The important thing for a mobile game, as I’m sure everyone who knows anything about game development knows, is that you can pick it up and play for three minutes here and there. That’s why games like Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja work so well on the platform. Yes, developers will try to export these titles to dedicated gaming machines to make a quick buck off the gullible casual crowd, but they belong on a handheld device. I, personally, have never felt that Cut the Rope would benefit from a WiiWare or Kinect re-release. I don’t go to my couch and TV for bite-sized games. That’s where I go to put in an hours-long session of Final Fantasy XII or bounce around aimlessly in the vast worlds of Super Mario Galaxy.

What Dynamic Hunting does differently is cut out the hunt part entirely. It probably should have been called something more along the lines of Dynamic Fighting, but we’ll ignore that little inaccuracy. The whole concept of the game is straight one-on-one fights against a select handful of the MHFU roster. I’ve only progressed to the point of seeing twelve available monsters in three tiers of four, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that there’s still a fourth tier to unlock. Five would just be gravy. While loading times are a little longer than I’d like, you can navigate your way into a fight very quickly, and I don’t think I’ve seen a mission time limit go over five minutes yet, resulting in the first Monster Hunter title that you can actually make a little headway in over the course of a single lunch break.

Though the true hunt is out, most other Monter Hunter elements are in, albeit in a scaled-back manner. You still have items, though the extent that you see them is in a few potions and another item specific to each hunt which are available each time you start a hunt. You can’t buy new stuff or swap in more useful tools, but the mechanics don’t really require item use. Antidotes are going to be the non-potion item used the most, as all the hunts are kill missions; capturing monsters is no longer an option. You can buy power-up drinks to use before a hunt with in-game currency or pay real money for “G” versions of them, but to be honest, I keep forgetting they’re even there.

Weapons and armor run on the same crafting system as full Monster Hunter games, with a few key differences. Since exploration is out, all your materials are monster loot, making it necessary to remember which monsters drop which ores. Armor no longer comes in separate helmets, gloves, body armor, and leggings, but rather as complete sets. This is nice because you never look like a mismatched idiot, but you also lose the benefit of mixing and matching bonus effects. Weapon choices have been reduced to sword & shield combos, great swords, and dual swords. The options give you about as much variety as you’ll need, but I’m very sad that my beloved switch axe wasn’t included. Given that the game is based on MHFU, I guess the switch axe wouldn’t have been included anyway though. Not sweating the loss of lances though. Never liked the lance. Notably, you cannot choose to play as a female hunter. This had better be fixed in an upcoming update.

Controls are great for a touch-only title, even though they suffer from the usual lack of accuracy plaguing all touch games that require fast and precise actions. Your hunter is in a constant state of “z-targeting,” always facing the target monster, and dragging in any direction will move him in that direction. A tap will make him swing his weapon, and a swipe will launch a super attack. Holding two fingers on the screen will block (unless you have the dual swords equipped, which cannot block), and a two-fingered swipe will cause your hunter to dodge. It’s super-easy to get the hang of, and ends up being a game of delivering a few blows when you see and opening and watching for the dodge cues. The swipe attack, I find, is the only action that doesn’t work reliably, which is a shame because using one when a monster is winding up its own attack will result in a counter and a nice big opening to get in a few more easy hits.

The game is not perfect, however. Monster Hunter games are not easy to begin with. Like real hunting, they require skill and patience. Generally you will hunt a new monster and get killed a couple times before you know it well enough to really stand a chance. Eventually the monsters are so powerful that they do get really hard (Tigrex and Barioth spring to mind), but the difficulty curve is usually sloped enough that it doesn’t feel like you’ve gone from basic training to expert mode. Dynamic Hunting though, doesn’t really work the same. The first four monsters put up a fight, but all of them go down fairly easy. The gap in difficulty between Khezu and Basarios, though, is huge. Basarios is not overpowered or unfair, but his attacks have short wind-ups and small dodge opportunities. You really have to step up your game at this point. The jump from tier two to tier three is just as wide, and I’ve only barely been able to survive the first two monsters of that tier. It never really feels like you’re hitting a brick wall, but the game definitely goes from a casual timesink to an intense test of monk-level focus. This is where patience, more than anything, is absolutely necessary. If there is a fourth tier waiting in the wings, I shudder to think of the horrors that will reside there. I’d like to be able to see some of the later monsters from MHFU though, as I hit my brick wall there at Kushala Daora.

The other slight issue I have with the game is the ranking system. Each hunt will end with you being assigned an overall rank from S to D. This rank is based on four factors: mission, life, time, and parts. You’ll get a sub-rank for each category, and your hunt rank is decided by (I think) the average of those. The problem here is that the game never tells you what those categories mean. Life and time are easy enough to figure out, and Monster Hunter vets can deduce that the parts score is earned by damaging specific points on a monster’s body. The mission rank is a huge question mark though. The Monster Hunter Wiki says that it’s a score of how well you dodge and block a monster’s attacks. That’s all well and good, but if you kill a monster without giving it an opportunity to attack (only possible on Yian Kut-Ku and maaaaybe Congalala), you get a big fat zero. Needless to say, earning even an overall A on a hunt is hard, whereas only the best hunters could even dream of seeing that big S on their results screen.

The last thing I need to complain about is sort of a Super Smash Bros. quibble. I know that there are a limited amount of monsters in this game. I wouldn’t be surprised if the third tier was the last. But within those twelve monsters are two colour-swapped versions of previous monsters. Includng Yian Kut-Ku and Yian Garuga was a little sketchy, but they’re different enough to justify having both in. Blue Yian Kut-Ku, however, is just a slightly faster version with more HP. Red Khezu is the same way. Maybe they have slightly different attacks, but really only in the way that Dr. Mario throws pills as opposed to regular Mario’s fireballs.

In between the last paragraph and this one, I actually stopped to finish the game, and it turns out that the third tier was the last. Red Khezu, despite being a buffed palette swap, was the hardest of the four and Monoblos, the final monster, was relatively easy. Getting even an A rank on him will be nearly impossible, but having spent as much time getting murdered by his big brother Diablos in MH3 as I did, he’s not super hard to kill.

In the end, I feel that Monster Hunter: Dynamic Hunting was an excellent investment of $5. Yes, it’s a little more expensive than the average iOS app, but it’s also cheaper than Final Fantasy III, and I think that MHDH will provide a more balanced fun:grind ratio. Given, all I really have left to accomplish in the game is to bolster my hunt ranks, grind out all the equipment and earn all the achievements, but I think that even this very basic Monster Hunter experience is a fun and exciting one. Not to mention that now I have a true portable version of Monster Hunter.

EDIT (17/09/11) : Due to the constant updates applied to mobile games, there is now a fourth tier of monsters available to fight. Kushala Daora is not among them, but my old nemesis Tigrex is.

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