The saga of Monster Hunter can be considered in all respects one of the most appreciated in the gaming world of recent years: in fact, it is impossible not to fall in love with this series of action full of style and courageous and fun choices, and which have been able to accompany hours and hours of our video gaming on different consoles.
Not surprisingly, fans of the series await with trepidation the release of the new chapter, Wilds, which was shown to the public during the Summer Game Fest. In the meantime, however, Capcom has decided to bring it back into fashion a spin-off of the series remained anchored to a console that is not exactly current-gen: the Nintendo 3DS.
Making its return with a port on the PlayStation console (therefore also the players PS4 have this possibility) is Monster Hunter Storiesa more “childish” parenthesis of the series which targets younger people and those who want to get to know the saga before venturing into more substantial titles such as World and Rise.
In this one of ours review we will evaluate the success of the porting on the home console: we have already provided our opinion on the original 3DS version in an article dedicated to it.
Monster Hunter from a new point of view
The title puts us in the shoes of a Rider, a character who therefore he doesn’t need to simply fight monstersbut indeed, he has the skills to get along with them friendship and create a bond from the birth of the little creature.
In short, the adventure of our young rider (who can be customized with a sufficient variety of hairstyles, faces, voice timbres…) construction of a real one team of little monsters to fight with a series of opponents scattered around the game world (if it reminds you of a certain pattern of GameFreakknow that you are not wrong).
Wandering around the game world, composed of forests, plains and other biomes, we will have to go to the search for monster lairsinside which you can steal the eggs (hoping not to be caught by the rather jealous mother-monster) and then hatch the eggs and raise the little creatures inside them, leveling them up through fights.
Meanwhile, in the background, it develops a rather linear plot who sees the presence of a good number of characters and several cutscenes entirely dubbed. In fact, the plot of the game is little more than a pretext to make some areas of the game map temporarily inaccessible, while the clue of the product is precisely its gameplay.
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Despite this, the plot turns out to have another essential function: to allow the title, adding to its conclusion our desire to “catch them all”, to be quite long-livedespecially in relation to the list price which we define as competitive.
Let’s talk now, given their role as absolute protagonists, of the “monstie“: versions, in fact, more softened of the creatures that we will face in the main titles of the series (such as the little one “Ratha the Rathalos”). The creatures they do not stand out for the originality of their designbut we notice a good variety within the game.
Let’s then move on to game world within which the missions will take place (main, but also very simple secondary missions of collecting objects or which involve the defeat of a certain number of creatures). We observe that the latter has not been adapted to the new platform reference, definitely more powerful than a 3DS: places appear bare and the few details present are of low graphic quality.
We then move on to the combat system, the effective pillar of the title’s gameplay, which takes full effect from Turn-based RPG style simplifying it even more than we might see, for example, in a main series game Pokémon.
In fact, we will be able to choose whether to use objects to cure our monster, or whether attack using one of the three different strategies: power, technique And speed, essentially giving life to a great game of rock, paper and scissors. In fact, each creature will prefer a type of attack and, once you have learned the pattern of a particular species, it will be enough to use the right counterweight to have an easy life.
Since it is, as we said at the beginning, a title aimed at very young people, we didn’t imagine sure of be in front of us to particularly strategic gameplaybut we can’t catch a glimpse not even a shadow of the simple yet complex combat system of the main series games.
A “lazy” adaptation?
What differentiates this version of the game from the Nintendo 3DS version? Very little. The game It allows a speeding up of the combat phases, but there are no other stratagems which allow the title to be more fast and pressing.
From a purely technical point of view, the reconversion work is equal to 0: empty backgrounds, animations that feel “old”, extremely basic polygonal models that we willingly accept on a 3DS game, but which we consider it not very competitive on fixed consoles. On the other hand, we did not notice any significant optimization problems either of frame rate.
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