Monster Hunter Tri Review

I’ve had this game for a while now but I still haven’t beaten it because it’s a pretty long game and it takes a while to defeat the boss monsters. I’m glad you guys enjoyed my last review. Since I got good responses from my previous review, I’ll be doing a lot more for you guys.

The monsters that you hunt in this game are enormous. It’s so fun fighting them. They are all different and unique and have different fighting patterns as well as different weaknesses and strengths. They all reign over their own special environments too. They all also have unique names that I’ve never heard of before in any other game. Most games reuse a name. You’ll see a lot of games with characters that have the same names, like Odin, or Dracula, or any other mythilogical person. But the names these monsters have are totally new and unheard of. They are pretty damn catchy too!

Once you kill the monster, you can “carve” materials from it. Like it’s scales or it’s bones. From those materials, you can make cool sets of armor with effects and weapons too. There’s a ton of different weapons to choose from, all with different styles of combat. Like you could use a Sword and Shield which specializes in quick combos with small damage and great mobility or you can go a completely different route and choose a huge Great Sword which is very slow and limits your mobility, but it’s charged attacks pack a wallop. Or if you’re not keen on using a melee weapon, you could always be a gunner and use weapons that fire from a distance.

There is no leveling system. How strong you are depends on the armor and weapon you carry. Kill stronger monsters to get stronger equipment. You don’t gain any stats because you don’t level up. How do you kill monsters who are strong then? It’s all about skill. If you’ve got the skill to avoid their attacks and study the attack pattern of whatever creature you’re hunting and know when are the right times to attack and where the weak spots are, then you don’t have to have super strong equipment to be the best. Although, if your weapon doesn’t have a good sharpness level (The sharpness level determines if your weapon can cut through a monster’s tough hide or bounce off. The stronger the monster is the tougher the hide is), you’ll find that even if you masterfully dodge all incoming attacks, your weapon would just keep bouncing off your foe and it leaves you staggering a bit, vulnerable to a counterattack from your foe. It still does damage when your weapon bounces off, but significantly less.

And my favorite part is when monsters enter rage mode. When monsters take a set amount of damage, they basically go apeshit for a time period. Usually they’ll do something to let you know they are pissed. Like they’ll roar and you’ll see their eyes change color or you’ll see flames or lightning around their mouths. In this state they do double and sometimes even triple the amount of damage they usually do. They also get a lot faster, making it harder to dodge their attacks or in some cases, their attacks even change in form. You could always wait until their rage subsides, or you could charge in anyway. Waiting is the safer option, but you only have 50 minutes to kill whatever you’re hunting and if you’re pressed for time, you might not have the option to wait. If time’s up and you don’t do the deed, you’ll automatically fail and you’ll have to start all over again! So don’t fail! That goes for the underwater combat as well which is new in the monster hunter games.

As you’ve read so far, the gameplay is what makes the game. But the graphics are very beautiful. Especially the environments. The monsters look real and when you see them tower over you, you get the sense where you’re about to face some real shit and if you mess up, they’ll destroy you. Especially in rage mode. I’ve shit myself plenty of times when a monster attacked me and I just barely avoided it by inches. And trust me, when they hit you, they’ll send you clear across the screen.

The online in the game is incredible. And fun. It’s the best thing ever. You could spent hours upon hours hunting with nice fellow hunters you meet and when they join you, the monsters get a lot tougher, but that’s what makes it even better. Having someone there to fight by your side to share all the “HOLY FUUUUU–” moments together. Especially when a stronger monster appears while you are hunting another.

When you kill a monster, you can get many different materials. Depending on how strong the creature is. But some of the carve rates for these valuable materials are soooo low that it could take you months or even years to find just ONE piece of material from a monster. And it sucks because you can’t make your favorite set of armor without that piece.

Some strong monsters are limited to only online play. That sucks too, for the people without internet who wanna fight said monsters.

The story isn’t so great. It’s pretty simple. Big monster causes trouble for small village. They employ you to kill it. That’s it. Rofl.

Fighting monsters could take forever if you aren’t properly equipped. It seems like the fighting goes on forever. I hate it when the monster you hunt decides to run away from you and you have to waste time tracking it down.

A big con for me is that the monsters lack an HP bar and when you fight them, you just have to keep whacking away and hope that you’re doing decent damage with the only indication of you coming close to killing them is when they run away and you notice a limp.

The skill setting for this game is too complicated. You need to put gems in socketed pieces of armor or weapons to get their effects. For this to even be really effective, you need armor or weapons with like 3 sockets each because you get a good skill you need to have a bunch of it’s gems placed in. Let’s say you want a skill that let’s you sharpen your blades quicker. You’d need sharpener gems. Each gem gives you only about like 1-3 points depending on how strong the gem is. If you kill a stronger monster and make the gem from a stronger or rare material, the gem will be stronger and will give you more skill points. But for you to even get the skill, you need to have 5 points. Every 5 points into a skill increases it’s effectiveness. Yeah I know, I don’t get it either. Too complicated.

This game is like…the shit.
No seriously. It’s one of my favorite Wii games of all time. It’s got it’s small shortcomings, but I think the gameplay itself far outshines any of it’s faults. I’d recommend this game for people who like monster based games and favor online play as well as gameplay over story.
Out of a score from 1 to 10 with 10 being the best, I’ll give this game a giant 10.

Hope you enjoyed my review!

‘Till next time!

~ Jaz