Monsters! Hunting! Fuck yeah!

I hate anything and everything you could class even remotely as a survival game. I have friends playing all those zombie and stone age survival thingies, folks who go crazy about Skyrim survival mods, the new Fallout 4 survival mode and, of course, Monster Hunter. Granted, a game where you swing an airplane-sized sword at humongous dragons may not sound like much of a survival game, but to me it's a Bear Grylls simulator, minus all of the host's off camera bullshit like hotels and five star buffets.

I tried Monster Hunter on the PSP once, but it bored the hell outta me. Tried the Japanese Monster Hunter X on the 3DS a few months ago, but it just frustrated me. Now the western version has been released as 'Monster Hunter Generations' and I gave it another go. Didn't really want to, but people kept comparing it to Dark Souls. Brutally difficult, large-scale boss battles, nothing is ever explained properly, risk vs reward, niche game, that kinda thing. Professional review scores between 95 and 100 out of 100. Lots of them. I had to give it another try, see what I was missing.

Apart from pretty insane artwork.

The game starts with the most pointlessly detailed character creation I've seen in a long time. On top of well over a dozen voices and the usual suspects like hairstyles and the like, you even get to choose your character's freaking eye colour, only to cover up the entire avatar in tons upon tons of armor five minutes later. Once that's dealt with you get to choose from four different fighting styles. There's a "balanced" fighting style, for whatever that means, an aerial one, which lets you leap off of objects and other players, so you can mount monsters and wrestle them down, then there's a really difficult playstyle with last second dodge maneuvers and counterattacks. There's also a mode for idiots, which lets you hack away at things whilst filling up those special attack bars really fast. Can you guess which one I picked?

We're not done, yet. You still have to figure out which one of the 14 (!) different weapon types you want to use. There are your usual suspects like swords, axes and the like, but there's also crazy shit like warhorms or a gunlance. Gun. Lance. And then begins the awkward part - the actual game. Again, I've never really played a Monster Hunter game before. Not properly. And you instantly get a ton of NPCs sicking an ceaseless stream of information at you. Many of them aren't all that nice, either. I browsed a store, didn't know what any of the items did, ended up buying nothing and the shopkeeper called me out for wasting her time. The skill NPC told me I was a worthless, filthy maggot. Monster hunters need a thick skin.

The game is chock-full of super cringeworthy cat puns.

One cool thing was how I got to choose and customize two cat buddies to support me on my quest. I made them look like our two RL cats and put fun little helmets on them. You get to craft gear for the kitties and you can even play a cat instead of your human character if you so choose. Apparently they even get special missions and everything. There's a whole anime series about their adventures.

The game then tells you to play a bunch of tutorial missions if you don't understand how stuff works. Problem is, the explanations in these tutorials are fairly basic and usually end in: "If you want to know more, check the ingame manual." Some tutorial. RTFM, really?

So I went and punched a few random monsters in a practice arena, even captured and tranquilized one without killing it, then picked an actual mission. "Collect 3 Kelbi horns." That's it. No explanation what a fucking kelbi is or where I'd find one. So I left the village and wandered around the landscape, past ridiculously huge dinos and buzzy beetles and bird monsters and other shit until I ended up in a forest. And there were those weird deer thingies hopping around. Or antelopes or whatever. They had antlers and looked like they were totally a kelbi. So I proceeded to murder the fuck out of one, then began carving what I assumed was the corpse. And as luck would have it, I got one of the horns on the first try. That's when the kelbi got up and ran away. How weird. Guess you harvest those without actually killing them.

What's weirder, I looted the next kelbi's liver and a bunch of raw meat from the one after that. They both got up and walked off. They must be immortal or something. Meanwhile, my two cat companions were largely useless, basically announcing they'd go for a nap while I was in the middle of a fight (and then totally chilling out and not giving a single fuck about the raging battle) or spamming my screen with chat messages about the beautiful landscape. So that part was realistic.

I still wasn't sold on the whole thing. What bothers me the most about this game is the shitty controls. There is no permanent lock-on. You can shoot a paintball at a monster and then center the camera on it by tapping the L-button, but the baddie will run off-camera again straight away. Dodge rolls are pathetic in this game and a lot harder to use properly than in Dark Souls. And the new 3DS "C-Stick", that pathetic little nub, is sluggish, unresponsive and a massive pain in the ass to use. I eventually got used to mashing the L-button a lot and not relying on dodge-rolling too much, but I still don't feel like I have a satisfying amount of control over my character.

My other big gripe lies within the game world, which is split into several tiny areas and their shitty transitions. The game looks absolutely stunning, which is only possible by making every zone in the game ridiculously small. Most places have at least two zone transitions, which lead you to the next area with an animation and a little load screen. And that's problematic, because certain monsters love to sit on these fucking transitions. Imagine you're in the middle of a heated boss battle and suddenly your character walks off screen, there's a loading animation and then you're in another fucking zone. This nonsense only stopped when I forced myself to lure baddies away from the exits, which isn't always easy.

One more hit should do it.... aaaand I walked out of the zone. Again.

To make things even more fun, I absolutely cannot play this game without Google. Every single quest tells me to kill, capture or gather a thing. It gives me the name of that thing, but no picture, no location, no description. "Collect 3 Immortal Moths!" Cool. What?
Turns out you have to buy several bug nets (they break after two or three uses), run around until you find a butterfly, then press your A-button near the butterfly to swing your bug net. With a bit of luck you'll get an immortal moth. Or some other beetle, which is completely useless and irrelevant to your quest. It's my childhood all over again, my brother and I trying to figure out Herzog Zwei on our Japanese Mega Drive.

Which is a fucking sweet game, by the way!

The really good shit happened when Google told me I had to explore some snowy mountains in order to find some crafting resources I needed. The first thing that happened was that my character froze his nuts off. Poor guy was shaking and trembling, which ultimately resulted in him coughing and wheezing and being unable to run. My stamina bar just crumbled. Apparently you can bring a bunch of hot drinks and keep your character warm in order to prevent that. I didn't know.

So I hobbled through the snow with a freezing, unhappy character. Is that a good idea? Will he get any worse? Is he going to die? No clue. I swung my pickaxe a bit and much to my surprise I was joined by my cats, who also began to harvest resources. Cool! There were a bunch of wild animals. Furry stuff that resembled goats and boars and the like. We stayed out of each other's ways and everything was good. Until the boss pig appeared.

This guy.

I tried to avoid him, but he kept charging at me. I tried to outrun him, but my character was in no condition to escape. I had all these fun new crafting materials, my character was probably gonna freeze to death and suddenly I got attacked by this boss, who wouldn't let me go, no matter what. So I fought him.

The boar seemed pretty powerful at first, taking most of my health with a single charge or his nasty gore attacks. What's worse, you can't sprint or use items with your weapon out. You always have to sheathe your weapon, find a safe spot, then chug a potion, which takes for fucking ever! I figured out his movements after a while and managed to stay away from his massive tusks. My cats helped by distracting him a lot. One of them chucked exploding barrels, which would knock the monster down every so often. And then the bastard ran, leaving the area. He limped and was visibly hurt. Cool feature, by the way.

What do? I could go home now, save myself before my avatar turns into a popsicle, use all of these materials and come back stronger. Then again, that boss did seem pretty injured. I could probably take him. So I went after him and fought him some more. The pig was furious! Apparently he engages some sort of rage mode when he's about to peg it or whatever, but the damn thing trampled me, smashed the cats around a bit and really didn't want to go down without a fight. There's also the matter of weapon sharpness, which degrades over time. My blades had gone blunt in the battle, they bounced off without dealing any damage, so I had to use a whetstone while I had this angry pig monster chasing after me. In the end, I just about managed to kill it, which resulted in some sweet, sweet loot, which I ultimately turned into even sweeter armor.

There's this absolutely ridiculous amount of weapons and armor you can craft from the bones, skins, teeth and other bits you loot from fallen monsters. I had just defeated a massive murder-pig and I looked the part! The whole thing was risky, I could have lost all my stuff, but somehow I've defeated my first boss and I felt more epic than all those assholes in the Money Supermarket commercials.

They weren't kidding with that whole Hunter aspect of the game. You're not just some guy, who goes out there and kills stuff with hilariously oversized weaponry. You rely on a whole bunch of tools and gadgets. Fail to use them properly and you're fucked. So I figured, I may as well go and get myself an actual boss quest.

The monster I was supposed to kill was a giant bird raptor thing. I chucked a paintball at it, which allowed me to track it across zones. Bigger monsters love to run away every now and then and it's a pain in the ass to find them again if you cannot see them on the map. A paintball fixes that.

This boss is a total asshole.

In the ensuing battle, I noticed a few things right away. First off, I clearly wasn't ready for this. I thought I was, but I kept using the wrong buttons, accidentally flicking through my inventory or chugging potions when I wanted to sprint or attack, because panic.
Second, I actually felt sorry for the monster. Yeah, he likes to sit on his tail to kick you in the face like a complete jerk, but watching him limp and wheeze and crawl all over the place after I finally managed to land a few meaty hits made me feel like the asshole.

Larger baddies do some crazy stuff when they're hurt. First, he ran off to a wyvern nest, starting to devour the eggs. I reckon that's some sort of dick move that regenerates health or something. When I finally almost had him, he ran away across several zones until I finally found him sleeping in his nest. I felt terrible! The guy was exhausted from the fight, he was clearly finished and he just wanted to rest. And I barged in there to finish him off!

There's a lengthy, depressing and somewhat laggy video that shows most of the ordeal, if you're into moving images:

I have yet to try what's definitely the game's best feature - coop multiplayer. I don't want to play online with random strangers, being the complete noob to the series that I am. But I'll grab a download key for Claire, so we can go hunt monsters together. I can't wait!