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I know I emailed you a little while back, but I was reading your recent posts involving Zelda, and something you said kinda grabbed my interest.
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About five years ago I was ready to give up on gaming forever. My first console was an Atari 2600, so this is saying something from someone who had been a pretty adamant core gamer for years. But there was this one game I could not for the life of me stop playing. Monster Hunter. I played this game this game nonstop, day after day. I would put it down and tell myself I was going to play other games, but very quickly found myself coming back to it without a thought as to why. This game would frustrate me so much, to the point that I would cuss it out. I was playing WoW concurrently as I played Monster Hunter, and ultimately quit WoW because while I saw they could add new content, the gameplay was always going to be the same. Which is to say it very boring and frustrating.
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But yet I kept playing Monster Hunter. I played it a year offline, and then after I quit WoW I finally got online with it for a year, and as someone who isn’t big into online gaming, I enjoyed myself so thoroughly. All the while I kept asking myself just why I kept playing this game, to the exclusion to all else. When I ultimately decided to quit the game for good, I told myself I would not buy a PSP for Monster Hunter Freedom, and then I wound up buying a PSP for Monster Hunter. I didn’t buy a PS3, 360, or Wii until I found out which one was going to have Monster Hunter on it. When Tri wound up being the Wii, I knew that the game being on that system would probably ensure it’s release outside its home turf (unlike Dos which never got released in the US), which is what has happened.
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For years I tried to understand why I kept playing this game. What was so special about it that I kept coming back to it like a crack addict looking for a fix? It wasn’t the gear collecting, because WoW had that and I gave up on it. The answer eluded me for so long. But now in recent months, and after I began reading your blog, I now understand why.
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Monster Hunter is an old-school videogame that uses many arcade-like notions in its gameplay, that are married to RPG elements and an online mode. When you talked about Zelda as being an action-RPG where you looked forward to getting better weapons and armor, Monster Hunter truly fits that bill. You don’t level up. You instead have to rely on your own personal skill growth to progress in the game. Armor doesn’t make you more powerful per se, but instead gives you skills that can complement and augment your playstyle. You can gain skills to let you better block attacks, block attacks you normally could not block, skills that let you charge up certain weapons faster (which can be very useful), skills that make your weapons more sharp, more powerful, or give them abilities they normally wouldn’t have.
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This is where your discussion about non-linearity in gaming made me think of Monster Hunter. The freedom of the game is in how much control the player has over their progression. In Monster Hunter, while the quests don’t change, and the monsters don’t change, what can and will change is how you choose to tackle those stages and monsters. I have replayed those games so many times, and each time I would do things differently. If my last run through I used Sword and Shield, then my next character would focus on using Duals Swords. If one character used Great Swords, my next one would use Long Swords. Bowguns and Long Bows, Lance and Gunlance, Hammers and Hunting Horns. Your one character can use all of these, but I would always try and have a preference and that alone would change the context of the entire playthrough. Using each weapon for the same encounter radically changes how it plays out, and even moreso with multiple players.
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On the original game I did a hard quest with two others who had strong weapons, but I myself did not. Instead I was able to play a special flute that bolstered all of our attack power, so that my lack of an effective weapon was mitigated. Following games made the Hunting Horn, which played notes that were able to support your fellow players in a wide variety of ways, drastically changing how the battles would play out.
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It’s such a simple and subtle thing, but it really does drastically impact how the game plays out in each and every encounter. You have to change your tactics, you have to change where you attack your enemies. You have to adjust your pace and rhythm to match that of the wyverns for each weapon. The same with armor. The armor has skills that can boost your attack power, increase the effectiveness of certain weapons, better support your allies, and much more. In the later games armor and weapons were given sockets to give them decorations that could add new skills to armor or augment existing skills, ala Diablo 2.
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All of these things gives the player much greater control over how they play the game without really seeming like it. And unlike WoW, all the boss encounters on that game, from the very beginning to the very end were always intense and “epic.” I’ve always thought lately when people talk about games needing “epic storylines” they’ve got it all wrong. They usually involve saving the world and other typical RPG notions. In The Odyssey and Beowulf, the stories aren’t about saving the world as much as it’s about one guy overcoming insurmountable odds, and at their very basic, overcoming nature. Monster Hunter’s appeal isn’t from having a storyline as much as it pits you, the player (who makes their own avatar), against nature. Each encounter you face is a crucible that tests your skills and wits. And when you finally overcome that crucible you genuinely feel a sense of accomplishment. And then you move on up to your next monster and your next challenge, and it starts all over again. Every battle in Monster Hunter is a crucible that never gets old, and never ceases to be challenging because of how the game is set up. Yet you can take what y ou have learned from each battle and apply it to each new challenge in some way. For this, even without the benefit of content updates and patches, the game’s replay value is nearly endless.
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I buy hardware to play Monster Hunter on, because I know I’ll be playing Monster Hunter years after I have bought it.
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This is a fantastic email. You may have put into words nailing down why the Monster Hunter phenomenon exists. Here is a video of gameplay:
This is a fantastic email. You may have put into words nailing down why the Monster Hunter phenomenon exists. Here is a video of gameplay:
I haven’t played Monster Hunter, but I plan to get it on the Wii when it comes out. As soon as I saw gameplay footage of it, I went, “Whoa! This looks like my type of game.”
I have nothing else to add to your superb email. You really elaborate the arcade type intensity better than I would. Imagine how exciting Zelda would be with that type of intense combat.
I’m going to leave this email at the top page so hopefully that poor soul at Nintendo who is assigned to look at this page will see it. We really need more former gamers, like yourself, to speak up more. Discussion of gaming is dominated by the hardcore and becomes lopsided. Publishers will view all the ‘hardcore’ comments and respond to their appeals.
The old school have been silent too long.
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