Monster Hunter 3

[gundamalpha]

I find MH3 a tad more tedious than MHP2G, so stuff like traps, throwing bombs are much more difficult to come by making some monster fights more troublesome. May be it's designed so to avoid abuse but the learning curve and difficulty are otherwise quite similar.

[Cthulhu]

I can't comment on the difficulty as compared to the others as this is my first MH. The quests so far have been really easy, minus a single one where a tiny screwup meant horrid death.

The game gives you so many healing items I had to stop carrying them all. Most of them heal you quite a bit too. So yes, I'd say so far it's not too hard (minus the aforementioned quest).

[gundamalpha]

No one's playing online here?

If you do search for me, my GN is fearless, can't remember my ID. I'm around HR28 now.

[Cthulhu]

I got to the first big boss fight quest, which was totally awesome - and then they followed it up with something almost exactly the same. Fight the same guy again but capture him instead. Yawn. That felt lazy as hell and effectively killed my interest in the game entirely.

[gundamalpha]

You mean the sea serpent? It's armor is excellent except for it's fire resistance and 1 kill + 1 capture is definitely not enough to make any of it's equipment

[UnscathedFlyingObject]

Capcom up to its usual shenigans.

[Cthulhu]

You mean the sea serpent? It's armor is excellent except for it's fire resistance and 1 kill + 1 capture is definitely not enough to make any of it's equipment

No, just the giant version of the early aggro-lizards. The quest is to capture it - I don't know what you get for doing so.

[gundamalpha]

You'd get more and better chance of rare rewards for capturing monsters.

[Cthulhu]

My complaint isn't that you can capture monsters - that's totally fine. A cool feature even. My complaint is that they build up to your first real boss fight and then you get the same mission twice in a row. It was a huge letdown and felt lazy.

[BryanM]

Since 4 is coming up soonish, was working on my Dual Swords file of MH1. Lots of exciting things I learned about the series that aren't obvious going in:

* The metal weapons that require mining are generally a better first choice. Since the bone weapons require material from specific monsters, you often end up in a "in order to get the weapon to kill the Rathalos, you must kill the Rathalos" kind of situation.

On the topic of Rathaloses, jesus hory sheet, they are completely unfair in this game. I've taken it down before with a Bowgun without a lot of stress, but it's impossible with Dual Swords. Without reach, you have to get right inside its angus to be able to deal any hits. There's a non-zero chance of being hit by its tail while occupying its angus. Then a 75% chance of being struck by its charge during your recovery animation. With a 95% chance of death no matter how good your armor is. If the charge doesn't take you out, you'll still get bumped by its foot during your recovery animation from that, which wipes out your last 4 hp.

Then, just to be the meanest Japanese man on the planet, they made the raptors in its lair respawn whenever you leave that zone. In theory, since the Rathalos stomps out your life in a few hits, and is constantly hitting 15% of the area of a zone all the time, and raptors have less life than you, they should all be killed by the Rathalos in about .32 seconds. But, somehow, its huge firebawllzzz only seem to deal 1 hp worth of damage to the raptors. Hurm. Wonder. Why.

The best part of these games is being put against an impossibly unfair situation and eventually overcoming it, with an elated "hahaha, fuck you, game" moment at the end of these roadbumps. This time, unfortunately, I could not pull through even with as much cheater juice (flash bombs) the game lets you farm. I had to press the "I win" cheat button. Which of course makes me feel like a failure of a human being.

In videos of later games, this boss looks remotely fair. You have little cat minions to eat a few of his charges for you, his tail seems low enough for a sword to reach (so you have 100% safe moments to attack that isn't just the Fireball animation, which will time you out of the quest in MH1 if that's all you swing at), just a cuddly carebear kind of game. Is that right?

---

(And as a bonus layer of extra meta difficulty for MH1, googling really specific queries on it is close to impossible. A lot of that stuff is under the title "Monster hunter", and if that's one of your terms, haha, you're getting results from 20 different games.)

[Jonathan Ingram]

Killing Rathalos with dual swords is totally doable. Moreover, after a thousand hunts you`ll be able to do it naked while taking no damage. :)

Why even bother with MH1 now anyway? It`s really outdated compared to the rest of the series. I remember how I never had enough money for anything during my playthroughs and I had to resort to doing those shitty egg fetching quests again and again just so I could clothe my hunter in some bottom of the barrel equipment and not die in one hit in the field. Not being able to gem in the armor with skills sucked too(although I didn`t know it back then :)).

[BryanM]

Killing Rathalos with dual swords is totally doable. Moreover, after a thousand hunts you`ll be able to do it naked while taking no damage.

You lie.

Why even bother with MH1 now anyway? It`s really outdated compared to the rest of the series. I remember how I never had enough money for anything during my playthroughs and I had to resort to doing those shitty egg fetching quests again and again just so I could clothe my hunter in some bottom of the barrel equipment and not die in one hit in the field. Not being able to gem in the armor with skills sucked too(although I didn`t know it back then ).

Well, because it's the only game in the series for the Playstation 2 that is also localized to the engrish. And it does well enough sating my urges to kill things the size of a France with a Buick. Don't get me wrong, I as much as anyone need a lance that is simultaneously a gun, or a Rath fight that isn't 70% bullshit waiting for him to come land on the ground somewhere you won't get murdered by the camera; just.. priorities.

Money isn't so hard to come by; then again I've become an efficient liver-fetching machine with extreme tolerance for repetition.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Ordered Tri the other day on a whim, without any real reason to do so just yet. Never played any MH and come to think of it, I might've bought it for the animations. Animations in Capcom games are something else.
2 player split-screen co-op sounds interesting. Just like hidden Dark Realm co-op in Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams, it's not something the franchise is known for.

[nasty_wolverine]

Just like hidden Dark Realm co-op in Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams, it's not something the franchise is known for.

You can play the entire game on Co-op btw. Its just obtuse to activate it.

[Jonathan Ingram]

You lie.

Forget dual swords. The carving knife is where it`s at. The thing never bounces.

Ordered Tri the other day on a whim, without any real reason to do so just yet.

The ship has sailed for this one. Now that the servers have been taken offline, a large chunk of the game`s content is inaccessible including some of the game`s signature monsters like Jhen Mohran and Alatreon.

[Obiwanshinobi]

The games going off like that was the main reason why I couldn't be bothered playing any. Console games just shouldn't do that. As a matter of fact I can't think of any PC MMO effectively terminated this way.
Still, local co-op, if not really the game's main course, remains tempting. Not much else on the Wii in this vein it seems. Maybe Alien Syndrome, then there's the evergreen BG:DA 'Cube port, Gauntlet: Dark legacy, X-Men Legends I&II - exclusives are thin on the ground and I've never been into Lego Star Wars.
I found The Return of the King quite entertaining, but the PC version's where it's at. Just trying to find about anything TPP co-op playable on the Wii.