There’s no real story to speak of; you’re a hunter in some alternate-universe version of medieval Japan where giant monsters roam the lands, and as the title suggests it’s your job to hunt them. That’s it. That’s all that players apparently need in the way of motivation. You can explore the woods near the village at any time, or you can go on a series of timed quests which can take you to different locations with different cannon-fodder creatures to slay. The main goal is to gather resources, either from the environment or carved from slain creatures, to be able to put together more powerful weapons and armour, which will give you a fighting chance against bigger monsters to get even better goods, rinse and repeat.
Though the prospect of facing down creatures which could probably swallow you whole sounds intriguing, the game does nothing to endear itself to a novice player at the start. Most of the early game is spent learning how to play the game through grinding resources and carrying out several “kill X amount of Y monster” quests. It’s like the things that drive us crazy about massively-multiplayer games all condensed into one area, and it’s as tedious as it sounds. The game essentially throws you in the deep end; a player who has no previous experience of the series is likely to be completely lost, taking well over an hour to finish the “tutorial phase”.
It’s possible to alleviate the grind slightly, since the village can develop with the right resources, giving you access to a farm and fishing fleet to take care of some of the work for you. However, by this time the average gamer is likely to have given up on the game due to the resource-gathering getting in the way of the combat, and in essence having to manage the activities of the villagers is just trading one version of annoying busywork for another. What also doesn’t help is that it’s often not clear on what items are needed to craft items later on or what can be safely sold to a vendor. It becomes easier to figure out as time goes on, but it still takes a lot of time and dedication which many people simply don’t have.
These problems are further exacerbated by a terrible camera, lacklustre combat and dreadful controls. It says a lot about a game’s standard control system when there is a bundle available with a Classic Controller, but using the traditional controls doesn’t improve matters much. Though control over the camera becomes a bit easier, the button placements seem to have been slapped together at random. All too often we would end up wasting items when we wanted to carve something. The controls in general feel counter-intuitive and getting used to them takes a while.
There are a variety of weapons to use with differing abilities to keep in mind, but there’s no lock-on feature for the combat meaning you can often end up swinging blindly past a monster. We have taken so many unnecessary hits because of having to manually adjust the camera to see where a monster went, and having to constantly fumble for the auto-centre button is a pain. Even when you get a grasp of this the combat is just button-mashing through and through, with little room for variation. The ranged weapons are more interesting to use, but combat in general is a pain, not helped by the too-long animations for using even the most basic items (especially as you have to holster your weapon before you can even use them) which leave you vulnerable to attack constantly. This problem of long item animations is further exacerbated by an idiotic weapon degradation system, which often means having to continue a fight with a half-useless weapon or using a whetstone at the risk of being slaughtered. Also you can’t change equipment in the field, meaning you can’t adapt to different situations on-the-fly; trying to fight quick cannon-fodder wildlife with a slow warhammer is an absolute nightmare. We understand that Capcom may be shooting for a realistic take on hunting, but the simple fact is that the game goes way, way too far with this and it ends up detracting from accessibility and fun.
The game does get more interesting when the time for fighting the large monsters finally comes. They’re like boss fights; all of them have their own signature attack patterns to be learned, and elemental resistances to be kept in mind. However, the time it takes to get through the tedious aspects and get to grips with the awful controls will wear out the patience of all but the most dedicated gamers very quickly. There is an Arena mode which allows you to fight against a monster with a pre-made character quickly and without hassle, and it even has a split-screen co-op mode available, but to unlock more monsters requires playing through the main game, which may not be worth the effort to the average gamer.
The graphics and sound are decent if unspectacular for the Wii with good diversity for the larger monsters, though the colour looks very washed-out. While the environments are certainly impressive-looking, all of the areas are broken up into smaller rooms divided by immersion-destroying loading screens, though it’s difficult to tell if this is a result of the Wii’s lack of processing power or Capcom’s refusal to alter the series’ formula.
So it’s easy to get the impression that the game’s pretty worthless; very little effort has been made to improve the problems that have plagued the series since Day One, and it holds almost zero appeal for non-fans of the series. What ultimately saves this game, however, is the online play. Veterans of Phantasy Star Online will be familiar with how it’s organised into various lobbies and how a team of up to four players can unite to tackle the monsters together, all without the hassle of Friend Codes. Struggling against the monsters and the camera with other human beings by your side makes things much more tolerable, and can lead to a real sense of camaraderie developing between you and your fellow hunters. It’s also interesting to note that this is only the second Wii game that supports the WiiSpeak add-on (the other is Animal Crossing), which becomes a necessity; trying to alert team-mates to new developments is a hassle otherwise. Coupled with the fact that many features of the game are only accessible online means that this is really the only way to play the game and have a good time.
That of course is the game’s biggest problem; it relies on you being able to play with other players to enjoy it. Otherwise the fact that the game takes so long to get to the good parts of monster-fighting (seriously, “it gets better later” as an excuse just does not hold water for us), coupled with the annoying busywork that ends up taking up so much time, multiplied by the shoddy camera and controls, renders this game a soul-destroyingly tedious chore to play. A solid framework for the future of online gameplay on the Wii and the strong multiplayer sessions are the only reason this game is getting an above-average score from us; if you’re not a fan of the series or can’t play online, deduct three or four points from our score and stay away.
