Monster Hunter Stories 2 - Short Review
After enjoying the demo for the upcoming Stories 3, I decided to grab Stories 2 on sale. Let me get straight to the point. This has got to be one of the worst games I have ever touched when it comes to disrespecting the player's time.
It was developed from the ground up as a Switch game, and you feel that immediately. Many of the core systems and design choices were dictated by the severe limitations of the console, making it a notably shittier game on PC.
An identity crisis:
First off, let us look at the demographic. Back in the first game, Capcom desperately wanted a slice of the Pokรฉmon and Yo-kai Watch audience, except the genre and themes of Monster Hunter do not translate well to children's media. Unsurprisingly, the first game flopped hard with kids. The only people buying it were mainline MH fans, despite the blatant child psychology and game systems designed to hook a younger audience.
By the second game, Capcom realised this but were already stuck with the setup. So we get this half-arsed mix-match. The game attempts a more serious theme whilst simultaneously shoving "power of friendship" and "kinship" tropes down your throat, complete with cringy "Ride on!" catchphrases and poses. Funnily enough, every time I heard "Ride on!", the only thing I could think of was Razor Ramon HG's catchphrase. The story is essentially 20 to 30 hours of the most clichรฉ, dragged-out, generic kid-friendly tropes beaten into your head over and over again.
Ironically, the Japanese version of Navirou was the only thing that made the story watchable for me. He is a fantastic traditional boke mascot character with great voice acting. The English version is terrible, and judging by the localised translation, it lost all the language and cultural nuances. I would have much preferred a story just about Navirou's adventures over the garbage we actually got.
Delusions of grandeur:
My absolute biggest problem with the game is its massive delusions of grandeur. It struts around taking itself incredibly seriously, acting like a prestige epic with sweeping orchestral scores and world-ending stakes. Yet it completely lacks the foundation to back any of that up. It violently demands awe and emotional investment, seemingly blind to the fact that it is a heavily shackled Switch game. The ambition of the narrative completely outpaces the reality of the flat environments and repetitive gameplay loop.
Disrespecting your time:
This brings us to the disgusting nature of the gameplay itself. The entire experience is a massive exercise in time-wasting. Because the game is tied to the Switch, the world is heavily segmented. You are subjected to constant loading screens just for walking into a cave. And when you get inside, the monster dens are nothing but procedurally generated, copy-pasted flat hallways with right angles. Even with the battle speed cranked up to 3x, you are forced to sit through long, tedious attack animations and camera panning.
The endless rng grind:
There is very little actual content, artificially padded by a massive slog of egg farming and gene farming. To get the best monsties with the right XL genes, you are forced into an abysmal RNG grind. Super Rare dens have a hilariously pathetic sub-one-percent spawn rate in the wild. You will literally spend hours fast-travelling to a Catavan stand just to reload the map and pray a shiny diamond den spawns. The only alternative is slogging through the shitty co-op system using Super Rare tickets, which requires you to grind bottle caps first. Once you actually get an egg, you have to constantly sniff them to check for a rainbow glow, hatch them, navigate the clunky Rite of Channelling menus, and farm duplicate genes just to make your monsters viable.
โ The Verdict
There is absolutely no doubt that a good core game is buried underneath all this garbage, which is exactly what I saw glimpses of in the Stories 3 demo. The kinship animations are genuinely fantastic, being fun, stylishly exaggerated, and a joy to watch. The equipment is also brilliant. It hits all the right nostalgic notes because they actually used the correct, older designs for everything. Seeing the classic old U type armour sets was one of the best parts of the experience, a massive breath of fresh air compared to the creatively bankrupt, sterile western designs we got stuck with in Monster Hunter World.
But getting to that good core is incredibly painful. The actual fun only unlocks after you slog through the main story to reach the High Rank content. With the exception of a few cool post-game bosses, it just becomes an even bigger time waster because the fights themselves are horribly bloated with HP sponges.
Even the Instant Finish mechanic is an insult. It requires you to be at a much higher level than the enemy, and it is still not seamless. The game forces you to sit through a loading screen to enter the battle, physically click the button, watch the S-rank finishing animation play out, and load back into the overworld.
It genuinely loves wasting your time on every single little thing.