Aug 29, 2018  Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate Review. Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate is an impressive collection of series history that is slightly held back by dated systems.

The Tourist Trap

HIGH The moment-to-moment exhilaration of fighting a gigantic monster can feel amazing.

LOW Poor training options, hunts are structurally repetitive, area transitions disrupt fights.

WTF The localization’s fourth-wall-bending goofiness is frequently obnoxious, complete with a literal “git gud”.

After more than fifty hours in Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, I am still a tourist.

Of course, fifty hours is nothing when one considers that Capcom has spent almost fifteen years building an Action-RPG franchise where players routinely burn hundreds upon hundreds of hours chasing giant monsters. Though the success of Monster Hunter World’s release earlier this year can be viewed as the payoff for that persistent brand maintenance, the Nintendo Switch release of Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate can serve as the crystallization – and, perhaps, a final farewell — to the series’ original pre-World formula.

In the beginning, players customize the look and feel of their avatars before selecting a weapon to convey an elaborate action-based fighting style, complete with combos and sometimes a form of meter management for powerful attacks. These weapons can be paired with a Hunting Style and a selection of Hunter Arts – both new additions to the series with MHGU – to create a moveset that can be surprisingly complex and expressive. To carry out the quests in Monster Hunter, players take their weapons and a limited inventory into lush environments that are conveniently stocked with item gathering points to forage from and monsters to hunt.

The hunt itself is the central pillar of the experience, and it’s where the subtleties of the combat shine through. Rather than focusing exclusively on damage, combat often centers on the Sharpness level of the player’s weapon — each area of the monster requires a certain sharpness for an attack to land and, since the player’s weapon degrades with every attack, the most basic strategy of a hunt involves finding the most vulnerable areas of a monster and the right times to retreat and repair a weapon.

Furthermore, monsters have no visible health bars, so players are forced to pay close attention to the changes in their prey’s behavior to assess a fight. Though the monster’s transitions between scripted actions are often robotic, their animations in the moment can be quite elaborate and, sometimes, disturbing. When a monster is near death, they begin to visibly struggle to move, drooling or wheezing as they limp away.

Getting a monster to this ‘wounded’ state is a signature moment that some players will see as a cathartic turning point, but it took me out of the fight and, gradually, the idea of the hunt overall. Rather than seeing a great beast brought low with the dignity of a battle well-fought, I saw these transitions as gratuitous, especially when the monster would cycle right back into a flawless attack animation moments later. After a couple of hunts, it didn’t even register as distasteful anymore — it was so unnatural and illogical that eventually it didn’t register at all.

As I got further away from combat, I found an increasingly hollow experience in MHGU that made it difficult to connect with.

The final moments of a hunt are a small, but illustrative example of this disillusionment — once a monster is defeated, a countdown timer starts almost immediately, as though the game is nudging the player out of a theme park ride so that the next group can come in. In these closing moments, players frantically carve out special items like tusks, bones and hides from their quarry before being hurriedly whisked away to town. Some of these battles can last almost an hour – why not give players more than a minute to savor their hard-won victory?

These spoils from these quests power a treadmill economy with a progression curve so carefully smoothed that it feels almost frictionless. The only real tension comes down to the amount of time a player is willing to invest – failed quests never go away and quest environments always reset. If I need some valuable honey, all I have to do is pick a gathering quest and mindlessly repeat it. Even after I harvest all the honey on one trip, the beehives will be back and brimming full the next time.

Beyond the hunts, it feels like there are dozens of utterly peripheral systems for players to toy around with in town, from customizing hunter’s guild cards to assigning elaborate training programs for the fan-favorite Felynes. There’s always stuff to do, but very little of it is memorable or even necessary. Even the Prowler mode that allows players to take on quests as Felynes devolves into a simplification of the core mechanics, as Prowlers no longer need to manage weapon sharpness or stamina for their attacks.

The lack of a real story also makes it tough to justify deeper investment with Generations Ultimate, especially when the rest of the game outside of combat is so monotonous. There have been MH games like 2009’s Monster Hunter Tri that took the time and effort to provide an ongoing narrative as connective tissue between hunts, but MHGU has no interest in exploring the world beyond the player’s attack range. Instead, it nonchalantly trades on its past as NPCs and villages from prior entries send players into classic maps to fight classic beasts. It’s a massive, all-encompassing reprise of the series, and it expects players to already know the words to its song and leaves newcomers like myself on the outside, looking in.

After more than fifty hours in Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, I am still a tourist because I can’t possibly live here. After marching through countless quests, this installment struck me as nothing so much as a devoted recitation of franchise iconography that will only feel warm and comfortable to long-time MH veterans. There is an experience suggested by the mechanics that could amount to more than a whimsical hack-a-thon where players frantically chase piñatas that occasionally breathe fire, but that world never materializes beyond the momentary thrill of the hunt. Rating: 6 out of 10

— Steve Gillham

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Capcom. It is currently available on Nintendo Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the Nintendo Switch. Approximately 50 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed — 42 hours of single player, 8 hours of multiplayer)

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains blood, crude humor, mild suggestive themes, and violence. The ESRB’s description for this rating is as follows: This is an action-adventure game in which players engage in hunting missions in a world filled with monsters. Players complete missions/quests and use swords, lances, bombs, and firearms to kill various creatures (e.g., dragons, dinosaurs, sand sharks) in frenetic combat. Battles are accompanied by impact sounds, cries of pains, and realistic explosions. Brief blood spurts appear as characters and monsters are injured. Players can equip female characters with revealing outfits that depict large amounts of cleavage. During the course of the game, players can throw “dung bombs” at enemies, resulting in depictions of greenish-brown clouds.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes and, frequently, critical text is displayed in deep red text on dark translucent backgrounds.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no required sound cues for gameplay, though some actions (such as cooking meat with the BBQ spit) are accompanied by supplemental sound or musical cues that can make the action easier to execute. There are no options to resize or recolor text. The following screen shot shows the typical sizes of critical text:

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not fully remappable, though there are a limited set of toggle-able behaviors for different control types (camera controls, swapping functions between face buttons and analog sticks, etc.) There is no single controller map diagram in the game, though there are detailed controls by weapon type found in under “Weapon Controls” in the Hunter’s Notes section of the Menu. The below is just one of many examples. Capcom’s online manual for MHGU also has some instructions for basic controls.

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Monster Hunter fans have long lived with the fact that their obsession of choice is a particularly niche one – a series that celebrates things like repetition, grinding and brutal difficulty in a gaming climate where many studios are actively moving away from such matters. But then, earlier this year, something strange happened. Monster Hunter World launched in January to nigh-unanimous praise (ourselves included) and has gone on to shift over 10 million copies and become Capcom's best-selling game of all time. Yes, the latest instalment of our favourite boss battle grindathon has somehow sold more copies than celebrated Hall-Of-Famers like Resident Evil 4 and Street Fighter II.

Part of it was a case of being in the right place at the right time, sure, but a lot of this success had to do with the way World iterated on and improved core systems that had long been the gatekeepers preventing new players from getting into the series. World was still a bit obtuse, but way less so than its predecessors. As you'll see for yourself, if you pick up Generations Ultimate with World having been your only prior experience of the franchise.Let's get one thing clear from the off: World's existence and the improvements it made to so many systems don't inherently make going back to the old ways 'bad'. It's just different, although admittedly in a way that will require a lot more patience, homework and practice from newcomers to fully enjoy it.

All Letter Soup Casablanca cafe answers updated. Solutions for all levels of the game.

And sure enough, if you only joined the hunting party when World rolled around earlier in the year, a lot of things are going to conspire to cause one hell of a culture shock. Maps are back to being sets of smaller areas separated by loading screens; armour skills require a set amount of points to activate rather than just being baked into gear; there are no magic glowbugs to track monsters for you, so you have to find and tag them for yourselves; solo and multiplayer progress are split across multiple different hubs; the only way to know which quests actually unlock progress is to look it up online or to do everything. Despite how it may sound, none of these are backwards steps, which will be especially obvious to anyone who enjoyed the 3DS or PSP games previously. No, they're sidesteps, only ones that take the game away from the universal appeal that World's quality-of-life improvements cultivated and back towards the more niche hardcore appeal that the series always had before it miraculously hit the big time. Maybe you're ready for that now, maybe you're not. The demo on the store should be able to answer that question for you, although hopefully the fine assortment of words that follows below should also be able to do a decent job. For all the steps World took towards accessibility, its limitations as a full-fat console game were just as clear as they were the last time a mainline series entry ditched tiny handheld screens in favour of home devices (that'd be Monster Hunter Tri on Wii).

As there, the work involved to get each monster into the game at the required level of detail left the overall count coming in way below par for the series, and the same goes for other aspects like weapons and locations, too. As such, Generations Ultimate serves as a real eye-opener as to how much content the best and most complete Monster Hunter games typically include.

Before you're even out of Low Rank, you'll have seen more places and beasts than in the entirety of World – press on into High Rank and the freshly-added (for this game, anyway) uber-tough G-Rank and you're looking at around triple the boss monster count across easily twice as many maps, with literally thousands more armour pieces and weapons to make and upgrade along the way. Granted, there are some duplicates created by the various sub-species (what Monster Hunter game would be complete without at least three different versions of Rathalos, after all?) but in terms of variety and options, GenU presents the broadest spread in the series to date. Amazing, then, that so much of what it offers is so damn good.One of our favourite things about Generations was the quality of its poster monsters. The Fated Four – bubble dragon Mizutsune, tusked fur mountain Gammoth, sparky dragonfly-alike Astalos and self-sharpening blade dino Glavenus – were, and still are, amazing fights, and that trend continues here. Not only do the overlooked three now get vicious new Deviant forms (Glavenus already had its Hellblade version) but the actual newcomers prove to be even better, with rocket-powered griffon Valstrax set to win Best Newcomer and the 'final boss' being beautifully bizarre even by the series' own esoteric standards.

There are more options for how you play, too. Generations' main contributions to the series were to simplify things like attack stats down to more manageable figures, then to re-confuse the issue by adding Hunting Styles into the mix – four unique 'classes' that offered slightly different move sets and access to various Hunter Arts (read: special moves). Ultimate adds two more Styles for a total of six, and while the new additions are gimmicky to the extreme, certain weapons certainly benefit from the new options. Valor is a strange and quite complex option that involves sheathing your weapon to improve attacks and avoid damage, while Alchemy is more of a support style where you periodically get to use a tombola for various items and perks. As backwards as some of its systems may look or feel at first, Generations Ultimate is peak traditional Monster Hunter – if/when it clicks with you, you're in for a good time, for a long time. Battles are punishing until you learn to avoid and counter each enemy's unique attacks, but that's been true since the first game on PS2. There's only so much of World's success you can attribute to following in the wake of Dark Souls when the series has been doing the same thing since way back when FromSoftware's cult classic was just a twinkle in King's Field's eye.

Learning and mastering a weapon is also hugely satisfying, especially with the options opened up by the various Hunting Styles. You'll go from getting bodied by bunnies and crabs to being able to dance around and batter the most badass of beasties without so much as a scratch, and there are few games that champion player improvement quite like Monster Hunter. The staggering wealth of options open to you in terms of gear and perks is another feather in its cap, too. In hours of online play, we never once saw two identical builds, and there's so much potential in the game's systems in this regard that you can make just about anything work so long as you commit to it fully.And therein lies the primary drawback of traditional Monster Hunter – even getting to the point where you're having to worry about end-game builds requires either learning an awful lot of things that the game will never explicitly tell you, or getting carried in multiplayer. The latter is a poor option, as it stifles your own growth as a player and feeds bad habits, hence why so many blade randoms are happy to spam attacks on a downed monster's head while a hammer/horn user is too busy getting tripped up to knock the bugger out and actually do their job. But the game never tells you that such 'roles' exist – that blunt weapons should get head priority while blades stick to wings and tails for the most part. It's just one of the many learn-through-experience things that are rife in classic MonHun, and another example of why the series took as long as it did to find the success it genuinely deserves.

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If you were to equate getting into Monster Hunter with learning a foreign language, World offered a phrasebook that gave you everything you needed to get by, to even seem fluent or at very worst competent. GenU, like every other MonHun game before it, gives you two-thirds of a dictionary and a stern look. Getting to the point where you're speaking its language takes more effort, then, but the results are still very much worth it in the end.