So there’s a new Monster Hunter game out for 3DS. It’s Monster Hunter Generations. It’s like a greatest hits of monsters/hunting areas from previous games. There’s also a bunch of changes to combat. Like you can do super moves. Also there are different fighting stances that give weapons different move sets and such.
It’s great and we should all play.
it rules, every now has power shot now, ahhhhhh
I played the Japanese version and it was awesome, aerial insect glaive is the most fun
There’s no cross region play though so RIP
Not entirely sure if I have it in me to make another repeat post outlining the clear ways Generations is a response to 4U when SB doesn’t talk much about MH framework / content designs.
Picking up and trying to shake off the rust with 4U just now mostly hurt my thumb on the camera nub, so I might pick up a controller pad pro and Generations if I can make the time for it (though I mostly prefer solo play anyway).
hey if you feel like making that post, or even pointing me to the old one, i’d love to read it! monster hunter grit is one of my favorite topics.
yeah it would definitely help me figure out whether I should get this or not, and even beyond that whether I should get my stubborn-ass brother who hasn’t really played any monster hunter games to get it and play it with me
Best change: You can now just hold down A to continue gathering instead of having to mash.
I’m trying really hard not to just jump back into charge blading. The change to hunting horns that allows them to double up on songs if you actually engage the monster instead of running away to buff is cool.
Good luck. I can’t find anyone local who would pick it up and play with me. AND I KNOW HE WOULD ENJOY PLAYING IT TOO IF HE JUST SAT DOWN AND CO-OPED IT WITH ME. 
Okay. It seems reasonable to be pensive with a series nostalgia trip like Monster Hunter Generations anyway. Floating thesis vomit of history personal assessment it is, minus many specific examples. Disclaimer: I’ve played probably over a thousand hours of Monster Hunter first in Tri, then Tri Ultimate, followed by Freedom Unite, and then Four Ultimate- and eventually I picked up a desire to play large chunks of the game solo, with multiplayer at this point mostly being generous to online others and farming equipment or achievements. Reliance on a primarily approach diminishes and reshapes a variety of these concerns.
The second generation culminated in a famous gigantic blob of content by collecting piles of monsters with aggravating slow gradation (subspecies don’t change moves for anybody but the mascot duo or the very few introduced at the end, very few monsters or quest moulds are restricted by the content/stat-resets of the ranks). The very deliberate base action + constant camera swinging of the series still holds strong and the numbers are very aggressive (sitting on the three-shot / two-shot damage dynamics in fights that can take five to ten minutes in groups or twenty minutes to an hour solo)- this makes the thorough roster redundancy and glacial stat resets have a clear functional result by permitting mastery through completionism / grinding / cooperation. There’s also plenty of chances to build up environments familiarity and worlbuiling npc charms over the repeated hunting grounds for break times in consumable resource management and equipment crafting and so on.
It’s still painful to return to as anything but satisfying curiousities in differing fights after the fact, but many keep fond memories of the total works.
The third generation reboots content with only a select few call-ups and much clearer content gradation through non-palette-swap subspecies and careful monster / model use. The absence of apes and crabs instead meets full trees of legged serpents and exaggerated larger dinosaurs plus elemental recontextualizing for subspecies, while climactic fights both terrible and exciting (the fortress-assaulting mountains, the titanic crawlers, the gimmicked trio of true dragons) are refined into chasing or swimming alongside leviathans and a few excellent fluid encounters. Locales are made into interconnected webs instead of niche-heavy sprawling environs to aide the hunt, infamous hitbox issues are reduced, damage is much more generous, and monsters die much faster.
With the Wii -> PSP -> 3DS / Wii U platform leaping, the games restructure themselves thrice with each newly introduced content instead of making expansion packs one can lift saves up to, and thus we get some of the strongest pacing of the series by the end of it. Still, older fans miss many of the old repeated bosses and the raw difficulty of antagonistic hitboxes and constantly-high damage numbers- this and struggles of depth perception in the new underwater fighting system leads to many bandying around the second generation as great.
The fourth generation twists itself around in appeasement. Locations swap out occasional water use for a generalized verticality awareness, an overpowered mounting system, and perhaps overly-sprawling overly-repeated specific arena maps. A lot of low-tier and top-tier monsters in the first and second generation get updates as they’re pulled up again, but the lower tier struggles on a less exaggerated and differentiated front and the top tier has tons of picked-and-chosen different monsters. Newer monsters have polarizing qualities of movement and weakpoints (compare the twists and turns of the heads for the combining insects or the six-limbed aberrations versus the transforming shark and constantly shifting snake) while constantly presenting new monster models as if to flee from how many chicken-bowed monsters were just renewed. Difficulty-wise, more of the game picks up the three-shot / two-shot health dynamic again, weird modifier systems arise like the mystical rabies and procedurally-generated personally-owned levelling quests ontop of it, and esoteric endless grinding customization really gets running.
With the series picking up more of a Western audience and the two games sticking to the 3DS the expansion pack nature of the last game around aggravates this divided, arduous arrangement, and the fourth generation becomes the most newcomer-hostile game in the series. The whole multiplayer bit is perhaps self-defeating for those that don’t have the hundreds of hours and piles of spoilers already, as the struggle to refine players away from over-aggression thus chokes- there’s a hell of a lot of quest failures when trying to play online with random others in the very long post-game.
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The series has struggled with skeleton overuse and underuse, with how to pace its echoing contents slow enough to teach and fast enough to intrigue. It’s also been quietly permitting further and further mechanical customization. Now Generations is the nostalgic celebration of this past, an experiment in grinding, and an explosion of player choices?
Generation starts with massive amounts of small monster and gathering quests to introduce its large glut of old altered locales. The roster is reassessed and grabs onto missed valuable mid-tier fights for the second and third generations (so one can actually be practiced for top apes and dinosaurs), though the early game still has quite the presence of cruft (the three upright quadrupeds really outclass the ancient raptors and enlarged charging minions). The struggling variety of subspecies are nearly thrown out altogether to deal with the generation gaps (instead of re-assessing and avoiding older works…), replaced instead with new venerated Deviants that provide the same strengths of moveset design and isolated away in their own grinding sector. It distinctly and deliberately lacks the repetition and difficulty of third and final rank while leaving the game in the lowly six-shot to four-shot sector, and there’s no reasonable way to tack it on without yet more great redundancy (having already gone through the older rosters several times and the specific absence of subspecies). The game already broadens out with the quest structures too, bringing out many multi-monster quests and capture quests and another new modifier system as if to further the lifespan of that series celebration- and grinding is further made rougher with a new material-devouring equipment upgrade system. There is, admittedly, almost something of a dearth of climactic final encounters and a great deal of absent silent tricks to monsters with said left-out rank…
The styles, super moves, and relaxed content pacing probably makes the game much more inviting for the patient newcomer- that select maximalist charm shines even harder with coherency, and the imposing walls against content have been worn down hard. It seems personally unsuiting for Generations to pull out focused nostalgia out of, say, the three old villages and the nearly-final-roster assessment, when the games already ask for absurd amounts of investment and acceptance of repetition, but I never played the first generation and visited the second only after the refinement of the third. If anything, I want to see the realized potential of a fifth generation’s content reset on whatever the NX turns out to be, rather than this eased-up celebratory apology- but spacing and swinging slow weapons against the hierarchy of weighty monsters is still immensely satisfying, so Generations is still tempting. By structure alone it definitely seems to be one of the two best games to pick up the series on, at least (the other’s 3U), if you aren’t caught on the low 3DS resolution.
Alternatively you can not care about history in the history game and instead grab the simplified point of Generations being easier and fuller and shorter after the series recently took a spill. Then you can pogo around and slash without really needing to aim or just play as a bloody cat.
what is the best monster hunter to start with tho
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I know this is billed as a kind of “spin off” game but I wonder if the system tweaks are going to remain for new MH games going forward
also I’m like a day away from buying this because I just ordered a circle pad pro so WHOOPS
Kinda annoyed how it feels like this game stepped back from the pace 4U had at its start. It’s been a while but I feel it did a better job getting you in front of the monsters and climbing the ranks single or multi. This kinda feels like freedom unite again with a lot of busy work quests with gathering, small monster slaying and the minor monster bosses.
I am so fucking sick of the stupid mountain village from MHFU and all its terribly designed stages. Why did they bring it back along with all its chaff?
I guess they made the stages from it slightly shorter? I remember it literally took 5 minutes to get from base camp to the top of the snow mountain in the original. Just an absolute garbage stage to give you at the beginning of the game.
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As far as I’m concerned, the best Monhun game in the series is Portable 3rd. Yukumo village is the most charming and nothing beats taking open-air hot baths with alcohol for buffs.
Wait, so @r-i: does this new game not keep the same focus on ecology as Tri did? Do monsters effect each other, summon each other, eat each other? That was the best addition to the series that Tri brought IMO.
Okay, I can be mostly more positive about the still-present constant developments of ecological lore. Mostly. Yakumo Village is actually one of the three villages brought back though!
Qurupeco the summoning bird doofus hasn’t been seen in all of fourth generation, disappointingly. One wonder monster still does directly summon another- the Seltas and the Seltas Queen use it as a clear combining mecha aesthetic (and also the Queen also might smash apart and devour her minion or launch him on a cannon shot to burst on impact). Unstable environs are still around at any rate, with flying blasting storms Astalos and Seregios shown as seperate rivals to Rathian and Rathalos plus the ravenous Deviljho still running about, but it’s all a bit less organic in using offline cutscenes compared to Qurupeco and Deviljho is nearly absent from 4U’s G Rank for no real reason (perhaps even he was scared off?).
4 and 4U had a long on-going plot about the spread of a mystical Frenzy Virus as part of an elder dragon’s ascent cycle, which exaggerated monster rage and exhaustion plus. On players it was a status effect that could be overcome and turned into a boost by attacking monsters back, and in 4U this was played with by producing an absurd Apex state on a select few famous monsters that scare off every other monster in the region. Making base monsters pull out moves from their subspecies and even more, a near immunity to nearly every standard trick, nearly-impenetrable armour within the majority of their bodies, and a fresh new limited system to empower weapons to temporarily cure the disease while hunting. It was probably a bit too much mechanically (see: all those words about 4/4U being newcomer hostile), and Apex Rajang being one of the two most optimal postgame fighting points is both great and tiresome.
Generations has some Hyper state as something of a replacement in a monster modifier system (and is mostly held back until the end of High Rank, so perhaps one could call it a substitute for G Rank). Somewhat more integrated into hunting than the previous item-blocking / item-demanding fights, monsters move from being engulfed and breathing out purple mists to instead have red mists swapping around body parts but still are perpetually outraged at their misfortune. They give a slight dramatic pause before uses of that part followed by some genuine solid damage, and provide more meter for one’s own super moves when hitting them, so MH edges closer to fighting game roots. I do not have a clue if it’s actually explained anywhere or integrated into the plot and environment of Generations beyond potential buried NPC dialogue, though.
There’s also the final bosses of 4U and Generations, which have beautiful concepts (if still both still trying to master the sense of the slow colossus already done best with the brought-up Akantor / Ukanlos / Alatreon / Amatsu-Magatsuchi). In 4U the fortress of Dondruma was brought back and refurbished to war against the constant invading presence of elder dragons and Apex beasts, and the final boss reflects this with an otherworldly horrible skeletal dragon dripping in explosive tar that fed on gunpowder stores and pierced itself on the ancient armed drill Dragonator. In Generations Nakarkos first appears to be a two-headed bone hydra swimming through a massive wyvern graveyard, but is instead revealed to be a titanic cuttlefish, gesturing with limbs armoured in the bones of uncountable and widely distributed victims. When revealed the abyssal spirit even weaponizes the elemental capabilities of its prey’s body parts, as if challenging the human hunters who have been doing the same for ~generations~.
So yeah, the series still is trying for a sense of ecology, with pests and plagues and titans. Arthopods have some of the best examples, really- one of the few new minions is an armoured pillbug that leaps onto large monsters to leech blood from their wounds, and there’s a horrible spider-like monstrosity that drapes itself with the wrinkled or veiny skin of flighty prey Gypceros and Khezu.
yeah pretty sure the answer to that question has always been the most recent one (hunt with me)
also index I’m not sure I agree with everything you’ve posted here but thanks for sharing it, I love meaty mh posts
Feel free to dissect any given thoughts from my imprecise blather and narrative impositions, I thirst for some genuine dialogues. There’s lots of individual bits one could probably go over- like arguing whether (Apex) Tidal Najarala is just non-conductive for the precision play I prefer or whether it’s a boon instead of a bane for 4U to make e.g. Brachydios and Deviljho essentially unique- and all my knowledge of Generations is second-hand.
My thumb aches on my N3DS’s scarred camera nub from idly picking up 4U again- considering how I can probably get dozens of hours still I probably should just buy a CCP regardless of what I decide on Generations.
went on a bit of a weapon indecision dilemma but I’ve settled on the bow! finally got the hang of hitting critical distance shots and I’m feelin good
Aerial switch axe is nuts. The jump is actually an attack in sword mode, so you end up mounting non-stop, and the recharge hunter art fills up faster than you can spend sword gauge, letting you maul monsters forever. Doesn’t have a lot of options if you get knocked down by a monster who likes to charge, though.
