 It's been five years since Monster Hunter Stories released on 3DS, which means I was on YouTube creating content when this game came out. Wow, wow, really? Wow, really? Hope you're ready for cringe. Nintendo even sent me this copy of the game, yeah! Those were the days. I couldn't remember if I even reviewed the game after they sent it to me, so I went back to check and found this atrocious thumbnail. What was I thinking? I wonder what I said about the game back then. It looks really fun. It's kind of like Monster Hunter, but different, I guess? Kind of more like Pokemon, where you hatch eggs and stuff like that. I really didn't know that. Why did I use to talk so fast in my older videos? Did I have somewhere else to be? Hey, slow down! Unless you count that as a review and I certainly don't, let me just tell you how I feel about the first game now. I liked it. It was indeed like Monster Hunter means Pokemon, but thankfully, unlike Pokemon, this game didn't have a really annoying talking cat. That's right, I'm Navito! Oh, never mind. The similarities don't stop there, not only due to the battle format moving to turn based, but because you can find monster eggs, hatch them and then add these little cuties to your team. Thing is, I never thought the game sold very well, and I figured it would go down as a one hit wonder on the 3DS. Imagine my surprise when they announced a sequel. Although you can tell the developers tried to age up the aesthetics, going from a more cartoony chibi feel to realistic vistas and an overall darker tone. There are some nice new additions here we can take a look at, like being able to play online with friends, but first I want to say it is really similar to the first game without too many added changes. Just new characters, a new story, and of course a brand new world to explore. Our adventure begins in a small town where we discover there's a mass disappearance of Rathalos around the world, which is apparently a bad thing. I've seen those guys. Don't don't we hunt those because they kill people? There's less of them, maybe good, but then you hear about a legendary Rathalos with the wings of ruin. Yeah, one little flippy flop of its wings and it will bring destruction to everything in its path. Sounds scary. Good thing all the Rathalos have disappeared and it's not like one of them left an egg around, and you are okay. All right, thankfully when it hatches, it's just the cutest little monsty in the land. And no, that's not me using Baby Talk. This world actually calls friendly monsters monsties. Never really comes up, but they also call feedies and speakers speakeas. Today's sponsor is a speakea, by the way. But this isn't just any ordinary speakea, it's a cove split speakea, the speaker. And I love it. I've put it in my home gym and what's great is it's already a surprisingly loud normal speaker, or I can split it in half, place one at either end of my garage, and because it does perfect left and right sound, it creates a 360-like stereo surround effect while I'm working out. It's literally like putting a surround system into my home gym for the price of just one normal speaker. It connects via Bluetooth in seconds. Okay, well I can't play that right now. The battery lasts seven hours. It's water resistant and pretty durable, which is good because I've accidentally dropped mine a lot. You can literally, what did I just? It also has a built-in microphone and 30 feet of range. Here's the best part. Cove ain't just giving you 15% off. Appropriately 50% off would make a lot of sense. 67% off. You're paying a third of the price. That 67% off code works site-wide on any of their audio products. So have at it. Click the link below. Get almost 70% off while also supporting my channel. Thank you so much to Cove for sponsoring the video. Get back to the video. Oh, can we take a moment to talk about how messed up the premise of this game is? You sneak into monster dens. Fight! What I can only presume to be the mother of these unborn children, just protecting its young. Once they're knocked out, steal their eggs, take them home, hatch them for yourself, and then Stockholm Syndrome trick them into thinking that you're just their bestest friend and that they should fight other monsters for you. Like, I know we're not supposed to think about the logistics of a video game. I mean, heck, even Pokemon is problematic and no, I don't mean you, Brock. Well, yes, you too, actually, while we're on the subject. Here's a picture. She can violate my rights. But it's hard not to look past how messed up it is when I'm comedically hot stepping it out of a monster lab before I get caught snatching up babies. Look, he thinks you're his mommy. Although the thrill of finding a shiny, rare egg is always a rush, your best bet is to find a gold monster den. These will pop up randomly and it's always worth a detour on your adventures to duck in a one and try your luck. You can keep plucking eggs out of the nest and just discarding the ones you don't want because who wants this unborn fetus? Until you are satisfied. But eventually the eggs will dry up and you'll get stuck with whatever one is left last. So be careful. If it's really heavy and smells like you got a winner, but a good one will light up like the 4th of July. So you can't really miss it. Hatching these eggs is fun, but still a huge missed opportunity in the franchise if you ask me. Why can't you raise the little baby monsties? That's something I really don't understand. Like they spent so much time and effort designing and animating these little baby versions of the big monsters we already know. Like, look at him. So cute. But you only ever see them like this in the one hatching cutscene. Then immediately as you go back out of hatching them, they're already fully grown and ready to go on hunts. It kind of sucks. Every single monster in the game has an adorable munchkin version of itself designed and animated just to be splashed on the screen for 3 seconds. There should be a little playpen or something that you can put them in for at least a few days. They have a system in place where the rarer eggs have better genes with more attack and defense, different abilities and so on. Then you can persona splice the genes together, picking one gene from a monster you don't want to keep and passing it on to another. Where that other monster goes are... We don't like to talk about. You can either use this to upgrade a similar ability or teach it a new one altogether and then you can play bingo with the colors and match three and you'll get an even bigger boost. Bingo! All this is nice and adds to the collectathon of it all. I mean sure you might have a certain monster already but if you collect it again you can use it to power up another one of your monsters. Like I get it. But I would much rather be able to spend time with these little guys and just train them up myself. This might seem like a small nitpick but it would also add something to do in the game in between the relentless turn-based battles and then the end credits. In classic Monster Hunter style you're given a list of chores, main missions and side missions to complete as well as a story of course as it is called Monster Hunter Stories. And it's the one thing that a traditional Monster Hunter game kind of doesn't have. As you follow along the story you'll adventure into new areas, finding new monsters, dens and challenges. Along the way you'll want to kill and collect as much as possible so you can upgrade your armor, weapons and more. You played Monster Hunter right? You get it. The turn-based battles are pretty unique. There's a rock, paper and scissors element to it. When you attack you need to assess the enemy monster like get all up inside its head and figure out how it's going to attack you. Is it going to attack strategically, fast or strongly? Then try to counter it. If you successfully counter you'll land a huge attack and take little damage. If you fail and get countered yourself it's the reverse. Of course. You idiot. You absolute fuck. If you tie and pick the same thing you both take fairly equal damage. But there is a bit more to think about on top of all of that. Like weapon choices. You can carry three weapons. Different parts of monsters will be resistant to different types of things. So you might successfully counter a monster's attack but if you're aiming at the tail with a bow and arrow and it's resistant to that it still might not take a ton of damage. That's a lot of damage. It's not that much damage really Phil. It could be a lot worse. It's all about maximizing each attack to get advantage of the situation quickly. Then if you don't suck the better you play you build up a buddy bar and then when it's full you can jump on your monsters back and attack together or unleash one huge special attack. These big attacks are a highlight and pretty special as each monster has their own unique cutscene for their attack. But to be honest you spend like 90% of the game in the battles so they get a little tedious. You're probably gonna want to be using that three-time speed by about midway through the game unless you're an insane person. This three-time speed will cut out most of the animations anyway. So it's fun watching each monster's unique special attack the first time you see it. After that you kind of just want to get to the point. Overall I enjoyed this system for the battles but it never evolves or gets fleshed out throughout the game. It just is what it is from the start and gets repetitive really fast. Also each type of monster will always attack the same way. A Tiger X will always favor speed attacks until he gets Mad Boy and then he'll always favor powerful attacks. It literally never changes so as long as you have a half-decent memory most battles will just be a walk in the park. It's kind of like playing rock-paper-scissors against your old uncle Ted who you know always throws rock until he gets Mad says okay now I'm going to really try and from there you just only throw scissors until he calms down. I'd prefer it if the monsters had more subtle body language changes from attack to attack so I'm always left trying to figure out what they're going to do next. Uh you might be glad to know this game does get pretty hard which is good. The only thing that would make this already kind of flawed system even worse was if the game was so easy you didn't even need to try and play along. As I said earlier there's even online options. You can go and hunt with friends which can yield even rarer monsters and fun collectibles. It's also apparently how you get a Palomute in your game but I still haven't managed to figure that one out. Never mind I did it. Sadly you can't explore the whole game with them just these dens with the monster nests but that's okay. Before I get to my final complaint I do want to say that at launch this game seems to struggle with some framerate issues oh but thankfully the only thing slower than the pacing in the movie The Tomorrow War is me. I'm slow. This game's been out for a while and it seems like it's been patched up pretty quick. Strangely it's really only the first couple of towns in the game that really seem to chug the system. This one specifically ran at about five frames a second. I say weird because the open world areas are much bigger and more expansive and you can sprint around those at full speed later on even able to fly across them in the blink of an eye and it's really smooth with no issues. I don't know what's happening in this town in particular but it doesn't represent the whole game. All right final complaint time and it's a big one. For a game with stories in its title with the whole point being it's a spin-off monster hunter game that attempts to tell an actual tale it's still just a cookie cutter means to an end narrative. No spoilers but this is the story. Rathalos gone. Here an egg. Take care of egg. Is egg bad boy or good boy? Beat monsties the end. Did I miss something? There wasn't any twists or turns in the story. By about halfway I was just zoning out of most of the dialogue which was either delivered in the form of flashbacks with images or this cat repeating the same phrases over and over and over. All right. You've got to be kidding me. We can do this partner to find what's causing this catastrophe. It's sure to become a claudacious Rathalos. Well it looks to me like we might have gotten off on the wrong paw, huh? That's some paw inspiring stuff. I'm a cat dear with gratitude. Perfection. That's clawfully rude. Is he more claudacious than me? And you'll be a positively claudacious writer personally. And pause for effect. Did we really need that pause on demo? Positively claudacious. Positively claudacious. Okay, shut up. You feel like Mickey Mouse. Okay, I guess I should stop waiting for a laugh, huh? I understand them not wanting the main character to speak because it puts you, the player, in that position and you just kind of imagine what's being said. But what's the point in doing that when you give them a sidekick that says everything for you? I have fine protectors with me. Fine protectors? Am I one of those fine protectors too? Yes, we'll need your help to guide us to go on after all. Well, okay, leave it to me. Now the game is now through. Like the cat is pretty much the main character of the game and you're just there. Forgetfully there most of the time. But overall it is a nice upgrade from the 3DS version. It feels bigger, fresher and overall it does feel better. It's still a little segmented out with its world placement and maybe that's just the monster hunt away. But I would like if the pieces of the world felt more connected and less like short trips around small fields with load screens in between. The combat is unique but starts to feel repetitive once you've figured out all the monsters attack patterns and I wish I had more of a role to play with raising the monsters. All that aside, it's still a fun game and addictive to have on the go. With lots to collect and items to upgrade, the story is worth progressing through just to see how it all ends up. But I'm mostly just really looking forward to another game to see if they can advance this concept even further. There is a great foundation for a fun series of games here but there absolutely needs to be more to do and I would like to see a larger story told within the monster hunter universe. That's it. My watch just told me workout finished so I guess I really am done. I don't know how it thought I was working out. I'm realizing I didn't write an end to the video. There's no joke, there's no way to get on out of here. So maybe I'll think of it in editing. Damn. Oh god. I just realized all the comments are going to be the positively Claudacious. POSITIVELY! CLAUDACIOUS!