I’ve never played these games. It all just feels extremely overwhelming with the large amount of menus and systems. I’m also unable to focus on long games (I also have issues with long open world games like Breath of the Wild for example), so that is another thing that pushes me away. But the idea of a cosy grind while listening to podcasts does interest me.
However, I have seen the film: an absolute masterpiece in the “bad film genre”. Just beautifully brainless action, similar to the amazing Resident Evil films of the same creator.
I’ve only played a bit of 4 and lots of worlds. I really loved the additional stuff to do in worlds. I was enthralled by the exploration and little collectible stuff as much as the actual combat. I do feel like it’s a lot of fun with friends. Playing with Randoms feels scary lol.
I’ve been trying to finish iceborne at some point but I hit a brick wall at frostfang barioth for a long time and then got distracted with other games. I’ve been meaning to go back and finish but u have a feeling the next title will come out before then. I haven’t even gotten around to rise yet lol!
One thing I kind of like about monster hunter is you don’t need to commit to the long term, a hunt will last at most 50 minutes usually closer to 25 or less. You can boot the game up do a hunt and shutdown, and still feel like you did something in it.
Similar boat. I’ve tried with friends on numerous occasions and it’s never clicked for me. I will say MH rise and the wolf mounts and weird grapple shot thing got me the closest to getting into one. The movement those 2 afforded made the game feel better to me.
A single play session isn't actually all that long, as others have said. It's about 25-50 minutes depending on how familiar you are with the monster. You also don't have to interact with all the systems at once initially, pick one thing and try it out. There's no real penalty for failing besides having to re-do the mission that you failed.
I started with 3rd and I completely agree with you. It’s so confusing and shit to get into, I technically started with the first PSP game but I played for like 40 minutes. Then I met a friend who became be first friend and he taught me how to play, and I ended up LOVING the games. They’re all some of my favorite games now. GU is my favorite. World is second. 4u is third.
That’s totally fair, Monster Hunter is infamous for its utterly terrible onboarding process. If you ever decide that you want to really figure out Monster Hunter, there’s two options I always recommend.
The first is incredibly simple: get someone who knows the game to play with you. They can walk you through what does and doesn’t matter, and help you get used to the game with someone there to keep you engaged.
The second option, if you don’t have a MH friend or don’t want to play with other people, is a simple process you can follow which I’ve found tends to work for getting people through the early game confusion:
First, ignore the constant tutorial popups. They’ll be there in the hunter notes in your menu at any time, and most of them don’t matter until after you figured out how to literally play the game at all.
Second, find your weapon. Every weapon type in Monster Hunter plays very differently. The weapon that sounds the best to you might not be the weapon that feels the best to you. Once you unlock the training area (I think it happens before your first quest even) just go in there and pick a weapon from your box and start slapping shit. If you don’t like that weapon, pick a different one and rinse and repeat until you’ve found the one that speaks to you.
Finally, just start playing! I find things make way more sense when you actually experience them rather than just reading about them or watching someone else experience them. Just start playing and eventually all those complicated systems will click and you’ll wonder why you ever had a problem!
A common joke in the Monster Hunter community is that everyone loves monster hunter, they just haven’t played it long enough to realize it yet! I hope you give the series another chance someday because it’s really something special!
Regarding the movie, as a terrible movie fan I agree, it was a fantastic watch! As a Monster Hunter fan however, ohhhhhh boy was I screaming at my TV! WHY did they give gore magala a beard?!?!?
One of my favourite series. Started with vanilla P3 back when it was released, during the golden era of PS2 JRPGs, then put hundreds of hours into P4, P3P, P4 Golden and P5, both royal and original. Also went back to check out the first Persona and two P2 games.
P2 and P2 aren’t really “Persona” games, they are “Shin Megami Tensei: Persona” games. Dungeon crawlers with random battles. Unlike more modern Persona games, you don’t go to school in these games, you go out of it by beating the shit out of demons. No school life simulator, no social links, just good ol’ 10% story + 90% battles. I love P2’s story, though. It’s the most… entertaining, I’d say, and definitely feels different compared to other Persona games. Probably because the characters are mainly adults. If you decide to give it a try, beware that it has two games and the second is the direct continuation of the first. Hope it gets remade as well someday. It’s also the best Persona game in terms of demon negotiation. The player can choose one or several members of the party and make them do a comedy act, play violin, tell jokes etc. to acquire persona cards. It’s a lot of fun to explore these little scenes, as they change with the story’s progression. P5 sort of added demon negotiation back, but in its early SMT form of “answer the question right”. It’s not even half as fun.
New Persona games are more or less similar, the main difference is the theme and the mood. P3 is blue and depressive, P4 is yellow and fun (but also a bit unhealthy), P5 is red and adventurous. P3 was a true revolution, as it added school life simulator aspects to an existing SMT formula. P4 and P5 use the same formula that was invented for P3, and it’s my main issue with Persona series. It doesn’t progress anymore. P4 being the same as P3 was understandable, as these games are a couple of years apart and were released for the same system. P5 being the same as the two previous games isn’t exciting at all. Yeah, it has better UI, QoL features, of course, better graphics, animations and everything else one might expect from a newer game. However P5’s core is the same as P3 and P4, and this core is immersion. At which P5, imo, is worse than P3 and P4. Can’t really pinpoint why, maybe its aesthetics are the reason, or the less believable, too grandiose setting. It went from “we are saving the world behind the curtains, but nobody knows it” (P3) and “we are solving a crime case and saving the world, but nobody knows it” (P4) to “we are defeating all sorts of evil people and saving the world and everyone sort of knows it” (P5). P5 felt less immersive than previous games to me. Compare Joker to P3’s MC - a chad Arsène Lupin who happens to go to school sometimes vs. a sad emo boy always with headphones on. I liked more down to earth and realistic approach of P3 and P4 in that regard. School life in P5 felt as an honestly unneeded afterthought. Another thing that broke immersion in P5 specifically for me is social links, pardon, confidants mechanic that was too centered on gameplay. In P3 and P4 you could do a run without some social links just because you felt like it, but in P5 your freedom of choice is severely affected by passive abilities gained by meeting with certain confidants. I dislike the game dictating me which confidants I have to prioritise. Don’t get me wrong, P5 is a very good game on its own, it’s just some things about it rub me the wrong way when I compare it to other games.
btw, I always thought that P3 OST is so unusual because it was composed with the idea that it’s the music that the MC listens to first and a game soundtrack second
P3 is one of my favourite games ever. Story, music, characters, art, gameplay - everything is stellar. Haven’t yet tried the Reload version, because Atlus taught me to never buy their games before the definitive edition is released. I’ll probably wait until the female MC is available. Anyway, I like it more than other Persona games due to how deep and immersive it is. It’s the only modern Persona where relationships within the party felt natural to me, where party members didn’t instantly become bff just because they shared the same goal. I liked the tension between Mitsuru and Yukari, Junpei’s ambitions, Ken’s animosity and so on. I enjoyed that the characters were wary of the MC at first and slowly opened up to them. P4 and P5 are a bit more “nakama power” in that regard. Notice how party dynamics remain unchangeable in P4 and P5 - once you get a new character, their story is more or less done and they behave the exact same way until the end of the game. And it’s always “one dungeon - one new party character” policy. P3 has less predictable structure.
Didn’t say much about P4, but it’s also an excellent game, with the best humour in the series.
Thank you for writing all of that. I’ve been avoiding the Persona series because I played some of P1 back in the day and didn’t care for it. P3 sounds much more enjoyable to me.
Huh didn’t know P1 and P2 were SMT games. Good to know. I’ve tried at least one entry in the SMT side and just could not get into it. Don’t even remember which it was. I get they’re both dungeon crawlers, but I don’t think I’m a fan of the more old-school SMT-style games.
MI is great, I played 1+2 when they were new (in the 90s), they were brilliant back then. These days, they’re probably still good point&click adventure games. There were some special editions or remasters which probably make them play well on modern machines. They belong to a long list of awesome LucasArts point&click adventures during the 90s and early 2000s. Most of these games are great. You should definitely try them out, especially if there are remasters available. But you can also play the originals using ScummVM most likely. Ron Gilbert is like the mastermind behind the series. He still creates adventure games to this day. And they’re all pretty good, but the genre is kind of niche these days. It wasn’t niche back then. It was just as big as action or soulslike games are today. The Monkey Island titles were probably the most successful or popular ones of the bunch. But there are some others which are equally good. Adventure games are rare these days but basically they are like puzzle games where you have to solve certain situations by combining items, finding items in the first place, trying different approaches, and so on. You kind of know once you’ve overcome a challenge when you were able to progress further in the game. There’s little to no handholding, but also little to no handholding needed. There’s one timing-based riddle in the original Monkey Island which I never liked that much, but it’s still a funny one. It’s not hard but it doesn’t really fit the genre well because nothing else is timing-based. It does fit the game’s art, setting and humor well though. The soundtrack is nice indeed. This is probably the most well-known track: invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=FoT5qK6hpbw
Man, I miss the golden age of point-and-click adventure games. My brothers and I played through so many together. PC Speaker version of the MI1 soundtrack for maximum nostalgia: invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=_cfPw3IL1sk
Love this series so much! Relaxing and chill and just fun to go at your own pace and make your own goals. I remember buying two cartridges for Wild World so I could have two saves! Also played a ton of New Horizons during the pandemic, like a lot of people I think. I actually kind of got burned out on that one and haven’t played in a long time, my island is probably covered in weeds now, ha ha!
I really love how they opened up more customization in New Horizons, including the terraforming. But they need a better system for actually doing the terraforming in the next game, because it seems so finicky right now. I also would love to see some inspiration from Pocket Camp come to the main games with more ways for the villagers to interact with your outdoor decorations so the villagers don’t just end up sitting on the ground most of the time!
Super Mario Bros. 3 was the first game I ever played, waaaay back in the early 90s. That hooked me into gaming for life, and every few years, I do a no warp playthrough of the game that started it all for me.
Then, a few years later, I tried Super Mario 64 in a Toys R Us. It blew my mind and I absolutely had to have an N64.
I despise Nintendo’s business practices, but there’s no doubt they had a formative influence on my childhood.
SMB 3 was a big deal when it came out. Not only was the game a delight to play, but they had a whole ass movie where they “debuted” the game at the end of it. The whole movie was pretty much a long Nintendo commercial showing different games and the power glove and all. The end was a video game competition and SMB 3 was the surprise game. They even showed where to get the first warp whistle.
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