As I wrote in my review of Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone (which runs next week), I broke my collarbone recently in a game of kickball because I am apparently very fragile. My recovery has been exhausting and even made gaming pretty difficult if not outright painful. It does not help that my computer set up is not very comfortable or effective in terms of letting me play while pain free. Lucky for me, I also have a PlayStation 5 that I can play from a more comfortable couch with a heating pad.
Since I was recently playing Monster Hunter Wilds, I decided to pick up a remastering of Monster Hunter Stories from the PlayStation Store. It’s also available through Steam for the PC for those of you in a functional state. In any case, it was described to me as Monster Hunter meets Pokemon, and that is a great way to sum it up. In Monster Hunter Stories, you start out with a very limited character creator and jump into the story of three kids who are sneaking through the forest looking for a monster egg. Eventually, you take one from a nest and hatch it into a Rathalos.
Rathalos looks a lot cuter than the giant hellbeasts I’ve been fighting in Wilds. One of the kids in your group names it Ratha, and it becomes your friend.
Later on, to advance the plot, a monster shrouded in a black aura attacks your village. It kills one of the kid’s parents and knocks Ratha into a ravine. Eventually, the monster is chased away, and everyone has to deal with the fallout of the attack. There is a time skip, and the plot follows you to the point where you are taking your test to be a monster rider.
You pass the monster rider test, and you get to set off on your adventure to explore the world. The combat loop is close to rock, paper, scissors in that you can chose a power attack, speed attack, or technical attack. Your opponents do the same, with each attack being better or worse against one other. It’s a type of combat that should be familiar to anyone who plays a lot of casual-like strategy titles. For example, it was recently featured in our Drop Duchy review.
The combat strategy gets a little more complicated when you factor in skills and being able to mount your monster for special attacks. While not overly complicated, it moves Monster Hunter Stories along at a good pace. The mount special attacks are unique and fun, like one with a monster who is like a bear/badger hybrid creature that jumps for a fish and both the monster and player catch the fish in their mouths together. Yum!
The plot for Monster Hunter Stories isn’t going to take your breath away. It’s standard fantasy fare with a kid learning more about the outside world while dealing with society judging him as an outsider. The monsters are a nice mixture of creatures from numerous series including staple monsters like the Rathian, Rathalos, Yian Kut-Ku, and Tigrex. The developers at Capcom did a great job of translating the usual adversarial monsters into being your friendly neighborhood guardians. And you get new monsters by finding nests and sneaking out with eggs, which I thought was a fun touch.
Overall, Monster Hunter Stories was a fun experience for me while I continue to recover. I was even able to find a signed Funko Pop of the character Avinia and send it to GiN columnist Vincent Mahoney as a thank you for recommending Stories to me. Sometimes, just a simple role-playing game is all you need to feel better after a traumatic week. I hope to get back to reviews soon, but even typing this column has been taxing. Hopefully soon I will be back to 100 percent so that I can provide more columns for you all. But thanks to Monster Hunter Stories, I can at least forget about the pain for a while and slowly recover.