We get to grips with Monster Hunter Tri!

Many readers may not be aware, but Monster Hunter has an absolutely huge following all over the world, specifically on the Sony PSP where players still devote hours of their life to the incredible game, it has its own cult status of sorts, and diehard fans still congregate together, five years after its original release to hunt monsters together. Monster Hunter Tri will be the first game in the series available, and designed specifically for the Nintendo Wii; and despite any reservations that fans of the series may have, the game looks very impressive and rivals that of its previous counterparts on the Playstation 2.

The Monster Hunter series is notorious for its steep learning curve, however in Monster Hunter Tri you are no longer thrown into a game, instead you are introduced into the world of Monster Hunter through Moga Village, a small fishing community that have been having trouble with earthquakes, you are shown the various things that you can do in the game, as well as explaining the key points of the game in a very friendly tutorial, allowing for new players to join in on the variety that Monster Hunter Tri has to offer; something lacking slightly on the Wii.

Monster Hunter Tri boasts far more features than its predecessors, including new weapons, such as the versatile Switch Axe that acts both as a great sword and a swinging axe. Underwater exploration and combat is another new and exciting feature, especially as we are promised no fiddly controls, which I can say thankfully is actually true. Monster Hunter Tri will also include a fully functioning Ecology system, which we didn’t manage to see much of but they promise much, and Ecology systems are lacking in most games.

Although they have tried to add as many new features as possible to the previous games in the series, they have kept in everything that makes the games fantastic; there is still as much free-roaming, you can choose to catch bugs and fish all day instead of killing monsters, there’s even a farm where you can kick back and grow some plants, Monster Hunter Tri give players an overabundance of choice, and we know at Gamercast that it will have gamers playing it for hours on end.

Follow up:

We were privileged enough to give the single player campaign a go, creating our character with the customisation tool, and break out from the basic tutorial to do some basic quests, so we could get a feel of the game, we were very impressed, taking into consideration that Capcom have had five years to bring the game to perfection, which is what we think they have done, never before have we been so engrossed in starting out an action orientated RPG, we couldn’t keep our hands off it, they had to tell us to leave. We didn’t get to meet Cha-Cha however; your friendly little helper who will stand alongside you during the single player campaign to compensate for a the allies that you would be playing with online.

The multiplayer portion of the game takes place in the hub of the city of Loc Lac, where players can get together in teams, have a chat or share a meal before they go out on a quest, we gave Qurupeco a go in a team of four people; most of whom had never played a game in the series before, however because of Gamercast’s presence we got the fastest completion time for the quest, clocking in at just over 6 minutes, beating everyone else at the event! The multiplayer played extremely well, and with the support of Wii Speak Monster Hunter Tri really feels like a rival to the once strong Phantasy Star Online.

As well as giving the game a go, we got to use the sleek classic controller pro, which is seeing re-release alongside Monster Hunter Tri on the 23rd April, in order to boost sales on the controller add-on, as Monster Hunter Tri is really best played with it. Generally, it is the classic controller with hand grips, but it works very well for the Wii, getting to grips with it takes a few minutes to figure out the button layout that is somewhat different to normal controller layouts.

When Monster Hunter Tri hit the shelves in Japan back in August it became the best-selling third party game for the Wii, hopefully when Monster Hunter Tri sees release April 23rd 2010 it will have a buzzing online community. -which might we add is free to play- So go brush up on your Monster Hunting skills, there is a season opening soon.