Your joy really does depend on your tolerance here, but your friends really will help...
Sometimes, all a game needs to do is one thing to bring you into its world and agree to pay, this is why Monster Hunter has brought me in. For a long time, I've been looking for a game where I could hunt down my beast living my life as a hunter, gathering, exchanging, and crafting. But I wanted it to be actual one on one, no spells, no completely unreal creatures; I wanted a world where I could hunt big creatures like dragons, dinosaurs, buffalo, and so on. If you share that kind of idea, you may want to check this title out because it is the only game that I could find that has this sort of interaction without being confronted by RPG's, I find RPG's to be slow and not mimicing of the way an actual battle carry out; (I slash you, then you club me with a hammer. Why not I slash you until you manage to block, if you then can hit me in time before I retaliate with another attack than so be it, thats how an actual battle would be carried out, not executed like your turn to move in a board game).
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Monster Hunter seems to not be an RPG but do to certain limitations with how far this product reaches out it does sometimes feel that way. The story is more of a legend, once upon a time when there were dinosaurs and dragons, mankind had one desire to rid the world of them all. No motives, no speech, little persoanlity, this is a game as if a big mission pack. You hunt, but you also gather by mining, fishing, scouring, carving, stealing, or inheriting. What you get may be used, combined or, exchanged items to aid you in combat, or strengthen your armour or weaponary. Your missions include either hunting down a creature, killing so many creatures, gathering something, or go on special, frusturating egg hunts. Thats what the game is but there is more depth, combat involves you selecting a certain weapon club, swords, spears, and so have one armor while gunners acustomized towards crossbows and so forth can have their own armor, you can find some material fitting for both gunners and blademasters but its difficult. You then enter a area divided into a number of subsections meaning you have load times abundanly popping in. Each weapon has a few moves but not much, the right analog stick is repsonsible for all moves you make, though of course; they are automated and there is too much time when changing from one move to another especially when fighting groups of enemies or most definatley against bosses, there is just too many times that you don't complete a move by getting attacked and losing the whole attempt. You could stick by what combos you find, it makes one move link into another with less hastle but It is a long ways away from away solving the problem. You can use traps, baits, and act as a decoy in ways (roll away just before the monster attacks), this helps out allot, fighting may come off a bit hit and miss but the camera uses the d-pad that means lots of readjusting. On the plus side the enemies may be mostly stupid (why the hell is a big dragon not obligated to eat that helpless dinosaur infront of him) every boss and most common enemies have their own fighting techniques, you can block his ram (if your in the right postion) but that won't do anything against his BBQ fireball. See, its got aspects of fun but theres allot of trouble to be taken in. Something perposterous is the aspect of randomness when you attain something; I had the issue of carving into a creature that took a week of preparing for to not find my lightcrystal boy was I pissed; there needs to be a carving index so that you don't find something that should of came from a wing when you were carving into the things damn jaw! This problem also occurs with mining and fishing, and combining but they don't have as large roles so the rarity system is excusable to a ceratin extent. There also isn't much interaction; search as much as you like but you can't do things like chop down a tree for wood or set the forest on fire. Your armour will help out providing you use the right elements, but with limited income, you have to make choices if you ever want to progress forward you will also spend allot of time just preparing yourself for that next big boss battle or nothing but that new weapon upgrade, though despite all of this just wait till you pick it back up and play again, you will find yourself wanting to come back. So its repetitious, akward gameplay is frustrurating but killing bigger and badder enemies is obviously fun if not very frusturatung, thank god there is 4 player co-op online because you need allot of tolerenace to play through this game. The game is not long, just incredibly slow, just watch yourself replay over and over to get more items, what this game misses is to go hunting as you please replay for money and items, why not just go on my own hunt with no time limits or obligations? Doesn't exist. What keeps it somewhat joyful is what humor you can get out of the dumb villagers, and the feeling of just being in a great, grand hunting adventure? Only sometimes, but at least the game has nice cinematics a solid framrate and very nicely detailed enemies and even better looking bosses; on the otherside, allot of grass and plants are 1 dimensional plants, and the enviroments lack the detail they should have. The sound is better, the music has a kind of catchy toon that I still remember points of today while the effects are all fair to good. So after the 150th hour, I had my fill of banal killing, minigames of fishing and mining, being picketted by cats and enougth egg dropping for all eternity, so I finally did just sell it. I can see how you can be lured in and if you still want a copy get your fill, though it will be much better with firends.