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May 14 2006
Monster Hunter Freedom Review
PSP Game Review | Strategy
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| Summary: The epic action-RPG you've been waiting for
85
Monster Hunter Freedom, my first experience with the MH-series. And I like it, I like it a lot and cannot understand why it is that I haven’t heard of this before, seeing that I do own a PlayStation 2 (even though it’s only been two years since I purchased it).
Anyhow, let us not discuss my gaming background but get down with the game instead. The title “Monster Hunter” tells you exactly what the game’s all about - tracking down and slaying monsters of various sizes, using a handful of different weapons, items and traps. When you first come to life in this game, after having spent a decent amount of time with the surprisingly well made character creation system, your character wakes up inside his house where there’s a bed (duh) for saving the game, an item box for storing whatever you wish not to carry around, and an info magazine where you may read up on things like how combat works, some notes on the areas where you’ll be hunting, and other topics that should be of great interest to a newcomer like myself.
Outside is the village in which you seem to be living and apart from having a couple of merchants and ordinary people wandering the streets, there’s also the Guild Hall where you embark on quests offline as well as “online” (ad-hoc, more on that later), a sword stuck in a tree stump, and a road that leads to a farm where you may do a number of activities without the risk of getting ambushed by Velicoprey or crushed by a descending Yian Kut-Ku. From what I have come to understand, the Kokoto Farm is a new feature even to veteran players and here’s a brief description of what it’s good for: planting seeds, mining resources, fishing and catching bugs. At least that’s all you can do at the start of the game, but as you buy and sell wares - you’ll gain Kokoto Points for helping the village grow and these points are used for expanding the farm. Not only will you be able to get more out of the stuff already mentioned above - but it seems that you can open up new activities as well. I recently added a Mushroom Tree allowing me to gather different types of mushrooms, for example. Kokoto Farm is a neat little feature that will allow you to get some resources without having to embark on a quest.
Because that’s the only way to leave the village - by embarking on a quest... Wandering off to the village border will only result in discovering an invisible wall, unless you’ve accepted a quest and thus will have the option to leave by pressing the square button. Not to worry though as there are quests that are pretty much impossible to fail and these only seem to serve as a way of leaving the village for resource gathering and weapon practicing. Quests are provided by the Village Chief and, naturally, the Guild. It is suggested that you go speak to the Village Chief first, since his first quests will serve as a tutorial where you learn more on combat, healing, combining items, traps etc. All quests provided are divided into five levels of difficulty, represented by an equal number of stars, and contains a number of quests ranging from 8 and all the way up to 20 (from what I have seen so far). Each quest has a reward, a contract fee (except for the first five missions given by the chief), a time limit and both goal and fail conditions. Quests are also divided into five categories: Gathering, Hunting, Capture, Event and Special and take place in one of five maps: Forest & Hills, Desert, Jungle, Swamp and Volcano. Each map consists of a number of areas - once you leave an area, you’ll have to wait until the next has loaded (think Fable).
So, you’ve accepted and embarked on a quest and thus are now standing in the camp; a place to rest up, do some minor resource gathering, and equip yourself with whatever starting equipment that the Guild or Chief has provided you with - which can be found in a giant, blue chest. Usually you’re given a map of all the areas, something that will restore your health and stamina, a whetstone to help keep your blade sharp, and basic ammunition if that’s the road you’ve taken. For inside your house, at the item box, you have no less than five different weapons to choose from - all with their own advantages, weak points and combat strategies. There’s the “weak” but very mobile Sword and Shield, the strong but very cumbersome Great Sword, the lance for keeping a distance without losing too much attack power, the extremely powerful though slow hammer, and the only ranged weapon available - a crossbow gun (heavier versions are available). You should try at least two of these before deciding on which to use. A sixth weapon does exist but you’ll have to find it first: the dual swords with their lethal combos.
Attacking is as simple as one, two, three. Mastering your weapon, however, isn’t. Believe me when I say that newcomers will wonder why the hell you’re unable to lock-on to creatures... But once you get the hang of it, you’ll forgive them for trying to make a realistic game where aiming and timing is of importance. Unsheathe your melee weapon by pressing triangle and then unleash combos by pressing triangle, circle and both together to perform different types of attacks. Timing is not a must here - simply bashing the buttons will do, but it won’t take you too long before you know exactly when to press the next button in order to extend your combo. The more you use a melee weapon, the sooner its edge will become dull and this will affect the weapon’s attack power. There are four levels of sharpness, presented in colors when examining your weapon (red, orange, yellow and green) and by a changing knife-icon when wandering around the map. Green sharpness gives you a 1.125 damage modifier, yellow is 1.0, orange 0.75 and red will reduce all your damage by half.
Once you’ve slain your first monster, you’ll want to cut it open. Stand next to it and press circle to cut the corpse with your hunter’s knife. This will typically provide you with a fang, some hide, raw meat or something else like that. This is also the main reason to why you hunt - to gather resources from both creatures and the nature itself (piles of bones, honeycombs, plants etc). Fangs are good for both weapons and ammunition, hides and scales will let you create new armor, and herbs can be eaten or combined with blue mushrooms to brew healing potions, for example. There are a ton of stuff to create in this game, it’s just a shame that you don’t have a clue on how to do it... I miss having recipes for what items and potions can be created (however, once you do manage to pull something together, you’ll receive a recipe for it). Thankfully, when it comes to armor and weapons - the shops will instantly tell you the requirements.
Monster Hunter Freedom also has an interesting way of developing skills: all armor will raise a certain skill by a certain number. So what you do is combine pieces of armor in order to raise a skill up to 10 points or more. This will activate the skill and you are then able to e.g. carry more, can withstand knockdowns, or are resistant to stealing - just to mention a few of the skills and their various effects.
Visually the game’s very impressive, as you’ll come to understand the moment you embark on a quest. The environment is highly detailed and monsters do both look good as well as move and behave like you expect them to do (hitting and slaying one Aptonoth may very well cause the rest of the herd to flee in panic). So far I haven’t had any slowdowns either - be it five Velocipreys or one, big Yian Kut-Ku attacking me, the game runs perfectly fine.
But there is one thing that slows the game down significantly, and that’s the frequent loading times. Entering the game as well as loading your next quest can take up to 30 seconds and while a map’s different areas thankfully only takes 4-10 seconds to load, they are all quite small and thus walking across the map will take some time to do.
Overall, Monster Hunter Freedom has been a great experience to me. It’s an incredibly fun and addictive action-RPG and definitely one of the top games out for the PSP. Very appealing visually and the sound isn’t too bad either, with good ambient effects and a nice (though short), Celtic soundtrack. It’s just a shame that they didn’t include more tutorial quests, left out Infrastructure (though ad-hoc play naturally is very enjoyable!) and that the gameplay is plagued by such time-consuming loadtimes. Still, I definitely recommend this game to everyone who finds the concept interesting but be aware that if you’ve never played a MH-game, you might have a hard time grasping the controls and will probably only think of it as an “OK game” the first hour or so, until you’ve completed at least the first five tutorial quests given by the Village Chief and thus have learned more about the game (even though you’ve still only scratched the surface). Now, let’s hope for a sequel with Infrastructure play and that they continue to support this game by giving us downloadable content!
Pros
• Detailed environments
• Good character customization
• Item creation
• Rich on content
• Ad-hoc play
• Downloadable quests?
Cons
• Load times
• Somewhat hard to get into
• Some areas are a little too small
• Infrastructure left out
REVIEW IT
PRODUCT INFO
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Comments
wow amazing review.
i cant wait to get thisg ame may 24th, when my gamestore gets it
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While I was reading the review, I got quite excited. I'm just questioning the game because on the Cons you said "Somewhat hard to get into". That's not good to hear.......
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GREAT review! Ok..this is now a must buy. I'm glad you stuck with the game long enough to find it rewarding. I haven't ever played MH and am/was hoping its as good as it looks. I love good RPG's and this one sounds, from your description, to have alot of be best elements of a good one! Is it a LONG game? It sounds like your still playing it now.. so I'd assume theres alot too it? Again, great review, thanks!
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Great review! I can barely wait to pick this up, and this early reveiw has helped me remember to start scraping up the money. I love that it really seems to be an RPG, where you actualy need to find out for yourself how to make food, and what you want to kill for armour, etc.
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Chance said: "GREAT review! Ok..this is now a must buy. I'm glad you stuck with the game long enough to find it rewarding. I haven't ever played MH and am/was hoping its as good as it looks. I love good RPG's and this one sounds, from your description, to have alot of be best elements of a good one! Is it a LONG game? It sounds like your still playing it now.. so I'd assume theres alot too it? Again, great review, thanks!" I don't have the game, but there are over 200 missions.
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is this a review of the japanese version then? been waiting for this one for a while.
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no im think he reviewd some european version of the game since it comes out a bit earlier there, but not sure
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KageNaruto said: "no im think he reviewd some european version of the game since it comes out a bit earlier there, but not sure"
yeah, makes sense.
though i wish this review didnt come out til later this month so i wouldnt have thought about it until closer to the US release lmao.
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Thanks a lot guys, I'm glad you enjoyed the review despite its flaws - I accidentally left out some information like ad-hoc because I was feeling a little stressed at time when I wrote it, and once I got to the game's graphics all I could think of was "Damn, I must come to a conclusion now or no one's going to read it!"
Multiplayer
So, what I would like to add is that there are two modes in multiplayer: either you and up to three of your friends takes on a quest from one of the five categories given at the Guild Hall, or you and just one more Hunter can search for treasures instead. So you could say that there's actually six categories, because Treasure Hunting will reward you with equipment that cannot be found elsewhere in the game. Supposedly, the game itself can and will also reward you for spending a lot of time playing with others and making friends, instead of going solo all the time. At least that's what I heard while playing the game (from a villager), cannot confirm it or say anything on what rewards you might get.
Text quality
More so, I would like to mention that the font and overall quality of the text in this game is pretty poor... It's not quite as bad as the case was with Kingdom of Heaven/Paradise but still, they really should've done something about it before releasing the game because I feel that the font chosen is too narrow and even feels a bit blurry. But maybe it’s just us near- and farsighted who might experience problems with this. I thought it would be worth mentioning though because they could’ve done a lot better on this point IMO.
I think that's all, at least for now. Now onto your questions:
GTALCS said: " I'm just questioning the game because on the Cons you said "Somewhat hard to get into". That's not good to hear......."
Yeah it can really be an issue, that’s why I in my review try to stress how important the tutorial quests given by the Village Chief are, because without them (as a newcomer to the series) - you won't understand much of what's going on.
On the other hand, I lack the manual (someone, please scan it!) so maybe it won't be as bad for those of you who actually buy the game instead of gets a promo. But if not - please remember everyone to accept and fulfil the first 10 or so quests given by the Chief, because they'll help you understand the game.
Chance said: " Is it a LONG game? It sounds like your still playing it now.. so I'd assume theres alot too it? Again, great review, thanks!"
Yeah like GTALCS says, supposedly there's at least 200 quests to embark upon (though I'm guessing that includes multiplayer) and so far I've only completed 16 in 17 hours. I've spoken to veteran players who claim that you could easily spend 500 hours with Monster Hunter (I'm guessing that you’ll have to really fall in love with the game for that to happen, though).
Agent808 said: "is this a review of the japanese version then? been waiting for this one for a while."
European version, hence is why my review was submitted for “Monster Hunter Freedom” (Monster Hunter Portable is the Japanese version).
Thanks again for you comments.
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did you say over 500 hours of game play can be put in this......i don't know but if it true, i am definatly gettin' it. but has anyone played the one for ps2, if yes, about how many hour of gameplay was there ( PLEASE HELP ME OUT, I REALLY WANT TO KNOW) PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
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Well in one of the player reviews of the PS2-version at GameSpot, the author claims that he has spent more than 500 hours of playing time and still finds it fun.
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I clocked in about 400hrs on my ps2 game and still play once in a while, the online would of made this game gold. But if your a big fan of MH then this is a must have. Now we can go Los hunting while on the subway, what could be more kickass.
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k, thanks yoall, but since it's not gonna have online game play, how many hours do you think the game will have (single player).
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i just pre-ordered it.. CANT WAIT..
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lol,i am so gonna play this for 5 hundred hours, when i go to bed i play a psp game i already beat for 5 hours just cause its so addicting (its the narutimate psp game, its just such a fun fighting gmae), and i pla it alot during the day too.
cant wait!
my questions: so to have diff characters do you need diff game saves? or are you bale to have like a few to choose from. i think you need gamesaves but since yore able to get so many diff character type si cant help but wonder. also, can you switch your weapon type in the game if you get the weapon?
alsohow often can you save your game?
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