• MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD
  

  56 hours playtime

  18 of 50 achievements

Finished the Elder’s Crossing arc. I was told there are more but at 56 hours, I’m thinking I could already mark this as “done”, especially with the closing credits after this arc. I still intend to continue with the game, especially with Iceborn coming by January 2020, but I wanna go through the rest of my backlog too.

Overall, this game is awesome! I initially thought I won’t enjoy it as much because of the grinding but I ended up doing a lot of grinds to get certain weapons and armor to deal with the next monsters to hunt. The SOS system is also great where I can call for help anytime I’m having trouble with a monster, and people actually showed up! I thought they’d be too busy doing their own thing. Only had one experience where some guy called us a “useless bunch”. Easily ignored and doesn’t seem to be as pervasive as other multiplayer games.

It also felt great to see new monsters, and I think that’s one of the main things that kept me going; I want to know if there are more monsters to discover and how they interact with other monsters, beyond just kind of pushing them out of the way while walking or flying. Deviljho and jyuratodus’s interaction with other monsters are the best IMO. Wish they did more for the other monsters.

The controls can be a bit tricky though, particularly when using items and you have a ranged weapon. I had a hard time choosing an item while avoiding monsters charging at me because the mouse’s scroll button is used for choosing the ammo type. I stuck with melee weapons for most of the game because of this, but I think it’s an unnecessary complexity. It makes for easy changing of ammo at the risk of not having the right item when you need it, but shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Still, it’s a fun game, and I often play a couple of mission at the end of the day without feeling like I’m losing anything in the story. That was a challenge for me when I played story-heavy games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect. I felt like I had to backtrack a bit to make sense of what’s going on, and I couldn’t just do one or two missions and call it a day.