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« on: April 16, 2026, 06:28:23 pm »
5: Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection (PS5)
I had a feeling back when I played the demo that I wouldn't be able to put this one down once I started it, and I was right. This game is worth every penny of the $70 I spent on it. Rarely does a new game exceed my expectations these days, and even more rarely does it turn out to be one of the best games I've ever played, but that's exactly the case here. This is the pinnacle of creature-collecting games. This game saw everything Pokemon Legends: Arceus did right and said, "Hold my beer." It's the same basic formula, but expanded so far in every imaginable direction that it ascends to a higher form. The art style is a massive improvement over that of the previous two Monster Hunter Stories games, keeping the anime-esque shaders while thankfully ditching the chibi proportions and preteen protagonists that other games in this genre adhere to like a religion. Finally a developer understood that some older fans of the genre want huge badass monsters and not beady-eyed yellow fuzzballs. And it's so nice to have a player character who looks like they could have a driver's license.
This game has a wonderfully complex turn-based battle system which forces you to take into account not only the element of your attack, but also the type of the attack (speed, power, or technical), the type of your enemy's attack, the charge gauge of your weapon, the type of attack your partner monster is using, what enemy body part you're targeting with what type of weapon (blunt, slash, or piercing), and whether or not the enemy is targeting you (which causes a clash called a head-to-head resolved by a rock-paper-scissors type alignment). This brings me to the next great thing about the game, its difficulty. This game is really freaking hard, and demands you learn the ins and outs of its battle system or else it will gladly bend you over the nearest table and ream your ass. When I first started the demo, I saw that in each battle you had three hearts that would auto-resurrect you or your monster when one of you died. I thought, "Oh cute, they dumbed the combat down for the modern audience." WRONG. This is actually a legitimate gameplay mechanic, and you will have to think hard about how many hearts you have left, whether or not you have any life essence to restore them, and whether you want to use items to heal your ailing monster's status or just let it die and come back with its stats refreshed. Unless the monsters you're fighting are the same level as you or lower, you will be dying a lot in each battle.
Like Legends: Arceus, MHS3 takes place in open-zone maps which you must explore and harvest new monsters from. These maps are a great example of how to make an open map without making it too big and empty. The method of acquiring new creatures is different from Pokemon, though. You don't capture the adult monsters, you raid their dens and steal their eggs. This often leads to comical situations where you're running out of a den carrying an egg the size of a small beach ball while the angry mother chases you down. The monsters themselves are highly customizable, as each has nine gene sockets where you can add new attacks from other monsters via the Rite of Channeling (medieval gene splicing), which is in itself a lot of fun. Want to give an extremely powerful water attack to a fire-type monster? In MHS3, you can do it. This gives you a new reason to capture monsters you already have: gene farming.
I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a perfect game, and even though I love MHS3, it has a few minor things I think they could improve. First, the game could have used one more area, or at least the fourth and final area could have been more fleshed out. Two thirds of it are basically a FFX-style winding corridor. After the second and third areas, it definitely feels like they ran out of time here. Second, the game could use more monsters. The ones in the game are great, but I've just started MH Wilds (which came out last year), and I'm already seeing monsters like the Quematrice that I wish had made it into MHS3. Third, even though they ditched the old chibi aesthetic, there are still some minor issues with monster scaling compared to the mainline series. For instance, I was excited to find the Barroth (one of my favorites from MH World) had made it in, but disappointed to find out it was significantly smaller than it was in World. The party/riding model feels like you're just riding a big cow. The scaling issue is exacerbated by the fact that the models for monsters in your party are further reduced in size by about 25% from the ones you see in the wild. It's annoying once you notice it and makes you feel like you got a gimped monster. Fourth, unlike other MH games, there's no option to make the palicoes speak cat. This is bad because Rudy is annoying and a bit of a control freak. He's also very, very loud (at least in the english VO). But it says a lot about a game when the only flaws I can find with it are that there isn't more of it, they made my Barroth small, and the cat is annoying.
You know a game has to be amazing when I spend 110 hours in it and immediately start another playthrough after the final boss. After 90 hours in AC Valhalla last year, I felt like I needed a vacation. Yet I'm still playing MHS3 a week after beating it. I can't praise this game enough, it has replaced PL: Arceus on my list of top 10 best games of all time. Nintendo made the Pokemon game I always dreamed of as a kid, but Capcom made the Pokemon game I dreamed of playing as an adult.
Rating: 10/10 Near-Perfect.
Completed:
Tomb Raider II (Evercade)
Tomb Raider III (Evercade)
Mafia: The Old Country (PS5)
Gundam Breaker 4 (PS5)
Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection (PS5)
In Progress:
Final Fantasy IV Advance (GBA)
Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation Remastered (PS4)
Resident Evil: Code Veronica X (Gamecube)
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