Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is Monster Hunter at its best. Containing an unpretentious but well-written story, a lot of new bosses, equipment and locations, the game’s only problem is to have too many luck-based systems.

In Monster Hunter 4, the player controls an avatar completely devoid of personality, whose function is merely to represent them in that universe. The protagonist is a novice hunter who has just been hired to protect a caravan, The Capital C, from possible monster attacks. However, when a mysterious dragon with black scales starts to infect the local fauna with a virus that leaves the carrier in a frenzy, the entire ecosystem gets endangered.

The game’s narrative has no great pretensions, never aiming to discuss social problems or develop complex characters. To make up for that, and certainly helped by the localization work commanded by Andrew Alfonso, the writers fill the dialogues with energy. The intention is not to make the player reflect on a subject, but simply have fun.

Few are the dialogues that don’t try to make us smile. In a conversation with a merchant at the beginning of the game, for example, the character subverts expectations with an analogy that makes fun of his precarious state of health: “Merchants like myself rely on trade routes to search our wares. Sadly the trade routes are as stopped up as my arteries.” Similarly, another character is a recurring gag, as she always seems desperate to return to her rural village, offering more and more difficult missions to help her get there, but she never leaves when the player finally completes them.

In the same way, Palicoes, who are anthropomorphic cats that can accompany the protagonist in battles, seem unable to speak without making puns about being felines: “A large meownster is closing in on the village, and I mean to purrtect it,” says a brave cat at one point. “Try taking a break meow and then,” some Palicoes recommend on the game’s home screen.

But it’s not just of jokes that the story of Monster Hunter 4 is made of. Several dialogues are built to convey a sense of adventure; to establish that the player is venturing into the unknown and that this enterprise is an essential part of human nature. After losing an argument with his daughter about letting her travel with the Capital C, for example, a blacksmith vents: “Gaaah, fine! She’s human, she probably can’t help it.”

The very structure of the game reinforces this sense of adventure, with its episodic format filled with fantastical situations: at one time, the protagonist will be traveling aimlessly on the high seas to reach a lost island; at another, they will be helping the inhabitants of a mining town near a volcano – and always one step closer of unraveling the mystery around the black-scaled dragon.

The game’s narrative tries to make the player understand that it’s because of this need to venture into the unknown and overcome challenges that human beings have managed not only to survive but also to establish themselves as the dominant species in this world populated by dinosaurs and giant snakes. Adventure is both the mortar that sustains that society and the engine that drives the actions of the protagonist. As that same blacksmith explains, in a way that would make the protagonist of Doctor Who certainly smile, “But as crazies as humans are, they pull off some incredible things.”

Even the brief descriptions of each mission are written with care, adapting the language to their specific context. The text of one of the missions placed by that girl that never returns to her rural home, for example, is marked by orality traits typical of a large urban center, suggesting that the character’s conflict is due to her identification with the place where she is now: “Oh my PICKLES! All I want is to get home from Val Habar. That’s all! But nooooooo! Those two Gypceros gotta be like that, spitting poison all over the place. Mind doing me a solid here?” Meanwhile, another mission – an investigation on a frozen island on the high seas – has a text that seems to have been written by a pirate: “Twas in the Frozen Seaway, I was, and that’s when I felt it – like me blood turned ta ice. Somethin’ was a-spyin’ on me. Cross me heart and hope ta die. Mind sussin’ out the creepy peeper?”

These missions are usually made up of long confrontations with immense and ferocious creatures that resemble stylized versions of dinosaurs or dangerous animals. They are monsters whose roars paralyze the protagonist and whose height exceeds theirs by more than six times.

Monster Hunter 4 is an action game, requiring fast reflexes and plenty of skill at the controls. However, the protagonist is reasonably slow: their attacks not only take a long time to hit the target, but also have a long recovery animation. Moreover, there is no way to lock on enemies, forcing the player to aim all attacks manually at huge creatures that never stop moving. To use recovery items, it’s necessary to put our weapons down momentarily and also watch a purposefully long animation. The same stamina bar is used both for attacks and for blocks and dodges, limiting the player’s actions. In other words, the main combat mechanics are built to accentuate the ferocity of the monsters, mainly by contrast: it doesn’t matter that the character carries a sword twice as big as their own size, since their opponents are even bigger, and much, much faster.

A crucial element that makes the fights more intense resides on the game’s interface: monsters have no life bar. By eliminating this abstraction, the developers force the player to always remain alert, not knowing exactly how far their opponent is from dying. Furthermore, the developers encourage the player to never take their eyes off the monsters, for they show signs of exhaustion and the amount of damage they have taken – when they are about to die, they start to limp, for example.

The focus is on reading the monsters and being able to predict when it will breathe fire or attack with its tails, and so position ourselves to take better advantage of the situation. Positioning during battle becomes even more fundamental due to the system that offers special rewards if specific parts of the creatures are damaged. Hit a dragon’s tail a sufficient number of times and it will eventually fall off during the fight; attack the creature’s mouth regularly and its jaw will break; hit its horn hard and a piece will fall off. This system is responsible for making battles more dynamic, as the monsters get in a state of anger when this occurs, becoming incredibly agile, encouraging the player not to abuse the same strategy for too long, with the danger of not getting the rewards for destroying specific parts. And it also offers an important sense of progression during the fights: we may not be sure how close we are to killing the monster, but we are already satisfied to see it snorting for having its horn broken, its wings pierced, and its back heavily cut.

The novelty introduced in this version of Monster Hunter is the addition of verticality, which can be used by both the player and the monster. If the former can now take advantage of ledges to jump on the back of a creature and, after a rodeo minigame, knock it momentarily to the ground, the monster, in turn, can hang on branches and attack us from a better position.

New weapons have also been added, such as the Insect Glaive: a stick that can be used to jump on a monster’s back and which comes with a mechanical beetle capable of capturing the creatures’ “essence” and leaving the player stronger with it. It’s worth noting that each weapon is a new experience, since attacks and recovery time change completely with each weapon. Regarding the number of bosses, there are seventy-five in total,  and twelve new monsters, such as the Najarala serpent, which curls up around the protagonist and throws its scales at them; and the great black dragon, Gore Magala, who, with its eyes covered by a shell and two large wings that stretch out like a purple cape while spreading a poisonous cloud that infects the hunter, makes from a frightening and formidable enemy.

But Monster Hunter 4 doesn’t have just boss battles. There are transport missions – usually carrying a creature’s eggs to a base, looking for shortcuts while dodging attacks from the creature itself – and missions that have us collecting ingredients to make specific potions.

After all, although the player’s skill is ultimately the crucial factor during battles, preparation before missions decides whether they’ll have at least a chance: without wearing the proper equipment, carrying a reasonable number of healing potions, some meat to increase the stamina bar, and taking into account the environment that the battle will take place – bringing hot drinks to Frozen Seaway, for example – the player will fail before they even have a chance to grasp what’s going on. Due to the usually high difficulty of the fights and the numerous factors that affect them – such as the temperature of the environment, poisoning, bleeding, freezing, and even the possibility of the character’s armor catching fire – preparation before each fight is essential.

It’s just a shame that the developers have left so much to the player’s luck, putting numerous systems based on RNG (Random Number Generator) in the game. The main rewards of a monster’s death have always been based on luck, although breaking its parts alters the percentages and adds some specific prizes – leading us to face them more than once if we want to craft their armor. A player wearing a full set made from Gore Magala, for example, will certainly understand the monster’s nuances more than any other player.

However, in Monster Hunter 4 developers extend the RNG to systems that don’t take any benefit from it, only complicating our life: what is the need for certain missions, called Advanced, to be affected by RNG and only be available at random times? What is the need for expedition missions to be randomly obtained by defeating some monsters? A player wishing to assemble an armor from the unicorn Kirin, for example, needs to go through a real via crucis if they are unlucky: find out which expedition monsters unlock the Kirin mission, wait until one of them is available, kill the monster, but receive another mission as a reward, wait for the RNG to put that same monster available again, face it again, receive the same mission as before, wait again, and repeat this whole process until it works, then fight Kirin several times for the armor. In a nutshell, it’s just an unnecessarily stressful process.

Monster Hunter 4 already offers an enormity of content; there is no need to make grinding a tiresome activity. Even a robust online mode is available, where the player fights together with three other hunters, with specific monsters and a unique difficulty available.

As for its presentation, although the game’s premise – fighting huge monsters – is more suited for a large screen, thanks to the scale of the creatures, Monster Hunter 4 works well on Nintendo 3DS due to the handheld’s stereoscopic 3D: what it loses in size, it gains in depth. And the soundtrack is very varied, containing specific themes for most monsters, which gives the fights their own musical identity: the confrontation with the huge wolf Zinogre, who manipulates electricity with its horns, is accompanied by a frenetic piece of music based on an electric guitar, for example.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is an excellent action game for the Nintendo 3DS, offering a well-crafted story, a robust combat system, and over a hundred hours of content.  Its only problem is to leave more than it should in the hands of luck, in an unnecessary attempt to force the player to remain playing for even more time.

February 10, 2020.

Review originally published in Portuguese on June 26, 2016.