The Monster Hunter Stories duology – hopefully one day to be at least a trilogy – are the perfect gateway titles to get kids into the larger Monster Hunter franchise. It’s pretty fitting for a series of hunting a large constantly growing set of interesting monsters to make a monster-collecting spin-off, it’s a match made in heaven. Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin was an absolute treat, that was only possible because of the massive blow-up the series got that only happened after Monster Hunter Stories. This remaster doesn’t attempt to elevate the visuals to the standards of its sequel, but instead to preserve the original experience.
This is undoubtedly a Nintendo 3DS game at its heart. There are large areas lacking the detail we’d expect of a modern game, with sparse NPCs density and restricted movement options. I’ve warmed up significantly to that system now that we’re so far away from its heyday. There’s something so simple about the budget titles on there, especially ones that shot outside its hardware constraints. Stories was a game made by a team of people who had more or less mastered the 3DS’ tech, and they were well suited to making sizable adventures on the tiny handheld.
Exploring these zones ended up being a lot of fun, especially when the game settles in on its hub zone quest structure a few hours in. You’ll be in and out often, made tolerable with fast travel and rideable monsters. You begin to fall into a charming rhythm of picking up a constantly building list of new quests as you venture out to new areas in your main quest log, and while it’s slow to start it has all the hallmarks of a fun RPG adventure. I’ve never been one to really care for how the mainline games have leaned into more story-based adventures with their main campaign, but Stories is the only time I think this has really worked.
Combat is fueled by a rock-paper-scissors system, with extra detail added on by weapon types and elements. You and your chosen Monstie will be partners, with you able to switch them out as the needs arise mid-combat. Outside of select specials, most attacks fall under the Power, Speed, and Attack categories. Every monster in your party typically falls back on one in particular, with their normal attacks being chosen by AI while yours are always manually selected. You can choose special moves for monsters, but there is a decent amount of randomness if you aren’t making active choices to switch your parties out as the situation demands it. This is an RPG with more than enough manual split-second decision-making, but there’s a lot of tactics involved in picking the right monster to handle the specific situation at the right time and letting their AI take care of the rest.
If both you and your monster pick the same attack that happens to be an enemy’s weakness, you’ll be able to do a combo attack for extra damage. Battles don’t really start the most engaging, with the enemies having all their attacks fall under one kind of attack every single time. I did notice they become more complicated in a few hours, with enemies being less predictable. Battles started getting tense fast, and that worked a lot in keeping me consistently engaged.
You’ll collect more monsters to add to your team by going into monster dens and harvesting them. The main way you can do this is just to find them randomly spread throughout the maps you visit, resulting in a small pocket of random dungeons to briefly explore before reaching the actual den. The eggs you’ll find here are random, and will likely cause you a bit of frustration as you dig through them to obtain one that might be good in your limited number of pulls. I don’t really care for this system, and didn’t really in Stories 2 either. It’s really tedious, and probably the weakest part of the whole game, but you can game it if you know where to look.
Paintballs in older games would mark the monster on your map so you could keep track of them. Over time this whole system became obsolete, but since this is a game largely based on pre-World, paintballs are important. If you find a specific monster you want while out on the field, but don’t want to fumble around for a random chance of hatching one, you can throw a paintball at it for a chance to make it run away. After this, it’ll create a special den specific to it, with the eggs there being for that exact monster. There are few things more satisfying than finding a monster that is meant to be fought on a return visit in your current area, getting the paintball working, and then adding it to your team early.
From here on though, you can customize your monster friends by performing the Rite of Channeling to fuse their passive gene skills into another monster. The monster whose skills will be given to the other will leave your party, but you’ll probably be getting so many eggs that you won’t miss them for long. The gameplay loop is strong here, as strong as you can imagine for an adaptation of Monster Hunter’s. Grinding monsters for parts to improve your main character, going on quests to get even more resources and money to support this, exploring the world, finding eggs along the way to buff out your team, fuse them into each other, rinse and repeat. It’s a genuinely fun comfort food RPG that has been great to play in small bursts over my time with it.
The biggest two additions for most of us in the West are a voice-acted story and Japan-exclusive content. Most if not all the actors from Stories 2 have returned to play the younger versions of themselves, and the localization gives them a lot of charming dialogue to work off of. This whole game has a “Saturday morning anime on Disney XD” energy that you rarely see fully embraced in monster-collecting games like this.
I mentioned this in my preview, but the performance is a bit inconsistent but ultimately solid enough. The focus here was on resolution, which appears to me to be running at native resolution in both docked and handheld. Monster Hunter Stories 2 looks stunning, but the flat coloring goes a long way in making the original have a cheery, cartoonish look that works very well with the models as crisp as they are now.
Outside of egg farming being annoying, I’d say nothing about Monster Hunter Stories is inherently “offensive” but rarely is it truly amazing. The simplicity gets in the way of that, but I’d still argue that isn’t an issue. If you could only afford one of the two Stories games, I’d probably recommend its sequel. It’s quite impressive though to see how much they got right on the first go, and it shows just how flexible the Monster Hunter franchise can really be. If you have a younger sibling or child interested to start checking out family-friendly games in this genre outside of Pokémon, you won’t find one with as much polish as this one.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch
Review copy provided by Capcom
