A game for all you monster hunters out there!
GAMEPLAY:Now we move on to the real meat of this game, the gameplay! If you couldn't guess, the game is all about hunting!...or well, mostly hunting. You'll sometimes have to go fetch some materials for some quests, or go fishing (just as "fun" as it is in real life!). Each hunt/fetch quest will take you to different areas, whether it be Moga Woods, or the Sandy plains, or the swampy flood floor, and these places all have different attributes to them. IN the sandy plains, for example, the desert parts of it will have extreme heat, which will deplete your health, unless you drink a cold drink. This adds a bit of variety to your hunting.
While you spend quite a bit time slaying monsters, you'll also be chilling at Moga Village alot, too. Here you buy items, materials, weapons/armor, everything and anything you will need on your quests. The more you play the game, the more stuff that becomes available at the village to help you with your hunting, such as a cat chef who will cook food for you to increase stats, or a man who will trade with you and bring in materials from other lands to trade to you, trhere's even some little wooden dude named Cha-Cha who fights alongside you on your hunts of if you let him. There is plenty of stuff to deal with at Moga village, expect to be seeing alot of it!
When it comes too the actual hunting and fighting, well, it's a mixed bag for me. It's fun, but can be frustrating as well. You cannot lock onto eneies at all; there are plenty of times I hve missed an enemy by not getting the right angle, and then enemies will move out of my way as I am hacking and slashing so I'm just swinging at air. Then also, when you use some items, there can be unnecessarily long animations, such as after drinking a health potion, your character will swing his arms to the air, and there is nothing you can do to stop this animation, you become a sitting duck for your enemies! Or to be more precise, an idiotic duck who's triumphetly swinging his arms up as an enemy is charging at him/her. I suppose this was all to add realism to the game, though all it does is make hunting more inconvenient.
The realism in this game isn't all bad though. In MH3, you don't control some mighty hero of destiny or super-human person or a soldier infused with magic or whatever, you fight as a normal, typical man/woman. You character has limitations as well, such as getting exhausted from running for too long, not being able to withstand extreme heat or cold, running out of oxygen while underwater, etc. There are ways to help counteract these though, such as using certain items or eating certain combonations of food from the cat chef, and more. This alll adds more depth to the gameplay.
Another inconvenience this game has is entering monster data into your Hunter's notes. To do so, you must use your Wii-mote to drag an enemy's name into the hunter's journal notes in the corner. This is a hassle when getting attacked by said monsters, and when you can't control the camera while in the hunter's notes. I guess playing with a Wii-mote and nunchuck would make this easier, but you would rather play with a cIassic controller or cIassic controller pro, anyways, since they are the superior controllers to use in the game.
The difficulty of this game all depends on how well you prepare for a quest. You gotta bring the most appropriate equipment on whatever beast you are hunting, and bring the appropriate items (though there is a box at your hunter's camp that gives you necessary items at the beginning of each quest).The more you are prepared, the easier the quest becomes. Many of the beginning quests are easy, of course, but it doesn't take long before you start fighting bigger and tougher monsters, the fiurther you advance, the bigger and tougher the enemies get.
This game also comes with an WiFi mode and an arena mode. I have not yet tried WiFi, but I would assume it's more fun to play with others rather than just yourself, though perhaps even more frustrating if you get stuck with a team of newbies who mess everything up. Knowing myself, however, I could end up being one of those newbies and get yelled at over Wii Speak and get called a "dumb noob" or "*** ass *****", and then proceed to eat a tub of ice cream as I despair. Now the arena mode I have checked out. It's basically like your quests from the main game, only a friend can join in, you have to choose from an already determined sword/shield set, giant sword set, hammer set,or bowgun set, the focus is on big hunts, and you fight within an arena instead of outdoors. It's definitely worth checking out, since the rewards you get from the arena do transfer to the main game.
PRESENTATION: MH3 is a decent looking game. the graphics are good, though they don't wow, but I gotta admit the water looks quite impressive in this game, especially when underwater. The sound is very good in this game; monsters make out very authentic sounding howls, screams, when cutting open animals to gain bones, guts, etc. it really sounds like your tearing the animals up, and when a big monster approaches, the music is very jaws-esque, letting you know that a hug monster is coming to tear you up! And boy, let me tell, when first dealing with the lagiacrus in a certain quest very early in the game, the music got me feeling pretty damn tense as I tried swimming for my dear life with a low stamina bar while still kinda getting used to the camera while swimming; certainly had my heart pumping. But many other times there is no music on quests, which is probably for ambiance as you run around focusing on hunting, which is fine, but can make the game dull sometimes as you are just running around aimlessly on mostly empty fields with small weak monsters...for me anyways.
OVERALL: This game has it's annoying flaws, and as I mentioned early, can be a bit stale at times, but still, it can be fun plenty of times, too, and has plenty of things to do, from main game quests to online to the arena.