You can always tell when people haven't played a game fully when they give it an instant 10! or 9! right out the box!
I took my time digesting Monster Hunter Tri. I never payed much attention to the series before. It just wasn't a game I'd be interested in. Now with a wii as my sole console I didn't have much choice but to check it out. So I heard all the hype surrounding the game and went and got a copy. At the time I write this I have 200+ hours dropped into this game. Most of that is online play.
After playing the game for so long here is a tried and true review of the game!
First of all I just want to say that the game looks great! It's not Ps3 great but it's amazingly detailed for a wii game. Now with that out the way let me get on to the game itself.
To sum it up...Monster hunter Tri feels unfinished and rushed. The game has a lot of areas where it could have been improved. I'll start with the biggest issue of this game. THE CONTROLS! Monster hunter tri has very sluggish and unresponsive controls. Your characters movements are very stiff and don't feel like they are designed for the battles this game presents. This is also a double issue as the monsters in the game move quite unrestricted and are much faster than your sluggish character. This is quite frustrating and will result in many quest failures and "faints" in this game. You won't lose a battle because you play bad, you'll lose a battle because of poor controls. You can get better armor, weapons, get better at maneuvering to have less of a reason to worry about the unresponsive controls…but it still doesn't fix the problem. You will need to run, heal, evade, etc. etc. and you will be fighting the games Monster + the poor controls.
I feel like this is something that should have been address and adjusted by the developers. Characters movements are so slow it almost feels like it's turned based. The monsters you fight move so fluently you'll wonder if they were meant to be in the same game as you.
That is one thing I feel that brought the game down and turned a lot of players away from it. The second thing about the game is that for people who play the game even further is that you'll realize the game is extremely short and repetitive. There or only 5 stages/maps and only about 7-8 monsters that you will be fighting over and over and over and over again. Then when you collect your armor you go back to zero and have to start from scratch doing the same thing you just did to get where you were. The game is quite repetitious. When you do the same style of hunts over and over again just with a different monster and the same clunky controls it becomes more of a chore than enjoyment.
The interesting thing about the game is that you can go on line and that refreshes the game. Getting a chance to play an online wii game isn't so common. The online aspect of the game is fun even though most of the time you're just doing the same thing over and over again till you want to kill yourself at least now you have other people there to suffer with you through the grind. Online play is just like offline…it's the same monsters and same maps with the exception of a few event (specialty) quest. It's really just more of the same. Online play is the main reason to get the game really because it's what keeps the game going…even when you've had enough of it.
The bottom line is that Monster hunter Tri is far from perfect. It doesn't deserve a 10 or 9. I rated the game a 6.5 for having crippling controls and a severe lack of content. The game feels incomplete and playing it you realize it when you take down Devil Jho for the 999999th time.