Monster Hunter Freedom Unite

In the world of Monster Hunter you're never alone.

Source // PlayStation

I won't argue with the idea that monster hunting would make a good game. Giving players the tools and the freedom to roam the lands in search of gargantuan beasts to carve up and turn into armour and weaponry sounds pretty cool, and making it a co-operative experience is just a no-brainer.

But I have always been put off by the presentation of the series that does this kind of thing, Monster Hunter. It has always been too convoluted for my tastes, seeming like too much work for too little gain. Will portable offering Monster Hunter Freedom Unite give me a bite-sized starting point to dive into?

Frustrations

My PlayStation Portable pretty much needs to be run off the mains these days. Its portable days are very much behind it, but I can still enjoy sliding a UMD into the delicately chunky disc drive and hearing it whir and rattle into life, providing I've got the game of course, and Monster Hunter Freedom Unite is one of the few PSP games I've got access to - my favourites of the past being inaccessible in storage these days.

I like being able to play on what is a bit of a failure of a product. It's not the nicest of handhelds, but I've had some good times with it down the years and might have more good times with MHFU, which tries to entice us with a CGI intro video of hunters getting up to their hunting. Planning, preparing, working together with their colleagues and then doing it all over again. It's a way of life, and that's probably how we ought to approach it.

So you know that's not going to happen...

The pre-rendered video is replaced by an in-engine video far more representative of what the PSP is capable of chucking out. We're on a snowy mountain, surrounded by giant dead things, and in the sights of a bigger and very much alive thing.

We stand no chance and are immediately thrown off the mountain to our death.

Only kidding. We're still alive, and after a few days of recovery, we can explore our new home, Pokke Village. We're here because we're the replacement monster hunter, the man responsible for defending these folks against all the nasties that exist in the mountains. Some monster hunter, huh?

The village elder can see we're not up to the task, so we need to head to school to learn some things about monster hunting, which is fine by me because I am a complete novice when it comes to this sort of thing. I gather we'll be finding and then killing monsters, but the rest of it is unknown.

There's a lot to learn, but it's all optional by the looks of it. Still, I head into a simple little quest to learn how to swing a sword and gather some meat - I wouldn't be much good if I didn't know how to do either of these things, would I?

The amount of text boxes is too much for my liking, so I skim the important bits before grabbing supplies and running off, where I immediately find how annoying it is to not have camera controls.

There actually are camera controls, but thanks to the limited number of buttons on the PSP, you're not going to like them. The left shoulder button can be used to recenter the camera behind you, allowing you to see the beauty of the environment you're making your way through. If you want more fine-tuning, you're going to need to work out how to use the D-pad while you're thumb is already likely to be occupied on the analogue nub.

You can stop walking - not that you walk very fast in the first place - and manipulate the view, but this is less than ideal. I preferred holding the right shoulder button to sprint, run into place, recenter the camera, and run elsewhere if needed, and that's going to kick me in the arse before too long, isn't it?

The map is chunked up into separate areas, and it is advised that you install data to your memory stick to cut down on load times, but sometimes the reward for sitting through them is a short cinematic of the area, showing your place in a world that would be massive, were it not for the fact that it is clearly only a backdrop to the small halls and corridors that you'll be running through.

Up ahead are these big fellas, and my task is to get two bits of raw meat. I think you can guess what's going to happen here.

You can use melee or ranged weaponry, most of which are exaggerated to the extreme, being carved from the giant bones of a ferocious monster, and the controls are a little weird. There's a ready stance of some sort that modifies attacks, I think, but otherwise, there are a few different attack buttons for a few different attack types.

This one little thingy went down to a single swipe of a small sword. I suspect bigger beasts will require a bit more effort. Stand over the corpse without a weapon equipped and you can skin it to get meat or scales or fur, whatever your hunter may be looking for, I guess, which each type of monster obviously giving up different items.

After dumping some meat into a chest, the training was complete, though you'd be forgiven for thinking you failed if you didn't catch what this said. As I say, the training stuff seems to be optional, and I just want to get stuck into the meat of the game, the hunting.

What you're supposed to do is have a look at the available quests and pick one that suits your level of preparedness and experience. Gathering herbs sounds boring, but going on the hunt for stuff that won't kill you will allow you to come back into the village with ingredients for a potion that'll help keep you alive, or for a meal that will buff your stats or something.

To be honest, I don't know how it all works because it is far too complicated. This is a game where you can employ talking cats as chefs to cook your meals, but I couldn't even find the kitchen. What good will gathering vegetables do for me?

No, I'm interested in the hunting part of Monster Hunter, not the cooking, nor even the trading, upgrading, crafting... None of that interests me, which is a little concerning, seeing as Monster Hunter is actually about the dull stuff as much, if not more than, the actual slaughtering of giant monsters. Shame.

There's no story to follow but the one you make for yourself, so outside of the village hub is effectively a bunch of maps to do hundreds of quests in. Each quest will make use of its own part of the world, and dump you at a camp with some items to make use of and a bed to rest in, should you need to recover in the middle of your efforts.

Seeing as I've done absolutely no preparation like buying items and weapons, these will have to do. Healing potions, hot drinks, something to sharpen my weapons back to full effectiveness - because of course weapons degrade in a game like this - there's enough to get us started.

Now, to the hunt.

Clambering up some ledges and climbing up some vines takes us back to the kind of environment where we nearly died earlier in the week, and it is at this point where I thought it best to check what my quest actual entailed - the killing of 5 carnivores.

What they were I didn't know. There's no way to target a monster and look it up in an encyclopedia, so all I've got to go on is this description. Small and white and carnivorous children-attackers. Let's see what matches that description.

When you do kill something and harvest the remains for useful items, you do get told what you've picked up, which is how I know these small, sort of white things aren't the Giaprey that I'm looking for. According to the map, there are three types of environment in this area, and the green and white sections haven't proven fruitful.

We've got plenty of time to explore, though, so into the ice caves we go.

From this entrance, I immediately stumble into some blue velociraptor looking folks, who attack me so violently I actually get pushed back through a loading screen outside. That's not going to be enough to get me to relent, so I run back in and get slashing.

It's times like these where you wish the PSP had decent camera controls, because this was not a pretty fight, both in terms of seeing it and the strategy involved. Swings were wild because there is no way to lock onto a target and being outnumbered resulted in plenty of hits from behind.

Now, expert monster hunters will likely have plenty of defensive skills or equipment to mitigate against a bad situation like this, but I just have a few attack buttons, a will to win, and the brains to stop in the middle of an active fight to skin a downed monster.

I had found a killed three of the small white monsters I was tasked with defeating, but there were two more that needed to be dealt with before the quest was complete, and eventually, with some prodding of the D-pad to move the camera to a point where I could see down below me, I found them.

While the HUD is eager to show you the state of your health, stamina, weapon, where you are on the map and what items you have access to, there is nothing but your own intuition that tells you the state of the enemy you're trying to kill.

With a poor camera and two or more identical opponents, there's just no way of knowing which one you were attacking unless you kept it in your sights for the entire fight. Should I have tried to lure one away to fight the other alone? I bet there are systems in here that allow for that, but that's a level of preparedness that I'm just not prepared to prepare for, so swing, swing, swing it is.

Fifth and final Giaprey defeated and the screen throws up a note that I'll be transported back to the village in a minute. I don't even need to run back to deliver any quest items on this quest, I'm just going to get zapped out of here. I'll take it. For a game that wants us to cook healthy meals and wear warm clothes before we even think of going hunting, teleporting out of a quest just because it's done doesn't quite feel right, though.

Anyway, we get some rewards for our efforts in the form of money and monster parts, which we can spend on all sorts of items and craft into all kinds of weaponry and equipment before we head out once more into the great unknown in search of the next big bad thing to fight.

Source // PlayStation

Final Word

But that's not going to happen. Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, and Monster Hunter in general, is best played on the assumption that it's going to be a bit of an effort to get through it. It's a job, not a game. You need to manage inventory, learn how to craft and cook, take on the right quests at the right time. It all sounds like a chore that doesn't have a payoff.

The idea of a game like this is that you team up with your friends and tackle the biggest of monsters as a team. Even playing in single-player allows you to have a cat ally follow you into battle, though how effective they are I don't know.

The point is, like the back of the box says, Monster Hunter is a social gaming phenomenon that's taking the world by storm. Well, according to the marketing department, at least. The manual even says that there isn't an end to this game, it's more about doing whatever takes your fancy. It all requires a different approach to getting the most out of it, and I'm not the kind of person to do that.

Not with Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, at least, and definitely not on a PSP. Had the 1001 list introduced us to a console version of this game, I might have come away with a better opinion. As I say, I think the idea of monster hunting is a good one, but the execution I've seen from what little Monster Hunter I've seen doesn't inspire the freedom that the title suggests. Quite the opposite: you do things our way and you'll like it.

I can't recommend Monster Hunter Freedom Unite on account of knowing effectively nothing about it, but I wouldn't recommend it as your first taste of the series. I'm sure that Monster Hunter on the go was great for those who wanted such a thing, but to start with this would be a mistake. It's too much effort.

Would I look into any other Monster Hunter game? Sure. They don't all have cooking in them, right? They do? Oh...

Fun Facts

Handhelds were nice targets for game-themed skins, and Monster Hunter's featured a hairy strap to complete the feel of having skinned a beast to make it.

Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, developed by Capcom, first released in 2008.

Version played: PlayStation Portable, 2009, also via emulation.