Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin Trial Version
Before I start my next full length game, I decided to check out the trial version of Monster Hunter Stories 2, or as Allie called it after watching me play “Dinosaur Hunter.”
I went into this with super low expectations, as I started the first game on my 3DS and overall just got bored with it. I felt much of that same boredom in the original for the first hour or so of the demo, but things did start to feel better towards the end.
The battle system is very “rock-paper-scissors” oriented, and you only have complete control over your human character. Your monster companion during battle is somewhat on auto-pilot, however you can issue some commands to it if you want to over-ride a behavior that they’re exhibiting. During the demo you also had a companion duo of another human character, alongside their monster pal. It gives a uniqueness to the battle system a-la the early Persona titles where you only control your main character. However, the difficulty here was still very very low.
There’s a crafting system in place here, where you gather materials from the maps to make stronger items, forge/upgrade weapons and even to complete fetch quests. It felt way more natural than the typical “monsters drop money and equipment” trope. Where do monsters come up with all that money anyways? I smell a ruined economy with out of control inflation every time I can get infinite wealth by killing slimes. Anyways…. I liked being able to craft my armor and weapons, and I bring that up to transition to the next cool thing I liked about this game so far.
Depending on the equipment you have on your appearance will change. This is very common in traditional Monster Hunter games, and I’m glad it’s here as well. You can freely alter the colors of your armor as well, for no charge, in your home. I liked playing with the color palettes, more than I thought I would.
The music was pretty good, although nothing memorable comes up as I mention it. The graphics are pretty good for a Switch title, and I barely noticed any performance issues.
My main annoyance of this game, though, was the silent protagonist that is spoken for by the annoying little cat creature Navirou. Again I am reminded of Persona 5, where Morgana speaks for you. This time though it seems much more annoying for some reason. Compared to some other cat companions you saw in the game that seemed much more mature and had less grating voices, Navirou is pretty irritating.
The story is your typical “there’s something bad happening and we need to find out what”, but it was told well. It was actually kind of charming. It almost makes the inclusion of Navirou bearable.
While the demo was overall an enjoyable experience, nothing really grabbed at me and makes me interested in spending $60 to play it at launch. I don’t think I’ll be picking this up unless it goes on a deep sale and my backlog starts to dry up.
