Monster Hunter is an action game series with RPG elements that focuses on complex, tactical fights with huge monsters, and then using those monsters’ parts to craft and upgrade armor and weapons to fight even bigger, more dangerous monsters. The series emphasizes deliberate skillful action that runs light on plot, so you wouldn’t expect to see a turn-based, JRPG, spin-off. Yet, Capcom subverted expectations with the Nintendo 3DS’ Monster Hunter Stories, and demonstrated that Monster Hunter can be a compelling JRPG with a healthy injection of Pokemon-like creature collecting. It was received well enough that Capcom made a sequel, Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin. This $59.99 Nintendo Switch game (also available on PC) follows a similar path as the first game, just in a bigger, prettier world with more monsters to fight and collect.
Ride, Don’t Hunt
Instead of a titular monster hunter, you play a monster rider, an adventurer who lives in the same world as hunters, but has a different philosophy about dealing with the large creatures. Riders foster “monsties”, monsters hatched from eggs collected in dens and raised to fight alongside their riders. The idea enables Monster Hunter Stories 2’s fight-alongside-your-favorite-monster gimmick, but besides a vague message about living alongside monsters and being less aggressive than hunters, you’re really doing the same thing but with a pet. You don’t capture monsters in the wild; you take their eggs from dens and raise them to be friendly monsties. The monsters you do fight (and there are a lot of them) are stripped for their parts just like in a regular Monster Hunter game, so the more peaceful message doesn’t really hold up to much scrutiny.
The story is similar to the first Monster Hunter Stories on the 3DS. You play a young rider, the grandson of a legendary rider (who may or may not be the main character from the first game; the timeline is very vague on that) who watched over a village for years with his Rathalos. Rathalos, incidentally, is the franchise’s flagship monster, basically the Pikachu of Monster Hunter. Like in the first game, you obtain a mysterious egg that contains a unique Rathalos that could be the portent of ruination. Also like the first game, Monster Hunter Stories 2 features a mysterious force that makes monsters become violent and attack people. So you must explore the region to solve these two mysteries and protect your village and the world.
Places to See, Monsters to Catch
Like the first game and most kid-friendly JRPGs like Pokemon, the story is an excuse to travel to different places, fight increasingly difficult enemies, and collect better equipment. You go to a new town, meet a new partner and monstie, and get directed by a village leader to perform a series of tasks in the wild to help the community. Quests usually boil down to going to a location and fighting a particular monster, usually one you haven’t encountered before. They serve as boss battles before you start seeing them regularly. The gameplay’s simple and direct, but that’s all you need for a Pokemon-like game. Of course, you can also undertake dozens of side quests that often require fighting a specific monster, or collecting a certain number of items.
The big appeal is fighting familiar monsters from the Monster Hunter series, then stealing eggs from their dens to obtain your own Pokemon-like monstie version. While it doesn’t reach Pokemon main series numbers in terms of monsters you can collect, Monster Hunter Stories 2 has twice the number of both monsters and monsties as the first game. There are approximately 150 different monsters to fight, about 90 of which you can turn into monsties. That’s a pretty good selection for a non-Pokemon game, and the various monsters and monsties are distributed well across a fairly sprawling game world of several different environments and locations.
As both a JRPG and a Monster Hunter game, Monster Hunter Stories 2 has lots of gameplay. You’ll reach the end credits in approximately 30 to 40 hours. The postgame content, such as the extra dungeon and ability to fight much more difficult versions of the monsters you’ve faced and turn their parts into higher tier weapons and armor, will keep you engaged.
Surprisingly Strategic
Monster Hunter Stories 2’s turn-based combat is surprisingly deep. Standard attacks and most special moves have one of three types: Power, Speed, and Technical. A rock-paper-scissors mechanic (Speed beats Power, Power beats Technical, Technical beats Speed) serves as the core gameplay strategy. Whenever you or your monstie attacks a monster that’s directly targeting you, the type of attack you use is compared against the enemy’s attack, with the loser taking much more damage than the winner in the clash.
These head-on confrontations are made even more important with team attacks, triggered when both you and your monster, or your partner, or partner’s monstie, directly target a monster that’s targeting either of you. If both characters’ attack types beat the monster’s attack types, they trigger a double attack that causes massive damage, while preventing either of you from getting hurt.
Incidentally, your monstie chooses how to attack and what skills to use on its own, but you can spend Kinship points to order it to use a certain skill instead. Kinship points are built up when you or your monstie win head-to-head confrontations, and they’re also used for riding (explained below).
Like in Monster Hunter Rise and other main-series games, Monster Hunter Stories lets you focus your attacks on specific monster parts to stun them or disable their attacks. Heads can be smashed, claws can be shattered, and tails can be cut off. Each body part is either strong or weak against the three types of weapon damage (blunt, piercing, and slashing), so you have to take into consideration how you arm yourself each turn. A head might be easier to crack with a hammer, but a tail might be easier to sever with a sword. Fortunately, you can carry three weapons into battle, choosing which one to wield each turn.
Elements also play a part in combat, again like in regular Monster Hunter games. Each monster and armor is strong against an element and weak against another element, and that easily comes into play when you’re facing a monster you know will attack with fire, or ice, or lightning. That makes three different attack characteristics to consider each turn.
Then there’s the monster-riding mechanic. A Kinship gauge fills as you and your monstie win head-on confrontations. The points in this gauge are used to direct your monstie to unleash a specific skill instead of acting on its own. If you let the gauge completely fill, however, you can instead ride your monstie. This heals you and your monstie, and lets you directly attack foes with both characters’ combined power. If you win head-on confrontations in this mode, your Kinship gauge further fills, from level one, to two, to three. At any point when riding your monstie, you can use a Kinship attack that deals heavy damage but ends your ride, and the level in your meter determines just how hard you hit. Your partner has its own Kinship gauge, and can perform Kinship attacks. If you both use a Kinship attack in the same turn, the results are impressive.
Of Course There’s Co-Op in Monster Hunter
Unlike main series Monster Hunter games, Monster Hunter Stories 2 is primarily a single-player experience. There are a handful of multiplayer modes, but you aren’t meant to go through extensive progression with a team of three other friends. The Multiplayer menu on the Quest Board lets you take co-op quests with other people playing online. These are randomly generated quests to kill certain monsters in an area within a particular time. Two players run around these zones, working together when either of you fights a monster. The battles are the same as the rest of the game.
The co-op quests are a nice feature that lets you find rare monsters, but there isn’t nearly the depth of cooperative gameplay you’ll find in Monster Hunter Rise. Though you can also fight other players and their monsties, Rise lacks direct, competitive, combat modes. I also found the online performance to slog a bit, with long waits to connect to other players (and to take turns in combat).
Pretty, Inconsistent
Monster Hunter Stories 2 is bright and colorful, but a bit less detailed than Monster Hunter Rise. The towns are densely decorated and varied, the fields are sprawling with strong color palettes, and the monsters look close to their main series counterparts. When you hatch an egg and turn a monster into a monstie, the companion you get looks a touch smaller and cuter than their aggressive versions. Whether it’s a monster or monstie, the creatures in this game are much, much more detailed than the ones you’ll find in a Pokemon game.
The game mostly runs at a solid 30 frames per second, occasionally chugging when it shows a lot of graphical effects, such as powerful monster attacks or the glow of eggs hatching. The performance would be fine on its own, but the after-battle results screen unrolls at 60fps, which is jarring to see when you’re used to the rest of the game moving half as smoothly.
For Monster Hunter and JRPG Fans
Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin is a well-crafted and lovingly built game designed for the intersection of two specific audiences: turn-based JRPG fans and Monster Hunter fans. It offers satisfyingly deep tactical battles for the former, and all of the familiar monsters, weapons, and armor of the latter. You won’t get a compelling, coherent story with deep twists, turns, or tension, but there’s enough here to let you enjoy the classic Monster Hunter sights in a different style from Monster Hunter Rise or Monster Hunter World.
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