Monster Hunter Freedom

This Monster Hunter was pretty much a port of the original game for the PS2 as far as im aware. I havent played the original, but this stands as one of the most played games of all time. At one point my PSP simply become a monster hunter machine due to how addicted i was in this game.

First off, the plot of the game. Its not important, but you play as a hunter and you must save the village from a multitude of monster attacks. This is pretty much the plot in a nutshell, and from the get go its clear that this is a game much more focused around the gameplay than the narrative.

The visuals are polished enough for a psp game. Despite the obvious low texture quality the animations of the monsters and player are very well animated and are an essencial part to the satisfation of the gameplay. The audio design is pretty well done considering the limitations of the hardware, and the music of the game feels like an updated version of an pokemon game.

The series as always stood on gameplay, and its formula resolves around killing monsters, making weapons and armor out of their loot drop, and fight stronger monsters. This is a cycle that the game does incredibly well. Besides the actual monster loot, its also required minerals and other items you can get out of your farm. You can gather these everytime in between missions. The game is extremely grindy, and i mean this. Because it is based on a RNG system for the loot drops, and some drops are at 1% rates, it can mean that it takes a whole lot of monster slaying in order to get that one item to build the equipment you want. Because missions can take up to 1 hour to beat, this effectively means that this game is a time sink.

Fortunatly the gameplay is there to make it a worthwhile time sink. The gameplay features a combat system not unlike Dark Souls, in which you can lock on to enemy and the attack animations are well drawn out and precise. You really feel the impact on those blows, and this is part of the gameplay as well since weaker monster areas will splash more blood. The game is extremely responsive when it comes to dodging and the hitboxes are on point. The enemy monsters also make the best out of these, as they attack fast and hit extremely hard. 3 hits is usually a KO unless you are overpowered for that mission. They have a huge variety of attacks and behaviours, and though there is a crossing over between mosnters, they all feel very unique to feat. As well as each having its own weak points, they have different weaknesses to different sort of damage. There are 6 weapons classes in the game, two of which are ranged, and they take a lot of time to master their attack timings and combos. Besides the combat, there are also other weapons and technique to make things easier, stuff like marking the monster in order to follow it easier, sharpening your blade, eating before missions to get buffs, crafting potions, using explosive barrels and traps. There is definitly a huge amount of depth to this game, and its really the only reason it can excuse itself being as grindy as it is. Unfortunatly the controls do have an issue, due to the lack of a second analogue stick on the psp. The camera is controlled on the d-pad and movement on the left analogue stick, so you can imagine that this game can cause quite a bit of hand cramps after playing it for a while.

Unfortunatly, the game only as a local coop multiplayer mode, which effectively made me play alone all the missions. The game is clearly balanced around 4 player coop, as otherwise monster can take up to 1 hour to fall down, and the game gets very fatiguing by that point. Even more considering that its a handheld title.

I absolutly adored the time spent in this game, but i actually find it hard to play another one of these titles. They are monumental tasks, extremely hard and require an amount of dedication only rivaled by the most hardcore MMOs. This one in particular has quite a few flaws, but its combat system and amount of content greatly outweight them and its the best PSP game i have ever played by far.