Ashen44

As others have said, the old monster hunter games are best played as a turn based battle. Take the fights slow. Stay safe and watch exactly what the monster does. Only go in for an attack when you know it’s safe. You might time out on a few monsters the first time, but every hunt you will get faster, as you figure out both the monster and your own moveset. The caveat though is you need to make sure you’re paying attention! Just going by feel will get you wrecked and you won’t learn anything doing it. Always be watching and analyzing. You can spend 10 hours throwing yourself at the monster and get 10% better, or you can spend 1 hour learning the monster and get 50% better.

Another thing to be aware of is that these games are capital S Slow. Fights are going to take forever, and that’s only going to get worse when you get into the guild quests, which are intended to be played with 4 person parties. Singleplayer health scaling was not added until World. If you’ve been wailing on a monster and it’s just not going down, don’t get discouraged. As long as you’re doing damage and not getting hit, you’ve got 50 whole minutes to kill the monster. You’ll get it eventually, I promise. Just keep at it and at some point you’ll break through, and the thrill of having conquered what once seemed so impossible will bring you a rush like no other! Good luck, and happy hunting.

You’re right at the end, there’s no more bosses. It’s just a bit of hiking and then a bunch of cutscenes. Then you’re in the epilogue and time rewinds so you can keep playing. Might be a bit of a weird place to start playing again though, as you just boot up the game after so many years just to watch a cutscene or two and then credits roll lol.

As you can probably guess by the chapter numbers, you are nowhere near the end of the game, sorry. There IS a bossfight, but you only have to do the first section alone, then you reunite and do the actual main fight together.

Definitely set some time aside to do the final segment. I’m not sure exactly where you are before the end segment, but assuming you’re right before edge knot city you’ve probably got about 4-5 hours left for the main story, if you take your time with it. There’s probably like an hour or two of cutscenes there though and you can absolutely rush the gameplay sections so if you really don’t care about the story you can probably shave that down to under 2 hours. It’s still a commitment though that’s for sure.

I 100% agree. Games are about what’s fun, and that differs for everybody. Difficulty selection exists for a reason. My mom LOVES the playstation first party games (god of war, horizon, etc) but she always plays them on story mode. It’s not because she can’t handle any higher difficulties (she’s been gaming since before I was born), she simply doesn’t care about the challenge and just wants to experience the story.

Games are for us to enjoy, and short of cheating in a multiplayer game I don’t really think there’s a wrong way to enjoy them. Opening up more avenues for more people to enjoy them is just a net positive in my opinion.

As a diehard(man) Death Stranding fan, I gotta say the boss fights were easily the worst part of the game. I always turn the difficulty up to maximum when I’m doing a new playthrough because the game just feels more impactful and fun when there’s an actual sense of danger, but it goes straight down to easy mode whenever a boss comes out cause I am not dealing with that lol

While I’ll definitely be doing the bossfights the first time around in DS2 this feature will probably save my future playthroughs. It’s just always nice to see more options for letting players engage with the game in the ways they want to.

I’ve recently been disabling minimaps in games that let me… hell of a good idea, makes the game way more immersive and fun to navigate.

That being said, it does require a certain mindset that using a minimap doesn’t. You need to be willing to take things slow, take in your surroundings, and really look. I recognize that most people don’t like going that slow and so minimaps are useful. I hope that they’ve taken that into consideration with this decision.

It’s hilarious that you say that because I literally just finished 100%ing Control the other day haha! I found it to be the perfect game for stopping and staring because of all the thought put into everything, and how many cool little details and experiences you can have by taking things slowly! I do 100% agree with you though, I wish they were way less aggressive with the enemies spawning. Thankfully when you get tired of it you can just turn on god mode and blast through them, but it’s certainly not an ideal solution.

Unfortunately, it’s an intentional design choice. You can see it in many, many other games too. Fact of the matter is, most players need constant stimulation or they drop off quick, so game designers specifically design their games so you never go without a new event for more than 5 minutes. You can see it especially well in games like Tears of the Kingdom, another game I love that has a godawful encounter system where you can’t go five steps without another enemy ambushing you!

It’s sadly something you aren’t going to escape from as long as you’re playing big budget games, which is doubly sad because big budget game worlds are usually extra fun to explore because they can afford to really flesh out their worlds! That’s why I appreciate games like Monster Hunter (specifically World and Wilds) which solve the issue by giving you those constanr encounters (back to back quests, running into monsters constantly out in the maps) but make it incredibly easy to just not engage and completely ignore them (most monsters not being instantly aggressive, ghillie mantle and skills that make monsters ignore you completely). This at least gives me hope that we can compromise between the stimulation bombardment and the tranquil admiration.

The author talks a lot about the addictiveness of the flow state, and how most players try to achieve thjs state to just stop thinking for a while. I found it interesting what the author said about the teacher trying to get their students to recognize the feeling of games, because that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do lately to counteract that state of not really taking things in and just passing through the game.

There’s a youtuber named “Any Austin” who really opened my eyes up to this. Now instead of doing the quests and advancing the game, I take my time with games. I actively get annoyed when games don’t give me some quiet time to not play the game, and I really appreciate the beauty of games beyind the gameplay.

I highly recommend everyone to try this out: pick your favourite game, preferably one with an actual game world you can move around in, rather than just a board like balatro, and just sit. Don’t play the game, just find something interesting and stare at it. Think about how it was made, and what purpose does it serve in the game. Keep doing this, just walk around your world and try to appreciate its existence. Stare at the skybox, the grass, the buildings, the mountains.

This has given me both a new appreciation for games, and a way to break free from the endless treadmill of going from one experience to the next, with no thought put into the inbetween. It’s a sort of mindfulness in a way, and something I feel has actively improved my real life rather than just distracted me from it. Now I find myself able to appreciate these small beauties and curiosities everywhere I go.

good god I am so hyped for this game. The story looks so good, the music is on point (hello woodkid?), and I’m loving the new environments we’re being shown! Ironically, the action is the part I’m least interested in since that was my least favourite part of the first game, so I’m worried that they showed so much of it, but hopefully they’ve improved it between games.

It’s kinda funny seeing that sandstorm after Monster Hunter Wilds just released. Where’s my Rey Dau BT? (wait a Monster Hunter - Death Stranding crossover would be peak)

While I agree with the criticisms of this list, it does have 2 of my favourite games of all time (Tunic and Crosscode) so I dub it based as hell.

my personal favourite is Laputa Castle in the Sky

It’s not technically Ghibli, but Nausicaa is another fantastic movie by Miyazaki

Build a Little World with Me - Laura Shigihara still hits me like a ton of bricks sometimes, but I’m also a total crybaby who has songs that I can literally break down crying just by reading the name of.

… Apparently I am almost fully unique by my language settings alone. 0.00% of people have canadian english and japanese as their phone language. Of course this is just from their dataset but still, this was definitely very enlightening!

Oh boy, I have so many game ideas that I would love to make, but they’re all so complex I would either need a full game studio or the determination of the dwarf fortress devs.

• A fantasy civilization builder in a massive open world. Think stellaris, but on the ground with magic rather than in space with spaceships, where you essentially design a civilization from the ground up, with countless different options for said civilization, and with a massive world to explore full of events and discoveries and other civilizations to interact with. As an example of what I would like to see, you could play as dwarves who live fully underground and end up finding the buried body of a massive god, which they must deal with the consequences of. Or you could play a nomadic civilization that progresses from living out of horse-drawn carts to constructing massive vehicles which they build entire cities on the back of. Maybe those vehicles are actually living creatures, or magically animated constructs. I absolutely love the wildly different civilizations you can create in stellaris and the stories they create, but I always wanted something somehow even more sandboxy, plus I love magic and fantasy so I wanted to mix that in.

• An extremely in-depth survival game with a focus on interactivity. Another genre of games I deeply enjoy is survival games that really make you survive. Two examples of this are the excellent games Stationeers and Vintage Story. The first game has a major focus on interconnected systems and full simulation, while the second involves a series of realistic and in-depth yet largely separate systems. I’ve always imagined some combination of the two, a deeply simulated world where everything interacts with everything else, and yet each individual system is extremely in-depth and meaningful. I would hope that this would enable extremely creative problem solving, such as you might find in the newest Legend of Zelda games, yet much more meaningful as now it is actually necessary to your survival. There are some more specific touches that I would personally add to such a game such as separating it from our world, and placing it in a fantasy world with radically different animals and environments, which I believe would open up more opportunities for unique and fun game mechanics when no longer restrained by realism. This is more of a pipe-dream but I would also enjoy if the in-depth systems were so in-depth that mastery of said system would require significant effort, without it getting stale. Combine this with highly intelligent NPCs that you as a player could work with and you could realistically form a village in which you as the player would fulfill a single role, such as being a farmer, or blacksmith, or scholar, without it getting boring, even if you’re playing singleplayer.

• Lastly, I’ve been rolling around the idea of an RPG in which the classes are all so different that they feel like playing different games. This came about from frustration with Final Fantasy XIV, where it felt like the only thing that changed when I changed classes was the order in which I press my buttons. I’ve had ideas such as a summoner who plays the game like an RTS, or an alchemist who gathers ingredients and crafts various potions and tools to use in battle, or a bard who casts spells to a beat almost like a rhythm game, or a fighter who dances with his opponent with parries and dodges and counterattacks. Admittedly this game is a much looser concept than the previous two, but I’m mostly just tired of games where class choices feel more like cosmetic options than like actual meaningfully different playstyles.

In the first moments of the game they give you a full summary of the plot of the first game. If you want to play the first game for the story I recommend you hold out on this one until afterwards.

Oh of course I never pre-order, but Zelda and Mario have not had any bad main games in the past decade so I don’t feel worried about buying them on release.

I only purchase full price games under one of 2 conditions. Either it’s a series that I deeply love and know for certain will always put out quality games (Zelda, Mario, Monster Hunter) or it’s a game that is extremely well reviewed and doesn’t go on sale (factorio, other Nintendo games)

As for whether I believe a game I’ve purchased was worth it, I don’t equate hours invested to price worthiness, but rather my overall enjoyment. I’ve put too many hours into games I regret ever buying (Ark) and played some games that were far too short but I would’ve paid double for (Outer Wilds). Rather, I believe it’s how much the game affects you when you come out of it. Ark was a frustrating, grindy experience, but Outer Wilds literally changed who I am as a person. When I play something like Sonic Frontiers I come out in awe, and giddy with how much excitement that game gave me, but when I play something like Elder Scrolls Online, I don’t dislike it but I don’t feel anything special. Frontiers was absolutely a worthy purchase but ESO was not, because one really affected me and the other, even though I wouldn’t call it a bad game, just didn’t really do anything to me.

I’ve been a pc gamer all my life but controller has always easily been the superior choice. For first person shooters and strategy games I’ll go KBM sure, but for every other kind of game I’ll go controller when I can get away with it. It’s significantly more comfortable for me and I’m much more familiar with it.

3 just feels a little more polished than 4. The transition to 3D was very cool but I think the developer’s inexperience with working in 3D hurt the game a little. Plus 3 has a lot more user content than 4 due to being much older. They are both very good games regardless!

Creeper World is sort of like this. Basically the enemy is a self replicating liquid that destroys everything it touches and you have to fight it off and secure each map. It was originally a flash game so go with those expectations but it’s pretty fun regardless. I recommend CW3 as the best one.