Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection
Review
Solid, but repetitive
by Alex Moretti
reviewed on PC
Beautiful
Monster Hunter Stories 3 is a very beautiful game with a great sense of direction. The intro cinematic is reminiscent of one of Studio Ghibli's earliest films; Nasuca Of The Valley Of The Wind. Characters wearing gas masks fly on top of colourful beasts into a polluted area to excavate a plot device. At times, it truly felt as though I was running through a sandbox designed by Hayo Miyuzaki. However, as they say every rose has its thorn, and while it may be fun to explore this game for a while, the question here is, can its gorgeous environments keep the average player hooked throughout its roughly 50 hour run time?
Learning the basics
The first seven or so hours of the game will be mostly about teaching you the basics. The combat, explorations, and crafting mechanics. The combat is turn-based with elements of Persona 5 Royal mixed with Final Fantasy 7. Yet in spite of many years of evolution in the JRPG space, it somehow feels like a watered down version of both those games. During combat, in which you, a monstie, a comrade and their monstie engage with the enemy, you can only control the main character and their monstie. Your comrade and their monstie do whatever they want, and there is no way to influence what tactics they may implement.
Some higher ranking enemies have separate parts of their body that you can target each with its own health bar. If you can manage to deplete that sub health bar, then you will stun the enemy disabling them from using that body part to attack you, as well as allowing you to use sync rush - a full on attack in which all four of the characters in your battling party attack the enemy at once. Since you can't control what your teammate and their monstie do, I often found myself wanting them to target a specific area on an enemy's body that I had weakened, only for them to target one that had more health.
As for the sync rush command, when it appears on screen, you have no choice other than to use it. I would have liked it if instead of requiring you to use the synch rush ability you were given the chance to use another command such as using a healing item, or focusing on support like in Persona 5 Royal. You can perform attacks that increase your gauge, and when the gauge is at a certain level, you can perform stronger attacks. Also, each character and their monstie have a life system, each character has three hearts, and if all three hearts are depleted, then you lose the fight.
Another interesting part of Monster Hunter Stories 3's combat is that when you win a fight, you automatically have all your health restored. There is no difficulty setting, or option to turn off this setting, and while I can appreciate this as it makes the game easy, and accessible to people who are new to JRPGs, I rarely ever found the combat challenging.
Exploration
The exploration and crafting mechanics are fun to play around with for a little while. It felt really cool to traverse the large hubworlds to find items that I could use to craft new gear as well as enhance its effectiveness in combat. On top of crafting ingredients, you are also incentivised to traverse caves to find monstie eggs that you can hatch in the game's many stables. I spent a good chunk of my time raising these critters so that they could aid me in combat and exploration. Later on you will even unlock a whole minigame where you can raise these monsters and release them into the wild to repopulate the amount of them you can find in the environment.
Each time you progress the story, you will be given the opportunity to perform side quests to aid your party members, as well as town folk. You can take however long you want to assist the town folk, although quests for your companions are only available for as long as you stay in that chapter. Once you progress the story, certain quests will be locked off if you haven't completed them. This would be fine for most RPGs, however Monster Hunter Stories 3 does not have a New Game+, so if you want to see everything and do all the quests, you have to do it in one go.
Technical issues
As I mentioned, the game looks beautiful. All the character models look as if they were lifted straight out of something like Breath Of The Wild. Naturally I wanted to enjoy it with the crispest framerate possible, however when I bumped up the framerate to 60 FPS, the game froze on me within a few seconds, before booting me back to my desktop screen. I am using a 5070ti GPU, and I've played dozens of higher end games at high frame rates with no issue, so I highly doubt my graphics card isn't strong enough to render a game with graphics that look as though they could have come out back in 2017 on the original Nintendo Switch in a high frame rate.
Not that it matters, since you're probably going to want to play on the settings with the highest graphical fidelity over framerate, as there is a ridiculous amount of pop up from non-playable characters.
Throughout the first 90% of the game, the combat is relatively easy. However, during the last five hours, many of the enemies become extremely difficult to beat. The difficulty curve in this game felt almost non-existent, as you can essentially coast through the first 45 or so hours only for the last five hours to have everything thrown at you. It would have been nice if the combat gradually got harder over time instead of being a cakewalk for the majority of the game only for it to throw everything it has at you towards the end.
Thankfully, for all of its faults, there is a great story and characters here. I was enthralled with the lore here, and Capcom does a great job presenting the fiction. Characters tend to act like real people, your party members in particular don't just blindly follow you without fuss. Instead, they voice their complaints often when they don't get what they want, and they are hesitant to trust the princess of a foreign nation who is on the brink of war with them. The combat may not revolutionize the JRPG genre, but it is serviceable and fun. There is a lot to explore and craft, and the armor and weapons that you can unlock add to the visual flair during combat.
While it may not win any awards in my book, Monster Hunter Stories 3 is a fun way to pass time, and a great game for newcomers to the JRPG genre. The turn based combat mechanics are solid, and there is a lot to unlock. The story and characters are fun to watch and exploring the environments is never boring. Here’s hoping that Capcom can refine this formula, and truly bring their A game with the next instalment.
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7.9
fun score
Pros
Newcomer friendly, Colourful environments with lively characters, Exploration is rewarded
Cons
Turn-based battle system is a dumbed down version of Persona 5 Royal and Final Fantasy 7, Exploration - while rewarding - is repetitive.
