My first impressions of monster hunter X

Okay, I haven't played cross very much, mostly I've stuck with one playstyle, bushido, and I'm loving the game as I've played it.

this is less of a review and more of a first impressions wall of text, so bear with me and remember, this is just my opinion.

my 100% accurate, infallible and totally perfect in every way shape or form entirely factually on point opinion.

MHX sucks.

....the end.

.........

.......I was kidding. it's actually really, really good. Like, amazing.

BUT!!!!!

I have a few observations i'm going to disguise as complaints/praise.

Monster hunter X starts you off in belna, beruna, or whatever you call it. you meet the chief, kiss some goats, pet a baby goat and have him sleep in your bed which is in no way creepy or strange and entirely endearing (and believe me, in this day and age that's harder to pull off than you know)

Your first hunts are straightforward, "prove yourself by gathering things!" says the chief. Okay, I gathered things, now what? "kill some monsters!" "Okay, killed some monsters, now what?" "go visit two villages and help them out!" "Oh goody! two entirely new villages to see that have all the same original facilities and are basically just every other town minus the guild hall! ya- wait is this kokoto? is that pokke? IS THAT YUKUMO?!?! I CAN GET ALL THE STARTER ARMOR SETS FOR EACH VILLAGE PROVIDED I ASSIST THEM AND GET TICKETS TO MAKE SAID ARMOR, AND THEIR WEAPONS?!?!?!?"

so it slowly puts you into a situation where it's suddenly very easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff that needs doing, the cat chefs need you to mix ingredients for them, the people need you to fulfill menial arbitrary tasks just like they did in 4u,

Remember 4u? where you were the hunter with the big eyebrows and your image was falsified by your surrogate caravaneer family to help you make a name for yourself/help them find an ancient elder dragon cub who would grow to be your rival? yes? good because it's basically the same system, but with a twist.

red speech bubbles are vital information, each village has a point system, the more you help each village, the more they reward you and give you tickets for making village specific stuff, but more importantly, the more you progress with each village's "story" which is basically a nostalgia mirror of their original plots.

with Kokoto it's basically the classic rathalos and the eggs tale, with pokke it's the tigrex, with yukumo it's the surprise zinogre during your bulldrome quest and with belna it's their original story featuring what is quite possibly the coolest monster any ten year old has ever thought of; a fucking T-rex with a flaming sword for a tail!

and yes, that is precisely what this thing is, and it's just as awesome and cool as I type it out to be.

awesomesaucetasticrificallizationalistic.

I made that up, but that's about how cool Dinovaldo is.

"But wait," you say as you eagerly type out a rebuttal, "those monsters aren't in those quests!!"

and no they bloody aren't! I say, because these are nostalgic "Mirrors" of those three classic main village quests, not actual repeats.

turns out for every portable title there's been a flagship specific to it, well somebody had the presence of mind to say "why just one" and lo and flipping behold we have four of the fuckers.

we have an electric wyvern who I'm entirely sure is made out of heavy metal and death in place of the rathalos quests,

 we have the world's greatest bubble dragon in place of zinogre,

 and for the first time in gaming history, we have the lord and protector of the popo tongues in the mirror popo tongue quest, A GODDAMNED POPODROME!!!!

well, he may as well be, because he's just as scary as you'd imagine a popodrome would be, and he's literally one name change away from being the popodrome, it's no coincidence he's replacing the tigrex's popo tongue quest, he killed the tigrex to protect the herd!

Lastly of course is our lord and savior dinovaldo, slayer of gog, bringer of awesome metallic roars and dominator of your ass.

water combat is of course gone in this installment, but that doesn't mean out leviathans aren't around, that's right we get all the big boys like lagiacrus, etc who get to come back and put is in our place, in fact, of all the monsters to get a retooled moveset, lagiacrus has now become the game's resident black mage because now he can summon lightning at will and has a pretty impressive array of the SCARIEST GODDAMNED LIGHTNING ATTACKS I'VE EVER SEEN IN GAMING!!!

but it gets even better, you see one of the biggest improvements to this game isn't just the sheer amount of stuff you can do/make, oh no, it's also the visual effects. old areas make a return, they're somewhat refurbished but mostly the exact same. they get a gentle retexture, forest and hills now has reflective mud puddles which add to their aesthetic a bit, and the zones are retooled for convenient climbing. the problem i have with this is, if they were going to give us back the old areas but refurbish them, couldn't they have added at least two addition spots to the ancient maps? forest and hills was practically begging for an area at the foot of the overhanging area atop the mountain! that could have been a great place to add an additional nest or something!! aw well, it's a minor complaint, we got some good new versions of older areas, no sense in getting greedy....

in order to access each village flagship you have to help each village, rack up points for lols and do the village specific quests indicated by the symbol next to their name. you also get a visible indicator by way of a list that pops up whenever you get a new quest, it's not entirely necessary but is a welcome addition for the sake of its existence.

aside from THAT, you could easily finish the main game in little to no time at all by just doing belna quests and unlocking the single most adorable endgame cutscene in gaming history, not spoiling that one for you, despite the fact that I haven't finished the game and spoiled it for myself like a knob.

so, the other three villages are basically your sidequest system, nothing special, you can choose what to do and where, and as you work through the villages you unlock cameos from old characters who couldn't make it because their village wouldn't fit on the bottom screen cough(mogasucks)cough(thechiefandjuniorarealrightthough)cough

One of the biggest additions isn't even practical however, it's entirely aesthetic.

every single movement, fireball, dust cloud or anything even remotely resembling a special effect has been visibly ramped up for no actual reason.

I'm talking a rush of air pressure around a velocidrome biting at you for crying out loud! wherever they could put more flash and flair, they put it there, nothing was spared, not a single damned thing! there are more enhanced visual effects in this game than in a michael bay explosion, and believe me when I say that this is not only welcome, but just serves to make the fights with wyverns all the more spectacular. literally anything that could be revised, was revised.

those roar particle effects are literally just for show, but my god they add so much more implied force to the roars!!!

like, cephadrome sand balls are now larger and have a lighter color to make it appear almost as if the cephadrome is spitting fire at you! and even when the illusion is broken by the sand landing, it still gives the impression that it just spat out sand hotter than the surface of the sun!

and it's not just special effects! the lighting engine in this game is entirely different, now we've got active lens flares instead of just static ones! the lighting system is doing its level best to be as realistic in an unrealistic environment as it can possibly be!!

remember khezu? and how dozens of quest and item descriptions would describe his hide as "pleasant to the touch" or "Pearl-like"?

well now the khezu's hide ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE THAT!!! all these years I assumed that they were made of slime, now the khezu's skin tone is closer to a sort of hybrid between beautiful ceramic and aluminum foil!

visually, the game is going so far overboard I'm entirely sure it's set a new bar for crazy visual effects, this game's not even visually stunning, it's just really really cool and fun to look at!!! monster attacks now seem to have more of a force to them, tail swipes actually gain more whooshing air effects when a monster is angry at you, electricity looks more like electricity! blights actually seem to resemble their namesake instead of just being impressions!! this is ten steps above the tri special effects, we're talking effects for something as simple as you landing!!!

and i bloody love it!!! seriously, I can't stop gushing over how much effort they put into the visuals, everything looks better, cooler, and faster. Oh I can imagine how those poor sods who always complained about frontier's flashy gameplay robbing the game of its value somehow must be feeling with this title! "it's all flash!" they said "the flashy attacks rob us of our hardcore gameplay! this isn't monster hunter if it isn't aesthetically subdued and humble on top of being brutally punishing to the point where dark souls is literally easy by comparison!!"

naturally they must be staring at this new portable title, which is basically more of the same but with flashy effects added to it, and trying to come up with a more stable, believable version of an argument that was probably meant for monster hunter online, the chinese ripoff which actually does suck, but they didn't bother trying to tell the difference when they made it!!

I swear there's so much flash in this game it's almost counted as a sin when something doesn't have an unnecessary flashy animation or sparkly effect tied to it (i'm looking at you vespoids) but it's really nice to have such ridiculously flashy effects tied to almost every miniscule element of the game's visual design, it shows that this game was a genuine labor of love and a lot of work and effort went into ensuring that when I sharpen my sword, the little puffs of light representing bits of metal I shaved off linger for a moment to float just a above my longsword in an unassuming spark cloud before gracefully fading into the air, never to be seen again.

Now as for other parts of the game, the visual design only serves to enhance the new "super attack" system, hunters arts.

you get four styles, each of which has its own art system and expands the combat moves of each weapon accordingly, I've only explored bushido but it keeps the longsword's evasion moves down to the point where you're forced to stay in and wear at your foe.

what little I've seen of this system is, at the very least in the bushido longsword's case, it's sort of broken.

did I mention how every installment of monster hunter had something broken? in p2 it was deathprize, in p3rd your autoguard charm made taking damage while gunlancing impossible, in 4u it was the insect glaive, in x it's absolute bushido evade into longsword gauge counter, I only have to hit a monster seven times with that counter and I basically send them limping, two more and they keel over!!

anyway, I'm glossing this over a bit because I haven't experimented much with the system, but you take on certain monsters and quests, etc and you naturally unlock more arts which do certain things. again, haven't explored it much.

Now on to what has got to be the best part of this game.

Nyantas.

Remember in freedom unite how if you raised a cat to high enough levels and equipped them, they could almost carry a wyvern fight and kill things like tigrex and nargacuga?

no?!

I must have been the only one to discover that they could do that, but somebody must have known it was possible, because we've now come fully bloody circle.

in this game your felyne comrades are now playable, they have roughly the same damage output as the hunter, but less moves to employ for that, meaning for high rank hunts you really want the solid damage advantage of boomerangs and their skills.

nyantas are fun, but in my mind they're sort of the game's hidden easy mode.

let me explain, nyantas do just about as much damage as a hunter when you take the time to raise them properly. they have NO stamina, unlimited gathering tool uses, less space to hold stuff in, but that doesn't really matter if you're just going for insects or ores and nothing else, and more importantly, they can be defeated up to nine times! (ha! I get it.)

But this is the important part.

you can reset the first three lives, represented by acorns, if you take the nyanta to a nearby bed and have him sleep in it.

so in theory you could carry an entire hunt as a nyanta, never have to worry about hot drinks or cold drinks, always know where a monster is with built-in cat-senses always tracking it on your map, unlimited continues until time runs out by just hopping back to the bed, and the only thing in your way is your own damage output, easily fixed by boomerang skills.

so yeah, loving the nyanta system! it's not just an easy mode to me, it's more about the immersion factor, nyantas are very different from hunters, they have cat soecific skills and movesets such as the ability to set poison traps, etc. the only thing they CAN'T do is capture, you have to do those as a hunter (edit, I was mistaken, according to redditor falcozappy capturing is entirely possible as a nyanta. I was wrong......runs off crying)

so my opinion of mhx?

it's flipping glorious.

please do remember, my entirely factually accurate opinion is 100 percent correct and I can do no wrong, etc, etc.

please feel free to correct or enlighten me anyway.

no, seriously.

and remember, when you get your copy,

don't do what I did.

don't try to fight dinovaldo with your cat.

This has been a first impression by the brilliant and amazing gamer on youtube, general shitposter on reddit, hardcore gamer on a channel I'll not bother sharing because none of you actually care about my channel anyway and I won't ask you to try, the greatest gamer in the universe, arrogant self entitled nimrod, high king of the douchebags and dark lord of the land of fluffy duckies and bunnies within which there can be no safe haven for mortal men from fatal doses of cuddles and quacking attacks.

Please feel free to bomb my horribly simple impression into nonexistence, I didn't really try when I wrote it, but if anyone's interested in mhx, these are the facts as I've seen them while playing, and you should give it a buy, even if you must import it.

it's the best of every portable title in the franchise rolled up into one amazing game with tons of enhancements across the board. ten outta ten.

Edit: (added an arrogant closing statement and a few con complaints as well as made myself out to be the worst thing in internet history, just according to keikaku (editor's note, keikaku means plan))