Week 2 — Monster Hunter: Generations Ultimate

Richard Dorough
Sep 3, 2018 · 2 min read

Coming back to a more classic style of Monster Hunter game after sinking my teeth into Monster Hunter: World earlier this year was… jarring. While I’m not unfamiliar to the original style of game, having played Monster Hunter: 3 Ultimate and 4 Ultimate, the user friendlyness of World was a nice breath of fresh air but left me pretty shocked and defeated after firing up GU on my Switch.
MH:GU is the expanded standalone sequel (it’s odd) to Monster Hunter: Generations, which released in 2015 on the Nintendo 3DS. As an anniversary title, Generations added new “hunting styles” which changed the way that weapons worked depending on the style chosen, with new super moves called hunter arts. GU adds on with two more hunting styles, and multiple new arts per weapon, and adds new difficulty, more monsters, more gear, more weapons, etc.

GU looks and sometimes feels like an upscaled Nintendo 3DS game, which to be fair it is, but is still an incredibly content packed game that controls much better due to the inclusion of a second joystick on the Nintendo Switch controller. This allows free control of the camera, vs the older L lock on targeting system which made most of the friends of mine who I tried to get into the series quit pretty quickly. The newer hardware of the Switch allowed the developers to tune the graphics a little, and the monsters all look great with their upscaled textures.

The hunting styles continue being a fun addition to the game, though I haven’t tried the two new styles out quite yet. I’ve kept mostly to the most traditional style at the moment, as I found when playing Generations, some styles made some of the older monsters a lot easier than they should have been due to the increased character mobility that’s offered. Newer monsters to the franchise though are much better suited to dealing with your mobility, and are a lot more fun to fight and hunt. They’ll have quicker tells, more devastating attacks, and more fantastical designs (there’s a jet dragon, it’s awesome).

While I miss some of the quality of life improvements from World, I think the greater general challenge, and longer end game experience wins out for me. The addition of G Rank, the hardest difficulty monsters with the best gear, allows for some great hunts with some ridiculous setups that I feel World is currently missing.

Richard Dorough

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Game Design: Weekly Writing