Affectionate Diary

It says a fuck of a lot about the games business that Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is:

A) Set in Vegas again

B) Even more of an arcade shooter ‘experience’ than ever

This shit is pretty much unforgivable when you think how distant it’s become from its root concept - to provide hellishly brutal and tactically demanding anti-terrorist missions. Gone are the small, deliciously taut levels such as that wicked one in the tube station and that chemical weapons factory on a farm, or mad fucked-up shit like that hydro-electric dam and the plane hostage crisis where you had your sniper fuck the shit out of some terrorist dude’s head whilst you stormed the cabin. Instead, we have sprawling environments that feel much closer to linear channels and set-piece arenas especially designed for the very latest in cinematic simulated battle experiences. We get camera zoom-outs for taking cover and a collection of influences from titles way below the series in terms of tactical richness. This, whilst providing an engaging and polished killing experience, is so far removed from what I loved about the early Rainbow Six titles that I felt like properly smashing some shit up. Tears were welling in my eyes when I saw the sweet graphics and fired the guns. When I saw the RPG stuff, I pretty much had a complete breakdown and had to call several friends for support. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact I’m allowed to use my favourite sniper rifle (a suppressed SR-25) from the start, I would have probably self-harmed.

I’m not particularly happy with all the fucking banter as well. You’re fucking Spec Ops. You don’t talk unless it’s mission critical.

-10/10

Monster Hunter is definitely rubbish. Rubbish controls, rubbish tutorial, rubbish loading, rubbish at telling you what the items/buffs/abilities/weapons do, rubbish everything. In spite of being rubbish, though, it’s also TOTALLY FUCKING BRILLIANT. It has a soul. It compels you to play it by enticing you with promises of one part joy for every two parts pain. Lots of games offer no parts pain but also no parts joy. I’ll take joy with pain over the crushing nothingness of the void any day. 

If you were reviewing girls, there’d be some girls who you’d review as a 7 out of 10 because they have sexy legs, watch Battlestar Galactica and have big tits, but shit hair and a massive nose. There’d be other girls who were a bit fat, and they sometimes cried because they hated themselves, and they had terrible trainers so you’d give them a 6. But if you had to choose which one to hang out with you’d choose the latter because even though she’s a fucking psycho that spends all day drawing MS Paint relationship comics, she’s FUCKING ACE to hang out with, whereas the first one mostly just watches dull fucking gameshows about opening boxes and wants to discuss the weather all the time. So sometimes, to maintain a sense of joy at the expense of your sanity, you need to choose the girl (or game) that gets you going, regardless of how much bullshit you have to put up with to get at it. That’s Monster Hunter. It’s also, possibly, Phantasy Star Universe.

I told you I only liked shit games.

Phantasy Star Universe is a shit PS2 game ported in the laziest possible fashion to 360.

THE PAIN!

Let’s not fuck about here - this game is fucking shit. So I can add people I meet to the game’s internal friends list (good). I can see where they are. Kind of. The labels for the areas in the game change seemingly FOR THIS BIT ALONE. So my friend is a the Pavilion of Air. Great! Where’s that? Which planet? Jesus. I know, I’ll invite him to my party, then we can voice chat and he can tell me. Ok, this is my list of friends, I’ve selected him, where’s the invite option? OH! Of course. It’s fucking NOT HERE, WHERE IT WOULD BE IN ANY OTHER SYSTEM MADE EVER. It took me almost five minutes of searching to find out how to do it the first time. Five minutes to a gamer looking in a game is the equivalent of walking up and down a high street for an hour and still not finding the Asda. The whole game revolves around forming parties. That Sega fucked this bit up pretty much says everything you need to know about this game’s painfulness.

Also, did I mention how lazy the fucking port it? Loading every time you need to access another 48kb of data.

And the crafting can fuck off. I’ve STILL not managed to upgrade my weapon, despite apparently having all the bits and being in the right place.

At least TRY to animate the bosses to move as they would if they were that big.

Inventory management - if you’re going to make a boing sound at least 100 times every time I do something as simple as empty my pockets into my storage area, don’t make that boing sound offensive to me on a biological level.

Seriously, this is one of the worst games ever made. And I fucking love it.

How embarassing.

Flying towards a bay city at 10 metres from sea level in a A-10 and destroying ships with your cannon is fucking wicked. What’s even more wicked it that it makes the right sound on the replay. You see, in the cabin it sounds like a fairly average cannon, but thanks to the doppler effect, outside the plane it sounds like the noise-weapon of god. And yeah, the developers have done everything they can to make Ace Combat 6 the ultimate wanking tool for jetfags.
.
Now, this means that one the whole, Ace Combat 6 is fucking brilliant. I mean, who doesn’t want to blow shit up in jets in a fucking gorgeous graphics engine with AWESOME clouds and shit? Then Ace Combat 6 is fucking brilliant - or at least it is if you’re a newcomer. I’ve shied away from the series, even though I love jets and war, mostly because I’m a fucking idiot and should have got intimately involved a lot earlier. However, that’s all okay now because I’ve got the prettiest version and I’m loving it. I’ve just unlocked the Su-33 Flanker, which is a BADASS looking plane and I’ve read that later, you can get the Su-47 Berkut, which is so unbelievably fucking cool that if you haven’t seen it and love jets, you’ll shit bricks when you click on this link:
.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1wXsygQTVA

.
But anyway, this teenage Afterburner does deliver immense thrills thanks to being at a similar level to the flight sims I dreamed of as a kid, so I’m basically masturbating the entire time that I’m playing it. What’s not so great is the shameful omission of a forza-level livery editor for your planes THAT YOU HAVE TO BUY. It’s a damn good thing that they’re sort of worth the money. The selection is pretty fucking awesome too, being a roll-call of the sexiest jets from the last 30 years. The A10 is fucking amazingly good fun and the fighters are sweet, even the aging F14. What’s more, despite being blatantly arcade as fuck, the handling feels pretty convincing in a PGR way, which is a lovely pitch to be at, giving you the freedom to push real limits beyond reality, but not totally into cartoon land. That is aside the floor bouncing, which I’ve done a few times and laughed at being bounced 100 feet into the air. Thank fuck I didn’t crash, though. I’d been flying for 25 mins. Did I mention the levels are a bit too long?
.
Finally, it’s a shame that in a game that lets you put on the full performance, complete with victory rolls and Immelmann turns, you can’t capture those moments with enough freedom to have a really fucking good wank. I mean shooting vast amounts of ejaculate when you find that magic angle that captures the approach, destruction and celebratory exit of a well-exectued strafing run. It goes quite far, but nowhere near far enough. I want long-distance cameras so I can see my canyon-weaving antics. Placeable tracking cameras would be too fucking awesome for words. I want to track the life of a SAM site from the beginning of the replay to when I blow it up with a missile. Or drop thermobaric explosives on it. Or crash into it after an immense cannon run. I want to see my A10 looming in, gun blazing, afterburner burning and like totally shit myself because it’s just too awesome, whilst I’m wanking and ejaculating constantly and shrieking with delight and weeping. I also want to see the little men fly in the air with their limbs coming off, but I think that might be asking a bit much. However, those cunts know that if you’re going to make the planes that awesome, you should at least let me pause and rewind.
.
This sort of shit should be DLC. Oh man. If they release a full replay editor I’ll do the greatest fucking stunt vid you’ve ever fucking seen. Seriously. I’m amazing at plane stunts. None of your Pilotwings bullshit here. It’s like NEEEOW to sea level. WHOOOSSSH up at the last second. FOOOMMM under a bridge with full afterburner. FOOOOMMM - launch back into the air with a victory roll and then NEEOOWWW your plane sideways between two sky scrapers.
.
The best thing about this game is that you can actually do that within a minute of the very first level if you want.
.
10/10

Ken is a cheap skank. He dies his hair blonde when he’s really got black hair, it’s too long, he’s got an amazing car and a fit girlfriend who wants to marry him. They will NEVER marry, though, because Ken’s a cheap skank. It’s just as well, really. If you think about it, when they’re at the altar and she says “I do, Ken”, brother’s gonna miss hear that because his ears are stuffed with crack and he’s gonna think she’s trying to fireball his cheap ass. He busts out the flaming dragon (all flash, no style) and next thing you know, Elisa’s dead. Or maybe her name’s Elise. Either way she’s a skank whore because she’s hanging out with Ken.

Ken isn’t the worst Street Fighter character though. Not by a long distance. The cheapest is BLATANTLY Guile. Game-freeze skanks? Check. The whole army as his back up? Check. Dead friend that he killed himself and then blamed it on Bison? Check. Guile is a cunt. As he walks up doing loads of crouching mid-kicks over and over, then sonic, then crouching mid kick, then sonic, then jab flash, then mid kick, then sonic, then OH MY GOD WHEN DOES IT END? I hate Guile WAY more than I hate Ken, even though Ken’s moveset is actually quite appealing. But even I acknowledge that Guile has gotten a bum deal in SFIV.

Where’s the dude’s hair?! It should be like a small building growing out his head. Jet planes should be able to land on that shit. He should be able to swim across the Atlantic carrying a squadron of jets on it like a fucking aircraft carrier. It’s supposed to be HUGE. That’s why he carries a comb around with him and needs to fix that shit at the end of a fight. It’s the sheer weight of his hair that lets him pull off the flash kick - torque at both ends of his body (his boots are made of iron, obviously. That’s why the crouching mid-kick hurts so much).

So let’s start it up right here. Guile needs more hair in Street Fighter IV. Capcom are right to fuck him over but this is just a step too far. Help a brother out. Write to Capcom TODAY and complain that his hair is too short. Make t-shirts up saying “Guile needs extensions”. Call your mum and get her to write a letter to your local MP. Whatever it takes.

Let’s make this wrong a right.

If there’s one thing everyone should know about Suki, it’s that he’s a fucking cunt. If there’s two things everyone should know about him, it’s that he’s a fucking cunt and that if he ever says a game is fucking brilliant, you can guarantee that it really is fucking brilliant.

Suki introduced me to Disgaea way back, when it was originally released on the PS2. I saw him playing an item world level and just thought “wtf is all that shit?”. Mind you, the stats that were coming up were seriously fucking impressive. It was at that point that Suki told me that Disgaea was, in his opinion, “fucking brilliant”. He also said it was “amazing”. Now, when Suki says amazing in that way, his brow falls into a deadly serious frown, even though he’s happy and there’s a pause in his speech before he says the word amazing. That frowning shit is fucked, right, but it underlines how special it is when he says a game is amazing in that way. It was pretty obvious, then, that Disgaea had to be both fucking brilliant and amazing in a totally serious way.
And you know what? It is. I’m not talking normal fucking brilliance, I’m talking jaw-dropping, hyper-intense, blistering luminance. Disgaea is really is amazing.

The key reason for this is the cackling glee that you get when you get rewarded for exploiting the game’s system. Obviously, the main strategy RPG thrust of the gameplay is a colossal grinding pit. The real joy opens in successive stages as you realise how high you can reach. Key milestones and exploit openers need to be spotted or pointed out to you about fifty times by someone who’s raped the game, but once you know that Winged Slayer is all that really matters, you’ll be off.

You see, Winged Slayer is a move that delivers high damage to a 3×3 square of targets immediately in front of you. You need the tile three squares behind you to be free too, but the key point is that 3×3 square. It’s the second from last move that you can learn with a sword, but when you grind a couple of characters (including Laharl, OBVIOUSLY) to the point where they get it, you’ll be near to unlocking Stellar Graveyard and the Valgipius IV map. It’s episode 10, so it’s quite a hard grind at the ‘normal’ pace. Don’t worry, if you put in the work, you’ll get a supreme reward.

What’s special about Valgipius IV is that it’s nothing but a 3×3 block of enemies. When you first reach it, it may well totally fuck you. However, you can see the value of persevering here once you’ve got Winged Slayer. Basically, this map is the first power levelling machine. You can grind every skill here. If you really want to take the piss, you can level up spell and heal areas before landing the Winged Slayer and to be honest, it will take a while to rape it properly but believe me, when you do you will FUCKING LOVE IT. Nothing beats that first straight kill of all nine cunts with one single move. This will also be your first taste of the statcrack you’ve just become addicted to. There is a map to come that will offer even more amazing 3×3 kills, where you’ll level up a newly-transmigrated character to level 64 with one hit. Yeah. 64 levels in one hit. That’s not even the highest you can take it. Suki knows exactly how high.
The other exploit that’s utterly crucial is being able to buy Foresights. This will take AGES, although Suki can tell you exactly how to get them as quickly as possible. Basically, these come with stat boosters (called ‘residents’) at the highest possible level that are free for you to move into equipment your team’s using. We’re talking XP bonuses that are hundreds of percent per resident and if you get a Legendary item, you can shove twelve of them in. Even shit items have room for at least one and with XP, weapon skill and mana gain being dominant, Nippon Ichi have given us a clear and deliberate method of ultra-sick power levelling.

What all this means is that the crucial attachment you have to characters that you’ve raised is profoundly deep. I’m so proud of my team. Barbara, the stalwart fighter who became a Ronin, took up Winged Slayer and never looked back. Thanks to transmigration, she can now omega heal, cast omega element spells and put down brutally high Winged Slayers. The beautiful thing is getting her the Tera level spells is a piece of piss and I could probably do it in an hour or two. In a word, this unique position of having total dominance over the game’s initially-presented ruleset really is amazing. I’m frowning right now. That’s how amazing it is.

Thing is, Disgaea has an upper limit. There is a pretty clear goal: top level chars, all skills, all weapons maxed, all equipment full of residents, all equipment the highest items in the game. Obviously, I’m not mental enough to get to that, but I am mental enough to want a maxed-out Laharl with a maxed-out weapon and a companion Divine Majin with the same and hilariously, it’s all within sight. It’s just a matter of grinding there.

This is why Disgaea is awesome on the PSP. I have to travel by train a lot and Disgaea really is the best companion, especially now I can transmigrate and level up to 500 in about 30 minutes. Yeah that’s right. Even better than a shy but beautiful eastern-european girl who’s longing to find out how an English geek’s cock works. I’m being serious right now. It really is.

So yeah, Suki was right, listen to Suki, play Disgaea and play it properly or you’re as much of a cunt as Suki is (which is technically impossible, but you know what I mean).

1000000000000000/10

Recently, I had the pleasure of seeing Rambo IV. One of the very best things about this film is that it features several crimes against humanity. No, this isn’t some snide entry to a heavy Stallone diss, the film does actually depict loads of war crimes as part of its deliriously brutal sensory cascade of simulated strong battle horror.

.

Strong isn’t the word, really. Jurassic Park/OMG IT’S REAL epiphany, more like. Rambo also heralds the death of the standard blood squib, as its CG bullet consequences are far more FUCK YO than an exploding plastic bag could ever be. A shame, in a way, but there you go. The important thing is the bit about war crimes.

.

Why? Well because it reminded me that I’ve got pics somewhere documenting some ace war crimes in Hidden And Dangerous 2 (the best FPS ever made).

.

Winning. In total war, two rules are crucial: corpses are there to be defiled and the very worst thing you can do to an enemy is steal their hats. For me, Hidden And Dangerous is defined by its hat-collecting subgame and I will go to great lengths to secure the hats I want. Sadly this level, whilst being one of the best in the game, suffers from a harsh deficit of hats, so these delightful peaked caps had to do. Experienced players will note that Arthur Muncie is wearing an Italian pilot’s suit, which is a right cunt to get without alerting every motherfucker in the place. One day, I will come back and perform an excellent war crime by using the AA gun. I did shoot the living shit out of an irate engineer with it once, but he was going spastic and like totally shooting my dudes so he wasn’t really an innocent.

.

Of course, once you’ve collected the hats and defiled the corpses, the only thing left to do is line them all up, shoot them again and then pile into a stolen vehicle to make good your escape:

.

On some levels, you don’t just get to steal hats, but you also get to pose in seriously wicked costumes. Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of my SSS rank hat collecting in the ’sink the Tirpitz!’ mission. My dudes looked SO CASH sporting a fresh frogman outfit with the most elite of SS headgear. In the meantime, we’ll have to make do with a couple of my guys looking badboy for the camera:

.

Check out that stolen uniform AND a stolen knife, which I stole from the dude I captured and then stabbed him to death with it. I should have taken pictures of that, really. Instead, we’ll have more horror in the desert:

This dude is like totally fucked. Capturing someone in Hidden And Dangerous 2 is immensely tricky, seeming to obey some random arbitrary rule system for when people give up. Trying to move them to places where you can pull off a wicked war crime is also immensely tricky and also incredibly frustrating. What this means is that when someone is stupid enough to surrender in a decent spot, you’re not going to let them get off lightly. For the subgame, Arthur’s done a beauty here and got an engineer to give up his clothes. As I mentioned earlier, they often go spastic with their little Lugers, so this was a particularly lucky catch. The other dude is totally rocking his desert stormtrooper outfit, which makes this picture pretty much a SSS rank.

Now, this prisoner is looking pretty defiant. You can see it in his face. This is deeply admirable when you consider what’s in front of him:

Yes. A vehicle. One of two that I skilfully commandeered and marvelously, they’re both colossal Panzer tanks. I’ve dragged some dead bodies in to up the PP for this pic, but the main source of awesome is pretty clear to see. It’s obvious what’s going to happen next:

The best thing about killing prisoners is that their hands remain tied after they die.

10/10

Me and My Katamari on the PSP is fucking great. The King of Space is fucking great. He talks in such a badass way and you can see the outline of his royal penis through his snugly fitting velour day suit. Also, he says Johnson on the loading screen and Johnson is a fucking great word for penis. It’s fucking great.

I play my PSP on the train to work every day. I played Everybody’s Golf and I did some Riiiiidge Racer and Disgaea and a few Phantasy Stars and ooh, everything. During all of these I remained calm and peaceful while I quietly went about my business of hitting balls and driving a car sideways and levelling up and levelling up and levelling up and levelling up.

Me and My Katamari has me sweating and swearing (good swearing, like you do when you see some tits) and laughing and my eyes go all googly like that guy in Total Recall when his eyes go all googly because he’s dying.

You roll shit up into a big ball and then you roll bigger shit up into a bigger ball and hey, you probably know all this already because you are just so great. It’s got millions of cute little touches absolutely everywhere. In fact it is basically just a great big cute little touch, burnt onto a hastily rebranded Minidisc and lovingly applied to the underside of your most portable of PlayStations.

If you are in any way unhappy, Me and My Katamari will make you happy again. And I don’t just mean if you’re feeling glum. Severe schizophrenics, sociopaths, the criminally deranged and even that guy who’s got you nailed to a chair in his basement right now will be rendered harmless and docile by the unbound pleasure gun of Me and My Katamari. I’m a Doctor and I mean this.

But let’s say that you’re already happy. Perhaps you’ve just won the lottery with numbers you found inside Christina Aguilera. Perhaps the Ferrari you ordered came with a second free Ferrari with wheels made from Hitler’s lungs and seats that are a really nice colour. Perhaps you’ve just discovered that you can see the outline of the King of Space’s penis through his snugly fitting velour day suit. I’m in no position to say.

If you find yourself encumbered with this level of gigantic happiness, then I have just the tonic: Innocent Life on the PSP. It’s so fucking sad. I don’t know if it’s possible to express how sad it is. Really fucking sad. Seriously.

Everyone lives in this cool little town by the sea. Everyone, that is, except you. Despite being a pre-pubescent boy, you live on your own, outside town. In some ruins. On a farm.

All the other kids go to school and hang out and play games and you work from six in the morning on a farm, hoeing and breaking up rocks with a hammer and sowing crops and watering crops and harvesting crops and cutting up logs.

You’re like, maybe nine years old.

And you’re not even a real boy. You’re a fucking robot boy. And if you do go into the school to try and gain some short, sweet solace from the endless solitude, desperate loneliness and back breaking labour you’ve been cruelly assigned, you discover that reading books is pointless because you already know everything in them, because you’re a robot boy. So you can’t even pretend you aren’t exquisitely aware of your predicament – the only one of your race, trapped in an endless life of hard labour, utilising almost none of the vast repository of knowledge stored in your robot brain. On your own. In some ruins. On a farm.

When you’ve finished your chores, you’re free to walk around the Island – everyone else has cars, you can walk. Or you can watch TV. There are four programs. One is the weather forecast. One is a really terrible version of the Power Rangers. One is a cartoon about – I can hardly bring myself to say this – a kitten that’s lost its mummy. A kitten that’s lost its mummy! And the last one is a cookery program. You can watch it and learn cooking, but as you live on your own, outside town, in some ruins, on a farm, you can only cook for yourself.

It’s utterly and totally heartbreaking.

Every Sunday, you go back to your ‘Dad’, the professor that built you. Every Sunday he gives you a check up and pronounces you fit and well enough to go back to the farm and spend the next week farming, on your own, again. Every week you want him to take you up in his arms and hug you and tell you it’ll all be fine and never let go. And every week he sends you back to the farm unhugged, untouched, unloved. Again.

Oh Christ, look at me now. No, just leave me be. I’ll be fine.

Overall, I would give this game 10/10

Graphics - the PSP can do WHAT? out of 10.
Audio - not bad through the shitty speakers, useful for knowing when a boss is in the area. Through headphones it’s on another level in terms of conveying information. Aesthetically not bad either. Merely 100 out of 10.
Gameplays - loads of them. Nearly infinite due to analogue control. With friends you can add another infinity. Out of 10.
Megabytes - loads of them.
Replayability - right, let’s get into this.

Monster Hunter is, I suppose, all about the grind. Certainly in so much as PSO was, less so than a monthly subscription MMO on PC is, but I feel like the term grind isn’t really fair when talking about Monster Hunter. I would say, once you’re past the opening hours and the confusion passes and you’ve done some internet research, the general flow of Monster is like so -

1. Check which monster you want to kill. Check which weaponry and armour are appropriate and then equip it. Stick all the shit you think you’ll need in your pockets, including some extra bombs and traps, eat a hearty meal and save.

2. Head out and find said monster. Play very cautiously with no hope of defeating it in the time limit. Learn it’s attack patterns and try to figure out what behaviour of yours elicit which attacks from the monster and try to find where it’s safe to be around the monster during its different attacks. Die. Maybe do this again, depending on how MIND FUCKINGLY STUPID/RECKLESS you might be. For instance, I will need to die on average two to three times.

3. Reload at the save point where you’re facing the monster for the first time and then go in and KICK ITS FUCKING ASS. Because you’re rubbish you will probably need almost your full allotment of time (50 minutes) to track and slay the beast. Carve the body up for items and then go build a new weapon with them.

4. Use said weapon to kill the next monster.

So that’s basically brilliant. It’s a non-stop boss rush with occasional henchmen slaying, only the boss doesn’t really want to fight. The sensation of tracking down a huge monster that can kill you with one hit (sometimes) and then crushing it is massively compelling. The only time this might become repetitive is when you’re building new armour sets.

I’d say that you probably don’t need to build new armour sets very often. I have tons because I like to switch them around but that’s mostly for cosmetic reasons. But when you do build a new set it means crafting five new items, not just one weapon. And each of those items will likely need several mats that have a low yield rate from the monster you’re carving from. Which means that if you’re building, say, a full set of Monoblos armour, you will need to defeat Monoblos maybe 10 times. Which is quite a fucking lot if it’s taking you 50 minutes a kill. Only it isn’t.

The chances are that the armour you want is from a monster you defeated ages ago. Which means you probably have a ninja weapon that is particularly good for killing that monster that you didn’t have at the time. You are probably also much better at fighting that monster than you were before, and have a good idea what its movements are. So Monoblos, for instance, has gone from a 50 minute fight to being a 10 minute fight at the most. And the process of doing that fight gets more and more fun the more I do it, because now I know how to draw him to a specific spot when he burrows underground so I can smack him as he comes up, and I can make him charge me so that I MATADOR him in the legs as he passes, and I know exactly where I should stand so that when I roll-cancel the third hammer strike I won’t get caught by his counter attack. I’m toying with him now. I’m MASTERING him. Not because I have statistically superior power, which is the usual MMO mechanic, but because I’m becoming more skillful. I’m a hunter and instead of a mounted head I have a suit of armour that let anyone who plays with me know - Monoblos is nothing to me.

Well, that would be what I had if there was anything to fucking play with. I can’t wait for a proper console version. The PS2 version didn’t count because I didn’t have it then, and because who the fuck had the kit to take their PS2 online?

Tonight I’m finishing my Khezu armour set. I just need one more piece of Pale Bone and then the arm guards are done. Everything else is good to go. I’ve killed Khezu (and his big brother Red Khezu) about 15 times now, and each time it gets better. Khezu was a real wall for me when I first reached him. I had to watch a video of someone else beating him before I could even get a hit in. Now I’ve got much better armour and weapons but in truth I could do it naked with a toothpick. The spaces I’m finding in his attack patterns and my understanding of the hit zones of my weaponry and his attacks both feel superhuman. And that’s what’s so brilliant about Monster Hunter. And it’s only brilliant BECAUSE you (can) repeat the same bosses over and over. If you couldn’t, you’d never learn how to deal with the late game bosses in any fashion other than statistical superiority. So yeah, it’s grinding. Technically. But not essentially.

Overall - 20,000,000,000,000 out of 10.