The core combat is fantastic, and great fun whether or not you're a monster hunter fan or not. It's simple in premise with it's rock-paper-scissors style, but having two of those on the go at once with weapons/parts and move styles, adding in elements, monstie control, and gene picking you can get some very interesting setups and battles out of it. It is enhanced by learning how to judge a monsters attack patterns off its design and similar things, meaning you can be predictive, not just reactive, in new battles which stops new encounters from feeling too punishing
Unfortunately, my issue is that a lot of the surrounding game is not good. The open world segments are good enough, but a lot of the game is spent inside dungeons. Dungeons that are randomly generated off say ~10 room layouts that comprise EVERY dungeon in the game. By the time you're in the second area out of six, you will have seen every room that can be in a dungeon, with most dungeons comprising of two to six rooms in a chain or loop. This makes the exploration tedious at best, and outright mind-numbing at worst. While they do have different themes, there is no difference between running through them based on locale except a rare water/lava obstruction.
These repeated rooms also complicate the fact that you can find dungeons INSIDE DUNGEONS. So you can be running through one dungeon, enter an egg dungeon inside it, and find yourself in an identical room with no difference or marker as to which dungeon you are in.
Add to this the lack of any music in dungeons, and before you even get half way through the game the thought of going into a dungeon is boring before you even start. And then you finish the game, get into the high rank post game, which is ENTIRELY inside dungeons, with nothing needed from the overworld. I couldn't bring myself to do it.
It could have been so much better. But I couldn't stand going through those dungeons for one more hour even to get to what I hoped would be some very interesting fights in the post game with new monsters
izigame.me
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