First hour: Monster Hunter Tri
(It goes without saying, or it should, but the video embedded above comes courtesy of the fabulous Giant Bomb. The text below comes from me.)
As promised, my revealing and contrition-inducing first hour of MONSTER HUNTER TRI for the Nintendo Wii.
0:00 Never have I felt sillier about booting up a new purchase. The whole franchise conjures nothing but disgust in my brainmeat, but several reviews have compared this to Dreamcast-era "Phantasy Star Online." If that's even remotely the case, I'm onboard.
0:01 Well-animated and surprisingly brutal opening sequence, wherein monster gets eaten by monster gets eaten by monster, a la that miserable Looney Tunes underwater sequence from "The Phantom Menace." But cooler.
0:05 The character customization options are pretty great, and it must be said: MONSTER HUNTER TRI has some of the best hair presets of any game I've played since SAINT'S ROW 2.
0:07 So I'm in the single-player game, and the main hub (Moga Village) is pleasant and populated enough, but seriously, the first order of business: pants. If you're a dude, you start the game in hot pants.
0:08 With chainmail leggings and a giant bone hammer suspended from my dude's back, my masculinity is secure.
0:10 So the character dialogue is rife with really intentionally bad puns, and there's a twirp in the middle of the village named "Future Alpha Male." I may be smitten. It's clear that somebody at Capcom gets how people like me feel about Monster Hunter.
0:12 I'm out in the field, and moving about feels pretty good. So does whacking things, which really surprises me. And while you can tell this is a Wii game -- there ain't even the faintest whiff of high definition, or definition of any kind -- it's pretty nonetheless. The design of this first zone is beautiful, and there are some nice environmental effects.
0:14 Load times suck though. And they come pretty quickly and furiously.
0:16 The game just ordered me to kill this harmless herbivorish dinosaur-lookin' thing. Savage. But I skinned the carcass for raw meat! The village chief's son will be so pleased!
0:18 The translation is thick on kitsch, but I continue to dig it. "Me plus BBQ equals BFF."
0:23 I just ate a haddock filet. In real life. Omega-3-alicious. 'kay, back to the game.
0:30 The game just introduced me to most of its basic features -- upgrading weapons, picking up quests, where to find crafting items, what to do with raw meat, etc. Take notes, SquareEnix! I'm not overwhelmed! I can learn to do multiple things all at once!
0:35 I believe I'm on my first real quest! The village folks have dispatched me to collect "resource points" so that I might restore our base camp. That means clobbering these harmless deer things — harmless, that is, until you bludgeon one of their friends to death. Then they harass you until half of your health and all of your pride are gone.
0:40 Just cleared my first room of what I'd actually call monsters, and it felt damn good. Nasty, dilophosaur-looking things. I BLUDGEONED AND SKINNED THEM.
0:48 Back to the village. Murdered another one of those pacifist monsters on the way, but hey, I needed the meat. Cooked a burnt steak and a rare steak; burnt food reduces your stamina, properly cooked food raises it. Duh.
0:52 Turned in my first quest! Got ... loot? Pittance fang? Funky pheromones? I suspect that stuff is for crafting, but for now, it's burning a hole in my item pouch.
1:00 Okay, feeling the groove now, official-like. Unearthing iron ore with my mega pickaxe, beating the brains out of Jaggis, checking in with the village chief ... I've got the bug.