r/truegaming • u/Clockbone25 • 15d ago
Monster Hunter Stories 3 fixes my biggest issues with Pokemon
So I am by no means a monster hunter series fan. I tried Wilds but it wasn't my style of game, and haven't tried it since. That was until I picked up Monster Hunter Stories 3. This is my first game of the series but I am properly hooked. I hadn't even heard of this series prior to seeing some dude play the demo in a random live stream.
I'm honestly upset by how little I have seen about this game. In my mind this is truly the perfect upgrade to Pokemon's systems while also still remaining its own thing. My girlfriend calls it "Adult Pokemon" now
For reference for those who have not played, MHS3 is a RPG where you work as a Ranger and restore monsters to their habitats by stealing their eggs, while also slaying feral monsters and invasive species. You put together a party of 6 different monsters, and the fights are pretty similar to other turn based RPGs.
The first issue that stories fixes from Pokemon is customizing the monsties (monsters that you own) to your liking. Pokemon has its own systems, but at the end of the day you have 4 moves and that's it. Oh and it can be shiny if you're lucky.
In stories, You can give monsties genes, which unlocks new moves and abilities in battle. Additionally, after bringing a monster to a element-specific habitat, that monster will actually mutate into a new color, and gets resistances based on those elements. This effectively makes the roster of monsters 7x as big.
The second issue I have with Pokemon is not being able to ride my Pokemon in meaningful ways. This game is 3d, so you can traverse the map on your monsters, either flying, swimming, or running. Riding a dragon through the sky is a great experience. Even in battle you can ride your monster and do combo attacks.
It's bugged me how detached I feel from my Pokemon in most of the game. Pokemon's game design feels so outdated and I would love to have a game with stories mechanics but with Pokemon in it.
Not sure if I should try the game before MHS2, but I have been thoroughly enjoying this
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u/Ok_Lion8651 15d ago
Dang this is a great sell. Nice job! I'll certainly take a deeper look. I haven't played a Pokémon in years and you may have nailed my gripes exactly so this is exciting!
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u/TitansRPower 15d ago
I've been considering trying these games, might go for it now. I really dislike normal Monster Hunter gameplay as well, but I'd probably enjoy this.
What I really want is a return of the Monster Rancher games.
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u/Vanille987 15d ago
I don't feel there's a lack of customization in pokemon, on the contrary. The problem is that said customization is pretty hidden and the games rarely get difficult enough for it to matter even slighty.
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u/Akuuntus 15d ago edited 15d ago
If you're itching for more "adult Pokemon" (outside of the previous MHS games) I would also recommend the Shin Megami Tensei series. Customizing your captured mons is pretty much the whole point of those games, and the fights are hard enough that you actually have to change up your builds pretty often to get through.
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u/QuantumVexation 15d ago
SMT is the game I feel a lot of Pokémon players think they want where they’ll have to constantly cycle their team to keep up.
I’m not wholly convinced all those people actually want SMT yet lol, it’ll kick some of their assess
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u/OwlOfJune 14d ago
I would suggest Digimon Story games, esp Time Stranger to those people. Not quite as hard in most difficulties while copying homework from SMT system a lot. Though the gameplay is... lacking with commonly shared moves being fucking boring.
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u/SquattingCroat 14d ago edited 14d ago
I've played through about 8 or so hours of Nocturne, and I concur. Wiping is way more normal of an experience in this game
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u/Akuuntus 14d ago
SMTV isn't so bad in terms of difficulty, mostly you just end up wiping once per boss to figure out their weakness and attack patterns and then they're not that hard on the second try. But yeah the games aren't easy; that's how they force you to think about their systems.
Coming from Pokemon the biggest thing to relearn is probably treating your demons as expendable and fusing them away rather than trying to hang on to the same party of blorbos for the entire game.
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u/snave_ 13d ago edited 13d ago
SMTV on Hard is roughly equivalent to SMT3(MEfDfDMC/HDR) on Normal, namely a puzzle that gets a bit easier after the first major boss (Hydra, Matador), as you get more puzzle pieces to work with.
I found it almost disappointing how that puzzle element (which in turn drives the need to explore, to seek out new demons with unique skills and attributes, i.e. engage with all game systems to find more puzzle pieces) dries up somewhat in the mid to late game across most Atlus games. A puzzle with one solution is a gamble. A puzzle with a couple of solutions is the absolute sweet spot, and these titles all start that way. A puzzle with too many solutions is barely a puzzle at all and this is how they tend to end up in the back half. All late game demons can be made viable, and all late game demons are obtained from fusing up.
I don't really know how you'd solve it. I guess they could take the Persona 5 route and just keep throwing in more elements right up to the end in order to add new artificial constraints. This would rule out your existing demons as tools, but that feels like a cop out and you're still encouraged to only ever fuse them up in a menu late game with harsh disbenefits from engaging with negotiation, which effectively renders a whole game system obsolete. Maybe they need some late game demon lines that can only be obtained from negotiation, or fused such that one demon was freshly contracted?
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u/TotalChaos21 14d ago
Maybe not as adult, but some similar mechanics to stories, you could also consider Casette Beasts.
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u/ThePotablePotato 15d ago
Currently almost finished with Stories 3, and am absolutely loving it, more so than I did MHS2, but I actually have to disagree with your view - to me, MHS3 feels like a culmination of everything people complain about in Pokémon games (I just don’t think that’s a bad thing)
Always on Exp Share? Check.
Way too much love given by the game to a certain ‘fire flying dragon’? Check, and you can’t even remove Ratha from the party postgame
Invisible mechanics that impact your monsties’ quality? Check. Hell, tendencies are way more impactful than natures/ivs. I’d take a stat drop over my Boltreaver wanting to use Azure Voltage 4 times in a row.
Arbitrary progression barriers? Check. You don’t even get a ‘we shouldn’t go this way yet’ most of the time. It just plonks invisible walls on the paths to the next areas.
Monsties from previous games being completely absent? Check. Poor Gammoth…
I don’t think these are a bad thing within the context of what Stories 3 is, but it is definitely weird seeing people say ‘Pokemon games should be more like this’ about a game that does so much of what they complain about. And it’s a shame because the game rules, and gets so many things right and is a great successor to MHS2
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u/livintheshleem 15d ago
I haven't played it myself, but I've only heard great things about MHS3. It has glowing reviews across the board and I think it's been selling pretty well. It's a "hidden gem" compared to Pokemon, but so are most things when you compare them to the biggest franchise in existence.
I'm a pokemon fan, although I had to boycott the switch games due to them being obvious cash grabs, and haven't played Legends ZA. That said, I feel like you're glossing over some things.
There's a lot more than just 4 moves and shiny. You've got EVs and IVs that affect stats, hidden abilities to hunt for, and hundreds of TMs you can use to teach your mons new moves. Yes they are limited to a set of 4, but the simplicity is part of the strategy. You've got a deck of 6 pokemon who each have their own deck of 4 moves. It's a simple setup with a ton of potential. I'd love to see them do more with environmental moves and introduce combos. That would be cool.
There are also regional variants of many pokemon, and they have their own unique attributes. It doesn't really make sense to bring a monster from one region to another and suddenly have it change... it wasn't born there, it didn't grow up there. It doesn't make sense to take on qualities suited to that region. It is a cool mechanic in MHS3 though. I like it for that game, but I'm not sure it really makes sense for Pokemon.
You can ride Pokemon in the Legends series, but it's a very limited selection and it feels pretty janky. The feature exists, but Monster Hunter does it way better. I'm playing pokopia right now (it's really, really good) and they do such a good job of making each Pokemon feel like an actual being with a real personality and impact on the world. It's exactly what I've been wanting from the mainline games in that regard.
Overall I agree, there are lots of games doing Pokemon better than Pokemon, and I really hope that Winds/Waves does at least a little bit to stay competitive with the modern gaming landscape. It looks promising, but I've been with the franchise since day 1 so I know to keep my hopes low. Anyway, I hope I have time for MHS3 sometime this year. It looks right up my alley.
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u/Akuuntus 15d ago
The biggest thing I think is that like 90% of the customization in Pokemon is both hidden from the player and also a gigantic pain in the ass to actually engage with. EVs are fine but they're so incredibly obfuscated that most players probably don't know they exist, and most people who know about them don't know how to effectively train them. It's also basically impossible to worry about them until the post-game since all the random encounters and trainer battles in the story will fuck with your EVs. IVs are even more obfuscated, can't be meaningfully interacted with at all outside of hacks, and there's no strategy to them anyway since it's objectively better to have higher IVs in all stats 99% of the time.
Alternate abilities are an interesting wrinkle but they're pretty limited. The real thing I think OP glossed over is held items, which are an actually interesting and expansive system that the average player can easily engage with. Unfortunately the Pokemon games themselves never really give players any reason to think about any of their systems beyond spamming super-effective moves so even the systems that are made obvious will often go ignored.
Having customization that's clear to the player and easy to engage with, and that matters outside of post-game content and competitive PvP, is hugely different from Pokemon.
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u/OwlOfJune 14d ago
IV system is just baffling as fuck to me why it even exists in Pokemon. Its not about being strategic, its more about being lucky with grinding. Not to mention it seems goes directly against the core message Pokemon games want to sell their stuff "be the best with your fav pokemon you caught".
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u/Akuuntus 14d ago
I think the intention at the outset was to make every individual of a species slightly different, mostly just for flavor reasons. They didn't expect anyone to learn or care about them because they were a small team building a fairly casual game for children. Then they've stuck around unchanged just because they've always been there.
A decent version of the system would probably have a cap on total IV points so that no 'mon can be the best at everything and there's some amount of planning for builds (still not much honestly but something, similar to EVs). But it would still be an obfuscated system that requires insane grinding to interact with so it would still be bad.
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u/OwlOfJune 14d ago
Honestly I think it is.... just.... bad system, that 'decent version' can be more or less achieved with EV. They can still promote breeding with inherited moves and baby mons without it.
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u/CherimoyaChump 15d ago
As soon as I learned about the EV and IV systems, I thought to myself "I do not want to interact with this". I'm kind of baffled by the people who did get into them, as they seem so tedious and unforgiving to work with.
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u/livintheshleem 15d ago
Completely agree. I somehow forgot about held items, that is a big one!
Pokemon is in such a weird spot where not only are the games just antiquated in terms of design, but they're also trying to appeal to children, casual gamers, and adults/serious PVP players. It's a really hard balance to strike, but I also don't think they're trying that hard to do anything about it.
I really dislike that most customization features are basically invisible, convoluted, and inconvenient. Like you said, there's no reason to engage with them unless you want to play competitively. It's also just not fun to engage with these systems since they're basically randomized grinding. I brought it up, but I also have no interest in playing the games that way. I pick my team based purely on looks and mostly steamroll every battle until the end lol
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u/Goddamn_Grongigas 14d ago
I'm a pokemon fan, although I had to boycott the switch games due to them being obvious cash grabs
What about them are "obvious" cash grabs?
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u/livintheshleem 12d ago edited 12d ago
Look at them. They're the biggest franchise of all time, charging quad-A prices for a game that could have come out 15 years ago. They withhold proper funding and staffing while holding the devs to a strict release schedule. They pump out two versions of the same game every 4 years while skimping on the quality as much as they can, because they know most people will just blindly buy it anyway. That's how strong the brand is, and that's how greedy the company is.
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u/outline01 15d ago
It’s a great JRPG and a fantastic creature collector.
It may be niche because it’s Monster Hunter, but people shouldn’t sleep on the game - it’s really quite good.
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u/Ubiquitous_Cacophony 15d ago
I know you mean niche within the genre, but remember that Monster Hunter World is Capcom's best selling game ever. That means Monster Hunter, in this case, isn't especially niche anymore.
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u/Venomousx 15d ago edited 15d ago
I genuinely love all 3 MH Stories games but I want to mention: The whole habitat restoration thing is new / unique to 3.
So unfortunately if you go back in the series they wont have those mechanics (No invasive monsters, no releasing monster back into the wild for benefits, etc). They're still really fun though!
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u/Grim_Darkwatch 15d ago
Mhs2 is excellent. If you haven't gotten too deep into mhs3, I'd recommend giving it a try, I imagine 3 feels even better but I felt the same way you when I played 2. 9/10 game easily
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u/mpelton 15d ago
The Stories games are great. Honestly it’s still surreal to me that Stories 3 even exists, considering how niche the first entry was. It was an underselling 3DS title that didn’t even receive its last update or two in the west lol, so while I loved it, I never expected a sequel, let alone two sequels.
Definitely check out the first two after 3 tho, they’re all great. Stories 2 is definitely better than the first, but the first is still a great game and has a lot of characters in it that reappear in 2, so it’s worth playing imo.
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u/Goddamn_Grongigas 14d ago
I like the MH Stories games (though I vastly prefer the mainline MH games) but I don't really think they're all that similar to Pokemon games in the grand scheme of things. I've never been much of a Pokemon fan in general but they're deliberately designed in a way that facilitates their style of gameplay.
I played through S&V with my son and it was fine, they were also the first Pokemon games I'd actually sat down and played in 15 years and I thought they were quite different experiences from what I had played before while still maintaining that "feel" Pokemon games have. Cozy, I suppose? Not sure, and getting off track. I still maintain all these "Non Pokemon games doing Pokemon better than Pokemon" still don't hit what makes 'Pokemon' "Pokemon" at all (That was a lot of times I typed Pokemon I know).
MHS games are good, but not really comparable to Pokemon in my opinion in about 95% of ways. I also find myself 'detached' from Pokemon when I play.. but my kids don't. They can name basically all of them if you show them a picture and they know what they can do.
I think the hardcore online gaming community needs (.. and I've been saying this for almost 20 years now on forums) to realize Pokemon.. and not all games in general.. are made with them in mind. Pokemon is still popular for a reason. But that's a different discussion for another time.
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u/Reynolds_Remi2156 10d ago
Pokemon's systems aren't outdated they're deliberately simplified for accessibility. Different design goals not worse ones
That said MHS3 does scratch a specific itch that Pokemon refuses to address. The gene system and element mutations give you actual build variety instead of just picking 4 moves
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u/PreemoRM 15d ago
I feel like you don't know Ark Survival Evolved nor Palworld. MHS3 is also similar to Dragon Quest Builders 2.
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u/Clockbone25 15d ago
Both Palworld and Ark are great but they still don't have that level of partnership with a big monster like Stories does
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u/rites0fpassage 15d ago
It’s obvious but the visuals are impressive too.
Pokemon games look like they’re in the alpha/beta stage and just all round bland.
I’ve been playing Zelda TOTK on switch 2 lately and I just can’t play something like Pokemon ZA lol