Press B 247: Monster Hunter Wilds Is NOT Easy

Jake, the guild gives you permission and authorization to hunt this podcast. And it's Wild Monster Hunter Wilds today on. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of Press me to cancel your favorite retro gaming podcast. And boy, do we have a retro classic for you this week. Can press B do two non retro topics in a row? Yes.

Yes, we can. Because this week's retro game is Monster Hunter Wilds, released two fucking weeks ago. Sorry, YouTube. This week we're talking about. I'm going to say game of the year candidate. I know I say that every damn time there's a new game coming out, but I think. I mean it this time. I think Monster Hunter Wild might be a game of the year for me or at least a strong contender. But we're going to talk about this game. We're going to talk about how well it's been doing and our takes on it, and also talk about some of the criticisms because there has been some backlash on this game and I want to kind of talk about it, but I can't do this alone. No. I'm joined by my good friend Chard. Chard, how you doing this week?

Fantastic. I'm very excited to talk about this game. This has been a very exciting game that we both played the beta on when it first came out. And we were both very much all in on this after just playing that short amount of time of the beta, even to the point where I was like, I was him and Han. And then it came out and I bought it two days before it was released because I have no willpower and I haven't stopped playing it since and been able to play it on the Steam deck with our Moon Moonlight Sunlight program that we've talked about. And it's just playable downstairs in this game. It's. It's an addiction. I might need an intervention because this game has been just playing. I've been playing it out, wearing out the tape on both ends.

Yeah, that's the thing with monster games, especially when you get. Once you get hooked into that loop, it kind of grows on you and it kind of sticks with you. And it's. It's definitely a game that I'll be playing, I think for at least half of this year, if not longer. But it's going to depend on the. The support. Sorry, I didn't check our audio levels before we went live, so I'm gonna do that as we talk now. Perfect. It's been a few weeks. We've been a few weeks.

We've been very busy. Very busy. Let's see Crazy. But yeah, to talk about Monster, Monster Hunter, I guess just the, the, I guess our experience with the franchise. I think before the mention of the podcast, you've only played this and then what else was it? World.

I played World. Yes. And, and just so we know, just so that everybody knows, Jake and I are fully qualified to talk about Monster Hunter Wild. I am sitting at 57.4 hours of gameplay on Monster Hunter Wild and Jake is sitting at a smooth 33.4 hours played into this game. So we have some time put between us while playing this thing. So if anybody's checking our credentials, check. Our Steam times, checking our Monster Hunter profiles and our experience cards. Yes.

So you played, you did play World. How much of world did you play? Did you actually get into it or you just kind of bounced off it?

I'll be honest with you. I played up to probably the end of the first main story and I'll be, I'll be. Frankly, honestly, it was really difficult for me. I, I had a real hard time getting the grasp of how the game is supposed to play. I was using Insect Glee for a while because I really liked the ability to jump into the air and fly around and stuff. And I think I did myself a huge disservice by being stubborn and charred headed, as we like to call it, and not changing into a weapon that might have been easier to wield, such as dual blades or sword and shield or something for somebody who's never really touched a real Monster Hunter game before in their lives and jumping into something as complicated as like the charge blade or insect leave or something. And I had a real tough time. I died a lot. I fainted a lot. And I got to the point where I was like, you know what? I suck at this. I don't want to play this anymore. And I have Iceborne and I wanna, I really wanna play Iceborne. My wife got it for me for Christmas a couple years back. I have it for both my PlayStation 4 and up here on. I think, I think Jake got it for me, I think for Christmas because he was like, play Monster Hunter with me. Yeah, he's all, play Monster Hurdle with me. And I was like, I have it on the console. He's like, no, you don't, PC. So I have it and I've been meaning to get back into it now that I've got a feel for how Wilds plays. And I know it's different, I know there's not going to be a lot of similar, there's some similarities, but I feel like it would be an easier transition now that I, I, I comprehend the gameplay a little better. It is not, it is not Dark Souls, which is what I've, you know, I've been playing a lot and I've, I, at that time I had really been really into the soulsborne stuff. So I thought this would be a very similar kind of play and it's not, it's, it's how complicated the weapons are and, and how it's animation dependent.

Combat I guess is where the similarity is. Like if you say it's Dark Souls, like I think that's where it lines up is that it's very animation dependent but it's much faster pace and much different gameplay than Dark Souls for sure. Not nearly as punishing as Dark Souls. Although we'll get, we'll get there. There is some parts that are quite difficult. I think I died more monster in a world than I did at Dark Souls.

Yeah. So for me personally I, I started. My first Monster Hunter game was back on the 3Ds. There was a few on the 3Ds. I want to say three of them. I think there was three monster three, four and then generations I want to say. And then eventually they brought Generations to the switch. They call it Generations Ultimate. And I played it on there and I liked it but I didn't get really deep into it on the, the 3Ds ones and genu on the switch are what we call, I guess the, the more classic Monster Hunter which is a bit different than the modern version of, of which started with Monster Hunter World Rise and now Wilds. The big difference with the older style with Generations and before was that it's. Well, first off story was I think almost non existent. I mean there was conversation with NPCs and it was kind of, you know, you were a hunter and there was a little bit of backstory but it was definitely not the cinematics and the storylines of the games we have today. The other big difference and I'm glad they moved away from it was when you're gathering stuff in the old games, if you want to collect ore, well, you need to have consumable pickaxes with you. You want to collect bugs, better get some disposable bug nets. Everything required consumables. So when you wanted to craft, if you wanted to do it, you had to plan ahead and carry that crap with you. I'm so glad they moved away from that.

I'm glad that is not still a thing. Yeah, I mean they have crafting in, in these versions where you just pick the stuff up and it. Yeah, if you turn it on to what you want, it makes it for you. So it's, it's almost a second thought, like if we had to do the consumable thing like the Old Ones, I'd. I'd be dead. I would not be prepared.

Look, I saw, I saw somebody on YouTube, he's like, here's how you make a gathering build in Monster Hunter Wilds. My first reaction is why? Like, I, I mean, I chug. I chug potions more than anybody. I am not an expert this game. I drink them like freaking rock stars. It's a problem really. But I thought I was going to run out of potions and I thought I would have to go and collect some honey and herbs or whatever. I looked at my pouch and I had like a hundred mega potions. And that's just from casually, casually picking up honey and herbs as I played the game. So I never really had to focus on it. And it's the same thing with ore. There's a few times now, and we'll talk about it later, with High Rank, where I needed some ingredients where I might go farming. But it's not like the Old Ones. The Old Ones, you really had to kind of dedicate a run to farming if that's what you wanted to do. It's totally different. The other difference is in that game, you had different zones in the map, which we have today, numbered zones on your biome, but they all had loading screens between them and. Which is fine. It's the time. But the big kicker was you had to actually find the monster. You had to know which numbered zone they would probably be in physically go to them and find them. And if you're fighting them and they run away as they do if you didn't paintball them, you.

Yeah, you told me that. Yeah. Simplify. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Like once you encounter and you start fighting it, it shows up on the map, which is great. And you even see, I think, an indicator of the health. I think it's a heartbeat. I know it's a heartbeat. In Wild. Yeah. There's a world. Yeah. There's a. Yeah.

And then if you, if you have a monster almost dead, it has a skull icon in Wild. So they've definitely kind of moved toward making the game from super hardcore to a little bit more accessible to people. But because really they looked at it, I guess, as a franchise, the core loop. For those, for those who've never tried Monster Hunter or felt intimidated, don't be it's really straightforward. The idea is you gather a couple ingredients, you eat a meal with your cat buddy, and then you find a monster and then you kill it, and then you skin it and you make new armor and then you just do it again. You wear its skin. It puts the lotion. It puts the lotions on its skin and wears the armor again. And then you, you find a new monster and you repeat. That's. That's the game. It's basically boss Rush the game. And if that's something appeals to you, if you dig the combat and you dig that loop, it's very satisfying going through the game hunting newer and harder monsters or just repeating familiar fights to get materials. And that's the loop. So it's. It's been an interesting ride with the franchise and I really got into a genu on the Switch and I played a little bit of generations on the 3DS, but world is where I really got into it. I think I have a couple hundred hours in Monster Hunter World, I believe, I want to say. But that was mostly because I played online with the same group for about a year. So it's been an interesting ride of a franchise. So World came out in 2018. Rise came out in 20. I have a list here, 2021ish. And then Wilds came out just two weeks ago. The big interesting thing with this one, because this game, it sold 8 million.

Copies, which is why it broke records, didn't it? Like on Steam, like it had the most, one of the most consecutive, like times of people playing after a release, like ever.

Was it. I know for the first week, solid 1.3, 1.4 million players on Steam alone. I don't know how many on console. Yeah, but that's, that's wild for a game that has, like, I think it's still 60% on Steam reviews. And it's mixed, right. For a game with such, you know, lackluster reviews, it's still a lot people playing it. I think even this week it's still easily half a million players on Steam, which is. Which is wildly successful for it. I think the big reason why it's so successful is World and Rise came out on console first. Like, I think while World came out on PS4 and Xbox and then eventually a year later, PC and then rise was designed for the Switch. But then later, a year or so later, they brought to. To the PC. So that's staggering. And the fact that there's no crossplay, I think it hinders the audience for this Game quite a bit. Whereas with Wilds, when it came out cross platform crossplay, it's. It's. I was gonna say seamless, but it's not really seamless. But I think the crossplay is what makes this game so attractive to a wider audience.

There might be a reason it's not seamless when we play it. Let's. Let's be honest, it's probably my fault. Let's. Let's not.

Well, so let's actually. Well, let's like. Well, you know, let's start with the first. Like people are saying that this game, they have issues with this game. And the first one I think is the online multiplayer. And this is the game that let's honestly. Is it fun solo? Sure. But this is a game that's best when you have a group of players with you, I think I would say. And that's. I know for me personally, I always had more fun when I played World with Friends. When I was playing Rise, I mostly played online with randos and it was fun. Wild. I'm in doing the same thing. Um, but I think you're playing single player.

Yeah. So where. And I don't remember if Worlds has this, but I. This was kind of a new thing for Wilds because I remember when I played in Worlds, you can get into. No, they didn't have it. In Worlds, you can. You can go and do hunts by yourself, but you had to select like one person to a hunt or it will randomly have the option to have up to two to four members or something like that. So you'd have to make it like a private hunt with like two people and then block out the other things. It's kind of a pain to just go in and play by yourself. When you play Wilds, there's actually. Is that true?

I thought it was. I thought it only happened if. I thought people only joined your game if you did the SOS flare.

That's what I thought they might have. I don't know. I. I just. I see people run around the hub and I'm like, I don't want to hear people screaming in their crappy mics in my speaker. Which has happened more than one time. It happened in beta, but so I saw that they have. When you start up the game, there's, you know, choose an online lobby, private lobby, your. Your guild lobby, or single player by yourself. And I was. And. And when you get in, it says when you start the game you could change this while you're playing. So it's not like you are hindered immediately. Problem is, is that you're playing on one. You're playing by yourself. So you're in your own little literal world. And when Jake wants to. Wants to join up with me, he can't find me because technically I'm like, I'm in a private lobby playing by myself and you have to pull me into a public lobby for us to get together and then go and do the thing. So I don't know if the online is as hard as we're. I think we're making it. I'm making it harder than it actually might.

Well, I don't know. I've seen other people complain about it as well. Like, first off, they're using terminology in this that is just as confusing as Final Fantasy 1411 head. Like, you have to. You have to make a link party. You're like, what the hell is a link party? That's just a party. I know we made a squad, which is basically this. This game's version of guilds, I guess, but they're much smaller and you can have multiple squads on your. On your. On your group list squad goals. But yeah, I. I know we had some issues getting online. I think it took us a good 15 minutes to kind of get on game. But even when you and I played last night, trying to get the online to work is still fidgety. You're like being online faster.

After I got out of single player though, once, once I was in the public realm, it seemed like it was easier to do it. So. Yeah.

And then is that if I am linked with you, I should see you in my server and you don't. You don't see each other until you start the hunt. Then you meet up in whatever hub area you're at and then you go. Go forward. So it's not like an MMO where you're like, hey, meet me at the hub. And then you sit around and you talk about where you're going to do, then you do it. You literally have to fire off a post. And that was the same in World, right? You had to select something and then you invite your friends and they're like, yeah, I'll come hunt with you. And that's it. And then when you're done, you go back to your separate corners and then you can find each other again.

I don't. Yeah. So I know when you. Yeah, when you first come into the game, you join us a server, I guess World. I think the limit was 60 players. 64 players. I know wilds is bigger. I think it's 100. But I mean, yeah, if you don't, if you don't join the same server as your buddies, you're not going to see them in the map. And right now, like, like you said, there's no central area to gather anyway. World had a special gathering hub zone where you could go to. And at Rise Head is similar. There's like a gathering room you can go to for online specifically. And they don't have that in Wilds right now.

So their base camps are weird, like weirder.

And they're all over the place. Right. There's a base camp in every single biome, which I mean is neat for story wise, but it sucks to meet up with your players. They did say they have a free update coming in April. And that's the thing with Capcom with so far with the last few games is they do a number of free updates and the first thing they said they're bringing is new monster, which is great. But they're also bringing a gathering hub equivalent of some kind to Wilds. So I'm curious to see what that looks like. But at bare minimum it means it's a central place that you can go to see your friends and their avatars in game, I think. Or at least I hope so. Right. It's. It's a bizarre thing. The other thing that bothers me about this, and we're all at this too, is you have these story missions and you kind of have to. You're kind of doing the story before you do higher difficulty or just random monster battles or missions. And the problem is like if you try to do a story mission that. Or if you, your friend does a story mission or opens a story mission that you have not done yet, you can't join.

Right. That kind of stuff. I get why it's like that, but I would just like them to let you join to fight the monster, even if you don't get story progress. Right.

I'm trying to recall how Rise did it, but I seem to think Rise was almost separate. Online was almost separate from the story campaign because you could go to this special online room and it had all the same monsters. You still had to unlock them as you went through and played them, but it was more online focused. No story got in the way. I kind of wish they had a separate mode here in Wilds that was just fighting monsters and not story because like having like a game like this, you want to play it when it's fresh and new with your friends and if one person played, you know, for a Little bit before the other person and they got too far ahead in the story. Story. They're fighting like 20 different monsters to pick from. But your friend can only pick from two.

Right. That part felt a little bit awkward. I don't know, I don't know about yourself. It's. You go back and it's, you know, if you're high enough hunter rank like you and I are respectively, when I are mid to high 30s now. Yeah, right. But if somebody like say, and I know he won't but say send a star was like guys, I want to play this. Let's pick this up. And he wants us to join him and help him back. We'll go back there and we will annihilate everything. Because it doesn't, it's, it's. Yeah.

It's not scaled like it is a level one fucking monster. And he and I will annihilate it without sinister even touching it. It's not until you get past that and it's almost like, and the joke is like we always say shit like you know, after 221 hours it really opens up. After about 10 hours this game does open up like you do. You play the story. Once you're done with the story, then you're in the game because that's, that's the grind, right? That's as Jake said, it's the, the lather, rinse, repeat where you just go out and fight monsters. You upgrade your weapons and your armor and you find new stuff. And not even all the monsters that you fight are in the story. You, you find more monsters outside of the story when it's done. So it's almost like the credits roll, you beat, you beat the main story, credits roll and then there's more chapters beyond that that aren't dlc. They're still part of the game. There's still a story but it's much more open ended like side quest type stories that you do and then once you get to another rank then you can progress into the next chapter mission or whatever. It's really interesting because there's still a whole lot for me to do and Jake and I have already rolled the credits. We've done the main story. But yeah, the easily meet up.

The initial story is three chapters and it. And I think I finished the chapters in like 12 hours or so. I think, I think it was. And that's a lot more shorter than world like the, the chapters that are post credits. So chapters four, five and six, those feel more like how Monster Hunter World was structured. Where you would have a story mission and then you had to go do whatever you want on your own for like a few Hunter ranks levels. And then you come back, do another story mission, then go do it and fuck around. Do whatever you want. That's what high rank is in Wilds, where once you've beaten the initial three chapter story credits, that's where it changes to okay, here's a story quest. Then you get to do whatever fight you want for five levels and then you get another story quest and then it kind of repeats that way it's a little bit more drawn out and that's more like world style. And I think even Rise was similar to that. They really did make it. So that low rank in Wilds is one big 12 hour tutorial, which is fine. Like to give you an idea of why it's a tutorial. In Monster Hunter, the franchise, there's always the choice of killing or capturing a monster. You don't even learn how to capture a monster till after the credits roll. Like after the credits. As soon as you beat the. You beat the game.

The next mission.

Yeah, the next mission is okay here. There's this new monster, Yang Kia 2, which. Fuck that guy. You have to capture him. It's just like what so. And there's things like melding of decorations which give you skills to your armor and there's. There's a bunch of new stuff that unlocks actually in this game. Like, much like the other games. You have a Palico, right? Sentient cat sidekick that helps you fight. He doesn't gain abilities. No, until after the credits roll. But when I was playing Wilds, I'm like, this game is fantastic. But the Palico sucks. He doesn't do anything. There's nothing unique about them. Because in Genu Genu you could actually play as a Palico in a special mode if you wanted to. But they all had different abilities. World had different abilities. Rise, you could pick from different abilities. And then you get to Wilds and there's nothing. Well, he unlocks the abilities after post credits you do missions for him and he unlocks a Zeppelin Attack and a Plunder Blade and all the stuff you expect.

I love the Zeppelin. Oh my God, I love the cat Zeppelin so much. So cool.

It's funny. No, it's so. I got. There's a lot of stuff post credits. So like when people think, I guess this goes to the next. The next criticism is people will say, oh, the game is too easy. Oh, it's too easy. Well, yeah, the first 12 hours, 12 to 15 hours. Low rank. Yeah, it's not difficult. It's meant to be a story mode. It's meant to be a tutorial until high rank. And then once you get the high rank. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not gonna be. I'm not shamed in saying that. That first high rank enemy of the fight, the way you have to capture the young cat, too. He knocked me in my ass. He was the first time I think I died a mission. And it's so stupid, too, because he's like a little tiny chicken dragon type thing. And, like, for fans of the franchise, they'll recognize the monster. He's been in earlier titles, too. And it's the same damn animations where he, like, shoots some fireballs and then he runs around flailing his arms around.

Idiot. Yeah.

Yeah. Like an absolute goober. And he flips around, does it all over again. The difference in this one, though, in Wilds, is that you can have multiple monsters, more than one, like, three or four monsters on the screen at once, and he's always in a pack of, like, two or three. And that's what. That's what got me. That's what screwed me up real hard, was that he. He's in a pack of two or three monsters. So, yeah, I don't know. Like, did you. How did you find the difficulty in the Low Rank campaign? Did you. Did you get carded? Did you die at all?

I got it. I got to admit, I was like, man, I'm really good at this. It was very. I thought it was easy, and I could. I could. There was points where I was like, yeah, I can definitely see why, like, veterans to this series are, like, this game's too easy. But I think you're right where it was a very tutorial. It was teaching you how to play the game, how to use the stuff, and what to look for. I didn't. I don't think I fainted until we got to high rank. And even so, I think I fainted less than I did in Worlds until the last boss that you and I fought last night, which was my. My first wall. But no, I. I felt good. I even, like, again, I've been much more into Wilds than I was in the world, to be honest with you.

I've.

I've bought into more to this. This game, particularly than I did in Worlds or any of the other Monster Hunter franchises. Knowing that, and I think, because of your information, Jake, because I was always like, I don't know what I'm Doing I suck at this game. And you're like, well, you got to learn your weapon. I'm like, yeah, you slash, you hit a couple buttons, you got some combos. You're like, no, no, that's not it. There's so much more to it, and there really is. So, yeah, what do I do? You know, I. I donate plasma every now and then. So I sit down in the plasma chair and I pull up YouTube videos on how to work the weapons. I'm there for a good hour and a half. I got plenty of time to watch a video and listen to what I need to do. So I begrudgingly picked up the dual blades because I'm like, this seems pretty simple. It's straightforward. A couple slashes. There's a cool demon mode you get to do, and. And there's some cool animated, like, really screw some things up attacks with this thing. And I got it quickly, understood it quickly, and I ran most of the tutorial with that. And when I got out of that and we got into the higher rank stuff, I was like, let's try some other stuff. And I, of course, zero to 60, went to the charge blade because I'm an idiot, But I watched a ton of video on it. I did a lot of recycling and a lot of, like, earlier monsters with it so that I didn't faint as much as I learned how to use it. I'll be honest with you, I got pretty good with the charge blade. It's. It's my. So I. I usually run dual blade and charge blade. And if for some reason I'm having a hard time, like these goddamn spiders that you see us fighting on the screen right now, if they're a little high mobility, then the charge blade can get kind of cumbersome to use. I switch over to dual blade because it's faster. And that was another thing that did not have in I don't think any of the other Monster Hunter games is you can have two weapons instead of one. Is that true?

First time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So having that feature be like, okay. And the secret, which is. Was introduced in Rise, they brought that over into Wilds, which is your. Your mount. Essentially, you get a mount early on in the game. You had a mountain rise, but it was a doggo, and the dog actually fought beside you. But the secret, I think, is a better version of that.

Yeah, okay. You had the. The Capcom, the Wish.com Chocobo, as I call it. But he carries all your. Carries your weapons for you. You can jump on him and he'll have items that sometimes you'll hear your handler go, you've got some new items. And you can check your secret and there'll be potions or warm buff potions or something in there. So I thought that was really cool that I could be like, I was not married to one thing in this game and I think that was my problem of worlds is because I was married to the thing, I'd already put time into it and I was too stubborn to give up and move on from there. So I, I felt dual blades made the game kind of easy mode when we got to the tutorial. But like you said, once you open up the game and you get into hard mode and I understand what's going on now, then it starts. Definitely there's a lot more fainting that the, the ray, the lightning one that's in the.

The beta, the rail, whatever his name is. Yeah, yeah. That thing. My first fight, that thing kicked the hell out of me. But the second time I went through it, I was like, I got this. So.

But the second time that you fight Rada in high. So you fight him in high rank, basically after you've beaten the game and you know, high rank, you have to basically do a victory lap of all the. The big bosses. They're called apex predators. Every biome has its own apex predator. Yeah. And Radao is the one for the. The desert area. He's cool. He's real cool.

And that high rank battle, I fought him the other night and it took place, I guess. I don't know if it's always like this for everybody, but for me it was on a cliff and he, he kind of drifted to the side of the cliff. There's a bunch of steps. And he was knocking me off one step down to the next one. He jumped down after me. There's no room to maneuver. And then of course, he's basically. His head turns into a giant lightning railgun, which is very cool to see. It's very cool.

Not when you're getting one shot at. Off barrel of it.

Yeah, it's, it's wild. It's, it's, it's a very, it's. The epic predators are all pretty epic. They're all very large, which is, I'm glad to see much like world. The monsters are very huge. And radar was a very epic fight. But fighting on the edge of a cliff in high rank and he's doing a ton of damage. And just, you know, that's where I thought maybe I should look at my armor skills. Maybe I should retool my build a little bit. Maybe I should actually put on something with resistance to lightning for once. Cuz I didn't do that in low rank. I didn't really care about resistances or elemental types. But I think it matters more in high rank.

Yeah, that like there's a lot of. It's all about the glamour in. In the tutorial. Like how cool does your armor look? Is it functional? Doesn't matter. And once you beat the final, the boss and you get the cool. The armor that I'm wearing in. In this particular video, you're like, I don't need anything else. And then there's a tab. And Lord Optic did the same thing as I did. He was like, I didn't even realize there was another tab of armor because I'm like, I have the bot. There's nothing else. Like I keep killing these high grade monsters where. How do I upgrade my stuff? I've. I've put all the armor spheres into this. This thing's rocking. I'm getting my face tanked right now. What is going on? Oh, there's a freaking tab for high rank right next to it. Oh, there's a whole list of in here I've missed. It's. It's really more in depth than I had thought about it. And I. And I appreciate that. And I thought.

And much like. Oh, go ahead. Good.

And much like World, when the way they do it actually is very great in Wilds is that when you start crafting a high rank version of armor, you automatically unlock what they call it layered armor version. So that any armor you make in high rank, you can actually use as cosmetic on whatever else you want. So I've been using. So you can basically do the fashion hunter if you want to. Right. And just. You just build all the cool ones you want, get the layered armor and then go build the armor you want to wear and you layer on top of it for free. Which is. Which is great. I think World had similar, but I think it was much higher up. So I. I think I'm kind of trying to think of the fashion and how you look in high rank matters too. But it takes a little bit to get there.

Right.

But the neat thing about armor in high rank is that most armor sets, like when you kill a monster, you get the parts. There's actually two versions of every armor set. World had this and I think Rise might have too. One of the sets will have a lot more skills, right? Like ability skills, you know, things like resistance or longer Evades or constitutional. You think about it, they have it and there's different sets. And then the second version of the armor will have some skills, but will have gem slots or they call it decoration slots. So I like how you can kind of go with the default set if you want, or if you really want to customize and pick the skills with the decos, then you can pick the beta version of an armor set. And it's a really interesting system and you have access to some of that in low rank. But it's not until high rank. And even in high rank it wasn't until Chapter five where I really sat down and said, okay, why am I dying? What monsters am I fighting? What really complements my gun lance? I want gunlance with my character. And I'm like, oh well this is artillery skill. That makes the. The cooldown or the. The shot of your wave and fire attack, which is very awesome, powerful attack. It makes it so that fires faster. I'm like, well got to get level three of that. Oh, I keep getting hit with, you know, roars. Roars stun you for a few seconds. Okay, I need to get the earplugs. So you actually sit down and look at the skills and what they do and all the information is there. So the interface a little bit cumbersome, but that's kind of on par with Monster Hunter. They've always been like this but. But the, the depth is there if you want to. And I felt like now that I'm 100 rank, 30 ish, 35 ish now I feel like I'm kind of need to actually look at that build more I think.

Yep. I'm starting to get into that flow after last night. Jake and I took on a very large boss last night that I again was a wall that I hate. We can talk about that. Was Jyn dad?

Was Jen dad? Yeah, yeah. He's. He's in. He's in an earlier in the story, he's part of the story mission and he's. When you've got dual blades on this one, this is like a dual blades dream. They. So it's a very long like snake like dragon with the all these spines and flares and all this on it. And there is a skill that the dual blade has that if you open a wound, which you'll see is like a little red glowing thing on one of the creatures, you can hit a button and you basically do like a leaping slash and he'll jump onto the side, stab the wound a couple times and then you Swing around on a rope and then you cartwheel down the back of whatever creature you're fighting with your dual blade spinning. And this creature is so long that it takes like five minutes to roll down this thing's back. And it's. There's tick tocks about it everywhere. It's like UDA or the, the. The Jin. The han is dual blades. Dream, wet dream. And it's true because it's just. I just kept rolling up and down, hitting it with my dual blades and it's. This guy sucks. This guy was a tough. He was a tough customer. And I don't. I tried to put on the frost stuff. I tried to get all the right decorations. And again, you know, Jake was working on his artillery stuff. I'm working on things that break parts and sever and cause more wounds to open up faster. So I've been trying to put those things on, but some of these things are so damn quick that you got to switch to a faster weapon just to track them down or get better. Because your weapons, when you were pummeling that thing with that, that lance.

Well, so that's the thing too is like there's 14 weapons in the game. They haven't added. Added a new weapon to Monster Hunter in quite a long time. I mean, they haven't really needed to because all 14 all feel very unique. Even weapons that you think might be similar. Like for example, I'm using. I use mostly gun lance in this game and there's also a lance weapon. And I thought, well, what's better than a lance but lance with a gun. Right, but, but they couldn't be more different. Right? Like the lance actually. Right. And when I say lance, I mean like full on medieval jousting without the mount you're running. But he has a charge attack if you use lance and he holds up his shield and his lance and he just starts running like you almost don't need a mount. It's funny to play Lance, but gun lance is much less mobile. Like there's, there's some tactics to it, but you don't dodge roll when you have the gun lance like you do with dual blades. You kind of like sidestep or side hop and you can do a larger side hop back. But the, the trick with this one with gun Lance is you can do a, a shoot and then move. So if you shoot and you slide to the step, it's kind of like doing damage but also maneuvering a bit. And I really like that move a lot. And there's also like A charging attack. So it's definitely not as mobile. But what I was doing was using the Secret because he's. He's with you in battle. And like I know some players, like veterans are like, you know, doing the whole Dark Souls magic thing. I was like, oh, you're using the secret. That's like easy mode. Like whatever. When you're playing gunlance and you're slow as shit, you call your secret. You mount it, you do a circle around the monster and then you just leap attack off it and you just smack him in the head and with a gun lance that explodes when you do the attack.

Right, right. It's pretty cool. It's a way to move around. Yeah.

But that boss was tough. He moves around a lot like you said, which is tough when you're using a gun, a gun lance or a slower weapon. But he also is like raid mechanics, I guess in a way in that he's very much in. He very much is of that environment. You don't see him move around to other zones like other monsters. Like you may see like Wrath Los or Kenya two in different biomes. But you won't see Jin to head anywhere else except for that biome. They designed the environment for him in that. The idea with him is you're supposed to break spines on his back and on his tail to lower the damage he does. Like with his frost attacks. But also in certain arenas there is frost pillars on the ceiling which sometimes he'll climb up to and he'll do an air blast attack at you. And eventually you can. You can use your. Your hook shot thing to knock the pillar and he falls down for a lunch damage. But also you can drop pillars on him and you have to really use those pillars to deal damage. Otherwise it's a bad time. But was really messing us up last night. And like the worst part is you know what you need to do. But executing is tough. Whereas he has this super powerful uber attack where he freezes the ground, covers himself in snow, he's encased in ice and he just explodes in a nuclear blast of ice. If you're not behind a nice. An ice rock or something, or you get really out of dodge, like, I mean way off screen. And. And if you think. If you think you're far enough, you're probably not far enough. But if you're not behind something, you die. Yeah. And like. And maybe if you're higher level than us and you have resistances, maybe you survive that. But I. It was brutal and there's a few times where I'm looking around for a nice rock to hide behind and I couldn't get to it. Or the worst part is, I mean, I love the game and I love the combat, but it is still Monster hunter. Clunky. Right. And you don't run until you put away your weapon. So you're trying to, like, put your weapon away, sprint to a rock, and by the time that happens, he's already blown up. Like the window. The window to die is. Is pretty short. And I think that was the problem I had last.

It's stress. Did you know? And I. I felt this last night when he's doing the. The ice building in. It sucks you in. So you're running against who does it. Yeah, you're running against, like, the friction of him sucking the ice in. So if you're too close, he'll pull you into that. And you got to fight your way out of that. Then you got to look for. And it's clunky. Like, if you have your weapons out and you're trying to aim to find the pillar to shoot it down, you're just slashing and the camera angle is looking up so you can't see your character. So you don't know your weapons are out and you're just flailing like an idiot while I'm trying to have my harpoon to pull the ice out. Which is why I died a couple times. Because I was like, I've run out of time. I'm not going to make it. You got lucky a few times last night. But Jesus. Yeah, it's. Yeah.

Before I had to go to bed. Like, we almost had him. The one fight we all had. I'm glad you beat him. After. After I had to log off. But yes, he. He's a tough one. And like, he. Him. I think he's the hardest one I've come across so far. But I mean, you and I have not finished a lot of high rank yet. I think we're halfway through. Maybe like, that's. There's. What is there to hide? The list here. There's. In the base game. There is. Where is it? Oh, there's like 27 monsters in this game, I think. I think I launch and 20 of them are brand new. The other seven are returning. And that's one of the other criticisms people have is. Oh, well, there's not nearly as many monsters as Monster Hunter World. Monster Hunter World, I think, launched with like 30 something. Rise had like 45 monsters. But these are launched. But Rise was also very smaller scale. Is meant for the switch, the monsters are very small, whereas in world and also in wilds, the monsters are freaking massive.

They're massive. So they're a bit different there too, so. I know, but like, there's still. I'm still finding monsters I haven't seen before. There's also variants that you come across, right? Like there's. There's. You come across a guardian Rathlos, but then there's also a regular Wrathos. And I mean, that's a classic monster from the franchise. Favorite. Your favorite Rathians in there, running around poison.

I haven't. I haven't come across him yet. I'm curious because. Yeah, in. In World and also in Genu, I think he was in Genu, Rathian is the one that almost had me. Rage quit. I. I think I quit World the first time because of Rathian fights. Because of the poison. The poison is awful. Yeah. And I haven't had that experience in wilds yet. At least not as bad. But there are differences. World was definitely harder in the beginning, but then now that I'm in high rank, I feel like the difficulty in wilds is very close to World. The difference, I think for people, they don't realize is half the time in World, your time was spent hunting, like fighting the monster. You had to follow the fireflies across the map. You're walking. There was no mount. And that took you like 10 minutes to get to the monster. And then once you will away at the monster, he runs, you're again on foot chasing the monster. And that adds time to it. So combat in Worlds took like 20 to 30 minutes for a fight. Sometimes felt like a war is in time. And wilds, it's like what, like five, six minutes? Maybe 10 if it's a hard monster, 15 if it's that we fought last night.

Yep. So that's the difference there. The mount makes a huge difference. And Rise was very similar. Rise also, yes, the monsters are smaller, but they were still challenging. But the fact that you know where the monsters in the map at all times, you can see them and that you have a mount, the mount is such a game changer in terms of like.

And it's got auto drive. You, you. If you. If you just. If you are like me and you're like, I just want to get to the monster and maybe grab some things along the way, but I'm not really, like looking to search for anything specific. You can. You'll pinpoint the monster on the map, you tag it, and then your, you know, your scout flies will Go out and hunt it down. But if you press up on your D pad, on your controller, you'll call your secret. It grabs you, and it just goes. And it runs right towards the monster. You, hands off. You put your controller down, you can go make a sandwich, get a drink, and then come back. And it won't. It won't run you into it. It will actually run around, like, a perimeter of it so that it doesn't trigger it. So if you are away for any reason, you won't get your ass beat from like, oh, I stepped away for a minute. Because it's. I believe it's very much designed to be like, okay, this might take you a little bit. So if you got to go do something or if you're paying attention to something else will get you to where you need to go. And then you can just jump in and fight it. It makes it so much quicker and easier. That inpatient people like me, I. I absolutely adore that thing. And then if you're like, you know, I just want to run around the map and just see what's out there. You're just on your secret. You can grab things while you're on it, so you don't have to get off to grab items. Yeah, it just makes the game so much more fluid. And. And I think one of my biggest gripes about World was what Jake was saying. You'd fight the thing and then it would run off. And at the time when it's your first Monster Hunter game, there's no life bar. There's nothing. I mean, there's indications. But you don't know that. I'm so used to fighting bosses with a life bar that I'm like, how much. How much time have I spent on this damn thing? And now it's running and I gotta go find it. This is. This is really annoying. But now that you know that you know and you've got and the secret, can you just literally just. You can grind your weapons while you're writing, you can buff yourself, you can drink your potions all while you're heading towards the next target. And you don't even have to control the secret. It is a huge quality of life improvement.

And, like, the thing too, is it's great that you can do that, but if you want to just leave the secret and not just walk, you can do that and explore the map. There's a lot of great stuff hidden in this map. People complain that, you know, oh, it's big zones, but you don't. You don't do anything with it. Well, that's by choice. If you're just riding the chocobo the damn time, you don't see half of the cool stuff on the map. There's a lot of hidden stuff. There's caves, there's one even in the desert biome. There's one underwater cave that you actually swim through. And there's no chocobo down there. You can't ride your secret down there and you're swimming through. And while you're swimming, you can pick up ingredients and items and stuff. There's a lot of cool hidden secrets around the map. There's pop up camps you can add for basically fast spawning points. I guess you can go and find those and build those. There's a lot to explore on the map if you want to. But if you don't care about that stuff, right. If you don't care about, you know, finding ingredients and gathering and all that kind of stuff, you just want to find the monsters. You can totally do that too. It's very easy to get into.

And there's some cool monster designs in this. In this version, again I didn't play Rise, so I didn't get a good like glimpse of that stuff. But I mean I felt like Monster Hunter Wilds was just a lot of dragons with different features. I mean most of them fly, most of them blow fire or poison or ice or something at you, but they're all dragons. Like you're pretty much just fighting a huge group of either a fluffy dragon or a scaly rathalos Diablos kind of dragon. This game has one of the coolest monster designs. I love cephalopods. I love fucking octopods. And this thing has octopus.

Yeah.

Two different octopus boss like creatures that are freaking awesome. Maybe not everybody loves them, but their design is really, really cool. And one of them is like covered in oil and the other one's got blades on its tentacles. They're cool. I absolutely love, love them. On the two spider monster designs are really cool that even, even like it's the same creature, right. But they're very, it's not a variant. They're. They're both octopus type creatures but they're different enough to know like this is this and this is a that instead of oh, it's just this with like blue skin or.

Yeah, like this is the first game where they've had octopus style animations for monsters, which is really cool. And the one, the one that's in the fire area, I can't really. His Earth Buddha or something. I say all these names are really wrong but yeah, he's. He's basically an octopus thing. And then occasionally he goes up on his hind legs. Isn't this funny? Goes on his hind legs and then it's a blue mouth and he just charges at you. It's terrifying. And then. And then he also sets himself on fire and when he's enraged on fire he does a ton of damage. He's brutal to try and get in on.

It's.

It's a really interesting fight. The other one is Zuwu and I know him because I. I ground the out of that guy because I want the armor. The armor is cool, right? A lot of the armor sets in this game look really good and there's. Yeah, I mean every monster has its own armor set. Plus on top of that there's hidden armor sets in the game like within hidden ingredients and stuff. And then unlockable stuff like There's a Leasley 45 armor sets in this game. At least 40 if not more. It's. It's wild and again you going through.

The tree you're almost like this is really disappointing. And then you get to the high rank and like you said there is just a slew of them and then you find more secret stuff by. There's trading that you can do within the game and there are characters where you have to trade for something and they'll give you like a cloth or something random and it unlocks an entire set of new stuff. I just got the Death Stench armor set. I didn't get it but I got from worlds I got that unlocked last night and I was like ah, that's cool. As looks like death add or. Right.

Yeah, there's. There's one I see on Tik Tok. It looks like they. They dress himself like Samus from Metroid. Yeah.

With cuz like the armor is very stylish mech style armor with gears and stuff. It looks very stylish, very sci fi and you get that it's arting armor and I think you get that from a side quest and it's. It's pretty interesting what you can do with it. The game has. Overall it almost feels like they're trying to take a sci fi bent with this version. I kind of. I would not be surprised if the next monster hunter game is a sci fi game because of what they've kind of built here like the, the Palico armors. Right. Because you have your, your. Your cat buddy that fights with you and you can unlock armor for him just like you but all his stuff is batshit crazy, Right? When I say crazy, like, one is the white wig and the dress, and that's. Okay, fine. Another one is like a bone helmet with feathers. Cool. And then one is. Is a brain in a jar of liquid.

It's a cat shape. The brain is shaped like a cat head. It's so stupid. It's cool, but stupid. Or like. And then there's a matching one where it's tentacles. Right. You kill a tentacle monster. You unlock cat armor. That's tentacles. So the whole body of your cat and he's there in cutscenes talking to you, and he's just floating there with the tentacles and the brain in a jar, bobbing up and down. It's the dumbest thing, dude. It's so cool.

There's one for the Arten armor for the Palicos. It's similar. It's a jar. It's like a. A enclosed glass lid. And then the bottom is like a spinning top. Like the. It's. It's really. It really feels like Capcom went to the art team and said, you know what? Just do it. Gloves are off. Do whatever the hell you want.

I love the little mech one he's got where his feet are dangling down. And it's the robot rocking around. That's. That's one of my favorites. I love the suit with the cat brain. I wore that one forever because it was. This is so out there. It's so good. It's like RoboCop 2 right now. Yes.

Or something. It is bizarre. And like a half the armor is. You feel like a Gundam if you want to. And like, there's. There's other cool stuff too. Like there's some armor that looks very cyberpunkish or something that would be straight out of Mad Max. Yeah. Zouwu armor is like a hood. And the ninja outfit, it's badass. One of my favorite monsters in world was Odogaran. And there's a version of Odogaran in this game. It's. It's a guardian Ebony Odegaard, which is a mouthful. So different than the world's fight. Still a fun fight. And the armor, though, is very similar to what was in worlds with the bow and. And the ninja garb and the hair and stuff. It's. It's really, really awesome looking armor. Like, the fashion thing is this is.

A fun part of this game. Have you seen the Sephiroth Armory? Yeah. And you've got to get the long sword when you get the Sephiroth armor with the Pink. The pink long hair. Oh my God. It's ridiculous. But it's so good. It's. It's so much fun. And if you're just awesome character, this. Is the way to go. Yeah, it's perfect and.

But like you the character designer right from the get go you can do some wild stuff with the character designer. I've seen people recreating, you know, Walter White from Breaking Bad. I've seen somebody do Shrek. Yeah. I've seen a Pikachu. I've seen all kinds of weird crazy. I saw one who just glitched it out and made the fight of the. The face bright glaring white. Which is a bug. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It just, it's just, it's pretty funny. Like there's the guys that was it. The McElroy brothers used to have this thing called Monster Factory where they would take character editors and make the most God awful thing they could make. I hope they do Monster Hunter. It's. It's pretty funny. That's good. A lot of people did that with Elden Ring so now we're just saying that over here. Monster Hunter. It's. Yeah but the fights, the fights are really epic man.

The fights are. I mean and that's what you get Monster Hunter for right? Is the fighting and the fights are next level. And I love, I love the things like you can cut off the tails and you can break like some of the fins that something has. Like you're fighting a Folgore which I believe is. He's from World. I know that. I don't know if he's from anything else. The Engineth. Yeah, you know the Folgore. I forget. I think they called it a folk or something on here. But it is the Engineth and he's. He's a Guardian Anginath and that's. And that's how they kind of give you the variants to bring them back. Is I won't ruin the story for people but that's how they use that is all the old ones are Guardian Guardian monsters that they have out there and they have these crazy electrical abilities or crazy fire blue fire abilities. And the engineer fights as you can see is, is very entertaining and it's just crazy out there with what you. What they're doing with these fights. I, I remember the fights being super epic in World but almost not to this scale. Like it just feels like this is way cooler. They've added like a perfect dodge and a perfect block mechanic. So if you have a shield and you do a Perfect block. It'll trigger like your. I wouldn't say a super move, but it triggers your weapons like charged ability that it can have perfect dodges will turn your character blue. And you do spin jumps when you dodge, that does damage instead. And they've got this real cool, I guess it's called like a ward off or a fight off animation that you do now that if you do the clash there you go where you do enough perfect blocks, the monster will be trying to bite you and you're holding it off with your shield and you can stab it, like stab it and break a part of its mouth and then it falls and it's. It's just really cool animation that just makes you kind of get your hair standing up on end. You're just like, this is the coolest fight.

Well, yeah, you mentioned the wound system, which is new to this game. Like you could always break sever tails and break bones and stuff on monsters, but they made it a little bit more freeform this time. There's something called a focus mode, which you hold the left trigger, whatever it is on keyboard and you enter a focus mode where you can aim at the monster and attack certain parts as you're going. And yeah, if you hit the same spot enough times, you get the red wound and everybody has that special attack. So for you, like you mentioned, you have that spine rolling attack move with the dual blades, which is very awesome for me. In the gun lance, you actually like take your lance and turn to like a drill like an auger and you just pound it into the monster. Do dozens of hits. The damage is not as high, but it's a bunch of hits, right. So if you're in an elemental setup, it's actually pretty, pretty powerful. I know when I played sword and shield, which was. Which is a cool weapon set, you jump and leap and plunge your knife into the wound and then jump off. It's. It's just. Everybody has a unique take on how to use the wounds.

The charge action. Certain weapons are better for others. I love the. The charge blade. Charge blade is awesome. It. Yeah, literally it takes the shield and it rolls it up onto the top of the blade which turns it into a chainsaw. And it's just doing massive break damage with that thing. It is so cool.

Like I did charge blade in in world, I think for a good chunk of the game. And it's a fun set, but you have to learn, you have to learn the combos, right, because you have move a sword and shield with it. You have to learn Those moves and how you charge things and how you build up the meter. And then when you turn into an axe, there's a whole other set of moves there. And the moves are different if you're charging up or not. You can also charge your shield so it does more defense. Like, there's a lot of intricate intricacies with that weapon that I wasn't expecting and it's neat. But if you're not into that kind of stuff, then you can always play something like hammer. Hammer is the most straightforward weapon. It's very powerful, it has a handful of moves. Combos are pretty simple to pick up and it's, it's brutal. So there's, there's a good mix. And Sword and shield is the one I did a good chunk of a few of the games with. And in this game it's great because it has a lot of mobility. Like, yes, it's like a, it's like a buckler, not a full shield. Like the gun lands, but you can do your combos. And if you want to do your combo and slash the sword so you have slash damage, you can. Or if you want to do a combo where you're knocking your shield on the head of the monster to do stun build up, you can do that. And it ends with you leaping in the air and coming down with your shield. You feel absolutely badass doing it.

Oh, yeah. And then also because it's a more mobile weapon, you can actually attack and then slide while you're swinging your sword. It feels so much more different than the dual blades. Just like the dual blades feel so much more different from Lance. Like every single of the 14 weapons feel very different. I don't know. Did you try bow at all? A little bit.

I played with some of the projectiles, but the blow, the bow I went out and actually fought some things with. And it's got some cool, cool aspects with it. I was trying to fight. The rathalos is a very fly animal. The Raytheon is too. And, and I got tired. It's. It's hard to fight flying animals with either the dual blade or the charge blade. It's just, it just makes it more difficult. So I went out with a bow and arrow to try it out and it worked pretty well. But not being super versed in what it can do, I wasn't very good with it. I eventually went back to the other weapons and just prayed that I could get a hit in there that. But the projectile weapons are fun, a lot of fun. The blow, the heavy Blow gun's pretty fun too actually.

Yeah, blow guns are pretty interesting too. The thing with the bow that I liked is that you can do a raining of arrows on the target. That's pretty cool. Or you can you do an attack and it's. It basically implants a tracer arrow in the monster and then you can look away from it and just fire off arrows blindly and they seek onto the monster. And that's just a standard move that you do. So it's very float free form as you're attacking. You don't have to be constantly aiming your mouse or your. Your joystick at the monster. You can move around and stuff. It's pretty cool. Plus different coatings for your. Your. Your ammo. There's a. There's a lot there. Bogan very similar. The only thing I'll say about Bogan, I used to play Lobo Light Bow gun in Genu because in that game you had a move where you actually shot and vaulted over the monster's head. They took that out in world and I kind of missed that move.

I think they did the similar thing. There was a. There was a charge blade weapon that you could do and. And I think both Rise and World where you can actually fling your fellow hunters in the air with the blade of the axe and then they can come to really and jump on him. And it was something that a lot of people I was reading when I was doing the charge blade read they were complaining that they took out of the game because you can't do it and wilds with this and they're hoping that maybe they bring that back in a DLC or in a patch or something. But it's. It was one of the features that everybody loved using the charge blade for. My favorite quote about the charge blade is I was reading about how to do the charge blade and all the combos and things that are involved and decided that I did not want a degree. So I decided to play sword and shield.

Didn't realize they definitely changed it the weapons over time. Like in terms of like the gun. The gun blade for the gun lands in this game. They actually added one of the combos where you. It's. It's a bit tricky but you basically shoot and move and then charge and slash. And then if you do it right you actually do two sets of your multi bursting blast and it does a lot of damage if you do it right. Which is. Which is pretty interesting. And then if you do it right with the timing you can immediately do your charge Wyvern Blast faster and do a ton of damage. It's a really epic combo. Where in older games you didn't have that exact combo. It changed a little bit. But where the other games were different was Rise had a really cool system. They had switch skills. Every weapon had like an ultimate ability or two ultimate abilities, and you unlocked additional ones. You could swap in and out between fights. And that gave you a little bit more variety in how you use your. Your character. Genu was probably pretty good for this as well. They had stances. You could be a Valor stance, Alchemy or Guard or. Sorry, Guild or Adapt stance. There's like five or six different stances. And the combo, the moves you had to your. To each weapon was a little bit different. Not drastically different, but enough of the mechanics had to be learned in a different way. Like for Gunlance and. And Jenu, one of the stances you didn't have, you. Your Waver blast was twice as fast but did half the damage, right. But it also charged twice faster. So it was a faster WM blast. So that was like a. A tweak to the existing moveset. Another one, I think you couldn't even do regular bullet shelling. You lost that, but you gained like an aerial attack or something like. It was. It was neat how they gave you a lot more variety. We don't have that in Wilds, but stuff is still being updated, right? So I'm curious to see what they bring. You know they're going to do an expansion, right? Like for a while, World and Rise, but a year or so after they did a year of updates, and then after a year they did an expansion or so. And expansion usually brings something brand new to the table. So I'm kind of curious to see what they do here. I know we briefly touched about High Rank and difficulty. One thing that comes with High Rank is something called Tempered Monsters, which are basically like your regular monsters, but they have a higher health pool and they do a bit more damage. And they've said casually that they're bringing something in a free update this year. They'll be harder than Tempered, but it's hard to. I'm not sure exactly what that means. I don't know if that just means the new monster they're bringing will be harder or if they're bringing a new difficulty tier. Because previous older versions of Monster Hunter had something like a G Rank, which is like a higher step of rank above high rank. And I hope we get that at some point this year because it'd be nice to have like an ultimate difficulty layer to this because the game is hard. But if I'm going to spend 200 hours playing this game, I'm hoping there's a bit more later, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean that's. You kind of feel like with. With a lot of monster hunters, it's. You get. When you get the base game, you get. You are expected. There's more to be expected. Right. It's like getting an mmo because essentially it can be. It's an mmo you play by yourself. Right. You can. And there's going to be updates and more monsters and more areas maybe. And I mean the DLC is going to probably bring you to an entirely different location like all the other ones have done with like another slew of monsters on there. But they've already said like they're gonna do events that bring in new monsters. The first patch started coming on April. Right. And there's already stuff I know they have, they have the tempered and then they have Frenzied, which I don't know if Frenzied counts as like frenzy is.

More damage but half the health or less health. And they're like more aggressive, I guess. But it's not every monster. I think it's only some of them, I think. Gotcha. But I haven't gotten that far yet.

Gotcha. No, there's. There's so many options to this and it's. And it isn't ever playing game loop and it's all about the grind and, and Jake and I are pretty big rpgers. I know I have been for a long time. So it's all about the grind with this game and it's just getting the best weapon and the best stuff. They have artisan weapons that you get in this game that you fight the tempered monsters and then you can build artisan weapons that are supposed. That are unique to what you would get from monster parts. Like normal monster parts that you can grab. And I've seen some of them are pretty cool, some of them are kind of meh. But some of them are pretty damn pretty cool looking. Yeah. So there's.

So you can customize the damage and the abilities they have is pretty, pretty rad. That's new, I think to this game. So I'm curious to compare them to I guess the end game weapons that are already there. But we'll see. It's. There's a lot here. Right. So if anybody's ever says, oh, the base monsters are less than World Horizon. Yeah, sure. But there's still more after that. For your money, there's still a ton of game. Oh yeah. I've easily.

I can tell you for World especially, the events were where it's at, right. They had a number of events. Like they've had two so far since the game came out. And the events are like kill a young cat too and you get special kind of cheese in the game, which is for cooking. Another the ones going on right now is you kill Chepacabra, the giant toad. I think it is. Is it? You kill one and you get like armor spheres. Like there's events like that. But the other one was the. The fire chicken. Yeah.

You kill this fire chicken and you, you get items that you let you build a special like the animal hat. But they do cosmetic event style items like that throughout the year. Yeah, right. And then like I know for World they had some weird crossovers we've had in the past for Monster. We've had Mega man armor, we've had Geralt skin and they actually added the. I can't remember the name of the monster in Witcher 3, but it's the tree monster. They added that to World and that's a brutal fight. They did a crossover of Final Fantasy and they brought Behemoth to Monster Underworld and he was brutal in World and there's talk about them doing other crossover for Wilds. I hope that happens. So there's a lot of crossovers they do that are pretty fun. So there's lots of stuff they do throughout the year. And like the thing with. The thing that was always tricky before with World and then Rise was because they released on console first and then they had some updates and then eventually came to PC. The release of the cool stuff was always staggered and I hated that. But this, we don't have that problem. Wild came out on everything at the same time. The content plan is clear and then I'm sure we'll get an expansion. And it's just. It's nice that we're all together on the same page. There's no delay. I love it when things are released on every platform because we didn't really touch on it. But if you're somebody who wants to buy this game and you happen to own a console and your PC is not so great, you might want to buy it on console. Yeah, it runs great. I love it on PC.

Yeah. But I mean I have a very nice video card charge. Your card is pretty good too. Jake and I benefit some from some really nice GPUs.

And if it wasn't for that, I would probably not be able to play this game. I think, I think I would seriously be looking at a PS5 if I didn't have the PC that I have. Because this game is pretty brutal. I think their system requirements. I want to say the minimum was a 20x series GPU from Nvidia. It's not nearly enough. Like you can't. They. They really need to make it so the minimum is 3060. And even then I, I don't know because even I've had like without getting too technical on some of the options, you. This is a game where you need to have frame generation turned on. Like if I turn off frame generation with my. I have a 480 super, which is an amazing card. I didn't upgrade for like 10 years. So when I did I went full out. If, if, if my card can only do 60 frames locked with everything on max, I shudder to think what somebody on a lesser card has. Like, it's, it's wild. You need frame generation turned on. When I turn that on, I get 120 frames. Like no issue.

Right. But with frame generation turned off and all the settings max, it's pretty demanding. Like it's, it's a very pretty game but it's, it's overly demanding and it's not tuned for performance really well. But I heard on PS5 it's a lot better. So for, for like in terms of just like if you just want to get to the game and play it. Console is probably a good option for this graphics. But if you have the PC it's, it's nice.

An Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 or an AMD Radon 5500. There's no way that is what Steam is saying. The minimum requirements is recommended is a 2060 super or, or a Radon RX 6000, 6600 even that, you know. Yeah.

The good thing is there's a, there's a benchmark tool. People need to use it before you buy this game. Like I want people to play this game. It's a fantastic game. But do the benchmark first because it is very demanding and like. And it's not in a good way. Like it's demanding because they didn't tune it properly. And that's. And that's a valid criticism. Criticism. I think on Capcom is the game is great but after two open betas and some feedback they had, I don't think they did much in the way of tweaking. I still think the game Has a long way to go in terms of optimizing. I'm sure it'll get there at some point, but now it's just too demanding to say 1660 is a joke. I used to have a 1650. It was my old video card. And there's no way it could run this game. Yeah, there's no way. And yeah, yeah.

I mean the biggest, biggest gripe is, is the optimization. Like Jake said, I mean, outside of everything else, if, if you can look past the optimization issues, which I, I had maybe three or four crashes. I'm not going to lie, I ran into it. But otherwise the game played wonderfully on my system. And like I said, I'm playing it on the. It's not Steam deck compatible. So if you have a Steam deck and figuring to download and play it, you're not. You need a, you need an app to play it on there. But it plays, it plays flawlessly with the app through my PC on my Steam deck. So you'll see the Reviews are mixed. 99,069 reviews on here that are mixed on Steam. If you have the beef to run it, you're gonna have a great time. You really are if you're into this kind of game. Jake and I easily can look past a lot of the optimization issues because he and I have, have, have the power to run the machine the way that it's supposed to. And he and I, we have a blast. We have a blast when we played it together. We have a blast to play solo. Our tick tock feed has literally been nothing but Monster Hunter wilds memes between the two of us because out of the, the five, the five of us in the group, Jake and I are absolute monster, monster hunter nerds about the whole thing. I actually have my, my Rathalos and my, my. You can see the wing right there. Check your, check your bingo cards, boys. That's Rathalo sitting there in my, my thing. I love Monster Hunters. It's a great game. This is a great game. I think this is a great addition out of the series. And if I had ever was torn away, like if, if, if you're somebody who played Rise and was like, I didn't like the way it looked and it kind of put me off from the rest of it. This will bring you back. This will absolutely bring it back to the, to the monster franchise.

Great. Yeah, I'll say. Like, I played World a ton. I played Rise a lot too. And my only criticism about Rise was the monsters were too small. Like there's A lot of them, they're really fun, well designed. I like it a lot. Even though it was meant for the switch, it still looked really great for what it was. But the monsters were very small. The scale was not as, as big. But I'm glad to say that Wilds has gone back to the scale of World where the monsters are almost too big. It's just, it's pretty crazy. And they, but they kept the mount, right? They took the mount from Rise and the mobility of Rise. You don't have the, the wire bug flying around thing and you don't do as much aerials as you, as you do in Rise, right. But Wild took a lot of this while a lot of the cool stuff from Rise and a lot of the great stuff from World and combined it together. They did an awesome job for that kind of stuff. The only thing I really, really wish they need to. I wish they tweak and maybe it's a difficulty thing, but I felt in World the monsters were more aggressive. One of my favorite monsters, favorite I used to hate him, was Nurgante from World, who's a big elder dragon. There's a lot of dragons, like, you're not wrong. And the thing with him, he's a massive dragon with black spines, brutal damage, is if you went to drink a potion, yeah, he doesn't have to see you, but if he could just hear you pop the cork on that bottle of potion, he would look at you and pounce your ass from a mile away. And it was very frustrating, but it was a very fun fight. When you're playing with buddies and one person's busy tanking Nurgante and you run off to heal your ass because you're going to die, and he. And he just pounces your ass. It's hilarious. There's nobody in wilds that I've fought so far that is like that. Nobody, nobody's aggressive enough. I feel like, especially with the secret, you hop on the bird and I just do laps from the monster and I chug potions. I can sit there and sharpen my blade. Meanwhile, you know, my cat is fighting the monster. Keep an aggro. There is nothing like that in World. Right? The aggro is much different in World. And I kind of hope there's another tier of difficulty in wilds where they bring that aggression back. If they ever bring Nurgante back as an, as a, as a dragon, I would love to see him in here. But he has to have that aggression. He has to be that much of an again because if. If not, then it's not the same. It's.

Right. That's why I'm curious to see how the Rathian is. Because I haven't fought the Rathian yet. Because the Rathian was super aggressive in World, and that's why I hated the game so much in the beginning is because of the poison, the constant attacks, the flying. I want to see how that is in World, in wilds, to see how it lines up. I have to get to him still.

I think I bumped into him after you told me about, like, how much of a pain in the ass he was in the other one. And I was like, huh, I wonder if I'll see him again. And sure, there was a question mark float floating around the map. And I did not use the guild's authorization. I just went after it because I was like, hey, I want to see what this is. And she even said, we're not authorized thing. I'm all, shut up, woman. Trying to kill this thing. It's biting my face. But, yeah, I know it was.

I know we're running long, but we should. Two seconds on the story without gross spoilers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The handler in this game is pretty great. Like. Like the opening line you said. I like how she's like, okay, okay. I understand the environmental impact of this encounter, but the guild authorizes you to kill this monster. Like, right. Thanks, Alma. Great. Or she chastises you when you try and go after something you're not allowed to. I always thought that was funny. It's. It's. It's interesting. But what got me was the biomes are gorgeous. Yeah.

Especially when you unlock the different weather. Right. Like the forest and the. In the. The rainstorm is. Is awesome. But the first time you're in the. The. The nice version of the weather where it's all bright and green and vibrant. You have to do, like, a tour with your group. And she's like, oh, go, go look. Look over there. And you have to aim the camera, hit a button to look at it. And it's like a small herd of baby monsters or it's like, you know, a pretty flight of birds or some. Some nonsense. But she's like, the biodiversity is so amazing here. And it's like, oh, the environment is so beautiful and wonderful. It's like they try and take this spin on it's. The environment is so great and awesome. And then five seconds later, we authorize you to murder.

Gotta quell the uprising. Yeah, yeah.

You're allowed to genocide this particular monster. Go at It. Right? And then you can carve its corpse and wear its skin. That's the game. So they like the opening. It was in the opening of the game when you first meet the local people, you're explaining to them these are special tools. And you're pointing to a gigantic foldable gunlance, and you're like, this is a special tool. That's a hunting tool used by hunters. Never, Never against another human. No, no, no. They're only tools for the job. It's cheesy in a weird Captain Planet sort of way, but it's fine. But it's weird. But I don't know. The story was. The story is not great.

It's all right. But Nada, I. I wanna. Every time Nada opens his mouth, I just skip. I just skip the dialogue. I don't even care. Like, it got to a point where I was like, I didn't care what's going on. I just want to go see all the cool monsters and the environment. And I feel bad because the story. I. I know that the team at Capcom that did this worked very diligently on the story. A lot of reviews before the game came out were very adamant about how they making. Because they. They make your hunter talk. So your. Your hunter is now has a voice and talks, and you can change his voice. And all this stuff that they were like. It makes you feel like you're more invested in the story because your character is talking. I did not feel that one iota. If anything, it was another voice that I didn't want to listen to. I. I felt bad because I was like, yeah, but it's like Jake said it. Just as you continue watching, you're like, this is so cheesy. This is so cheesy. Jeezy. Why is he getting angry at the monster that killed his entire, like, all his people? Or at least he thought he did. You know, it's just all this crap where you're like, none of this is making sense. None of this is making sense. I'm done. I just want to kill it.

Why is he upset at me now? Yeah, right. We were authorized to kill this monster. Yeah. I got authorization. What he wants. I went through the proper channels. I got the paperwork.

I got the hunter's permit. Like the permit? Yeah, we're going fishing. What? You're pigeon. Yeah. It's weird, but they're definitely trying to take. They're trying to flesh out the world a bit more in this one. And I didn't realize I actually put the thumbnail for this episode. But there's actually callbacks to Not World before world. Monster Hunter 4. I think it was 4 and genu or Generations. There's characters in those games. And again, those games were not story driven like these ones are. But there's two characters. There's one called Little Miss Forge who is a little blonde girl with a bare midriff. And she was doing all the smithing for you, making weapons and armor. And then there's also another character called the Ace Lancer.

Yeah.

Both of those characters are in wilds. They don't come right. Right. Flat out and say, oh, I'm Little Miss Forge. But there's references between those two characters, Fabius and Gemma. That reference Monster Hunter 4. Like Gemma will say, you know, yeah, it used to be little something back in the day. Or fabulous. Say, oh, Gemma's come a long way. She's really growing. It filled herself out over the years. Right. Like or and whatnot. And then there' a scene with Fabius where he basically wears the same Lancer armor that he had in the older games. So I didn't expect that. I thought this was a game was going to be a direct sequel to World. And I never stopped to think if Capcom ever decided Monster Hunter games as a franchise all take place in the same world. I wish that was more of a Final Fantasy deal where it was all separate. But it really does seem like they're trying to make it so that it is one world over a period of time. And there's probably some lore in the background that they haven't decided to put in yet. So I appreciate it. There's not a lot of deep stuff there. But I like that they're trying to build one cohesive universe of Monster Hunter. And I think that was kind of neat.

That's cool. I don't. I wish I knew more about like the previous game stories to kind of. To get those correlation. I just see blood midriff making weapons and everybody fucking thirst trapping. Yeah. But I just want to make sure people are clear though. It's like this game is not one you play for the story. Like in fact, the story will probably annoy you unless you're really into that kind of stuff. Right.

And I don't say I like story games. I do. But it's. This one is a bit. Is a bit of a place. The one in World I think was better, although much, much longer. This one is a lot shorter. So you can. You can skip through the dialogue and it's fine. It's. It's not it's not terrible. It's only 12 hours. Yeah. It's not that. The me, the meat of this game is not the story, and it's never going to be. It was always about the fights. But it's also the point where I kind of wish they said, you want the story or you want to just skip this, hit this toggle and not have story and just do monsters. I kind of wish they did the online thing only.

Right. That's okay. Yeah.

I know we're running long, but I will say that this is one of my favorite games. I know when it first got announced the other year and I first saw it opening trailer, and I'm like, it's open world. Hell yeah. How the monsters on the map and you can tag them and have a quest on the spot. Hell yeah. The online was there. This game is. I've been looking forward to it, to finally play it. I'm glad I did. Technical issues aside, it's a freaking awesome game. It's just. It really is something great. I've been playing this all year, so this is definitely a win for me. I'm really glad to see how. How well Capcom's done in the last 10 years. Just like, outside of, like, Dragon's Dogma 2, which I know I on a lot. Everything they've released on this engine has been amazing. This is their RE engine, right from Resident Evil. Silent Hill, I think. No, not Silent Hill, but Resident Evil. And they've done other stuff as well. But this engine is killer. Looks amazing. Just the soundtrack, the graphics, the gameplay. Like, Capcom is just killing it. Like between this and Street Fighter 6 last year, it's. It's been a great time for Capcom.

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. I. This says my stark raving reviews as well as Jake said. I'd. I was very much on the fence when I saw it because I. We. We saw it when they did the premiere during the game awards or something, and we were like, this is amazing. This is spectacular. I hope they don't do what they did in Rise. And they didn't. They completely went back to the same artistic style that World had, which sold me immediately. I was in. And then, you know, it's like, is it going to have the same kind of difficulty spike that I felt in World? So I was very much, like, trepidatious about the whole thing. And then the beta came out. Jake's like, download the beta and play the beta this weekend and just see what you think. And I mean, you fight the little monster first and you're like, yeah, okay. And then, and then you fight Raya Dua, you know, the big lightning monster. But what really gripped me was the weather. It's so silly. Like the changing in the environment when you're fighting the Alphas or you're. Or you're going through the different biomes. It's not just static. It's not sunny and blue and, or night and day because you know, there's. There's time in the game and it's, you know, the moon comes up, the sun comes up, all that. But then there's lightning storms, there's huge downpour and rain showers. There's. There's firestorms that go through in certain areas. There's. There's cold fronts that come through that affect your character's ability to do things while fighting the monster. It adds like another level of difficulty to the game, but it brings, it makes the world feel alive and it doesn't feel stagnant and just static and just night and day. And I really, really thought that was cool. Dodging lightning bolts from the sky while you're fighting a monster is really cool. Like it's, It's a real cool feature.

There's the one fight I had with Gravio, so I don't know if you fought him or not. He's in the volcano area and it's just like when you go down there for to find him and he's one who's not even in the story. He's just there. You go to, you go to fight him and he's encased in rock. You. You shooting him with your weapons. It does like nothing. You have to hit him in certain spots. Very interesting fight. But the location, you have to be careful you don't stay in the lava too long. Otherwise you catch on fire. And when he goes to run, he kind of goes down this lava tunnel and you can't follow him. But to see this giant, massive stone dragon go into the lava flow and then down into a cave and then you have to go around. It's. The scenery is amazing. It really is awesome scenery. Like this is like world was a nice looking game when that came out. Like it's still a nice looking game, but wild blows out of the water like graphic wise. It's crazy.

Yep. Seal of approval. Anyway. Got the Jake and Chard seal of approval. Absolutely. Yeah. Press be authorizes you to go enjoy that diverse biome and slay some monsters. Absolutely. Char, do you want to tell people where they can find you?

Taking a small break from Twitch right now. As I try and get some things gathered. So you'll find me mostly here on Pressby and on the YouTubes because I'll be posting videos and messing around with some things there we are working on for those of you who are watching us on Twitch for the first time or just realizing that Pressby is on Twitch, remember that we are trying to get our follower count up over there on Twitch so that we can become affiliated over here. So please make sure you hit that follow button if you haven't already. And if you're watching us on YouTube, hit that like and subscribe as well here. And yeah, you'll see me hanging out my friends on here or running around slaying monsters and Monster Hunter Wilds and whatever new games are coming up. We got. We got some pretty cool games coming out in the next couple years that we do. Yeah. But yeah, you'll see me doing a lot of podcast stuff until probably mid summer. I'll I'll come back to Twitch. It's looking like.

Okay and you can find me mostly here, but I used to Words are hard, Jake. I've also done some guest spots and other podcasts lately. The ones I want to call out. I did Battle Toads with Danny over at Retro wars uk. I love doing his show once in a while we always try to pick a game and beat it. And then when I suggested Battletoads, he laughed and we tried it and neither one of us beat it, as is expected. So apparently that'll be a yearly tradition as we try and get further into Battletoads and talk about it. So we talked about the first few levels of Battletoads. That was fun. And then I did an episode of Remember 64 show with with Dave and Jiggy. Look back. Dave was on our show a couple times over, impressed. B that was an awesome time. We talked about Paperboy. That's the game for the N64. I should have gave more time to because I actually kind of like it now. That was a fun time. And then of course we're also now part of the SuperPod network superpodnetwork.com There's a lot of great shows there. I'm not gonna list them off this week because I'm tired. But Please go to superpodnetwork.com There's a lot of great podcasts there. And surprise, they're all gaming related so some retro, some modern. So go check those folks out. They're really great as well. And of course you can check Presby to cancel wherever you listen to your favorite Podcasts. We are ranked 41 out of 100 according to this random bullshit list that tagged us on a social media account. Whatever.

That's pretty good. That's better than Middle of the Pack.

I mean, yeah, that's true. It's no number three in Zimbabwe from a few years back. I'll take it. That's okay. You can also find our website, pressby2cancel.com or pressby.org. you can find us over in Blue sky. Just search for pressby.org over in Bluesky and you'll find myself and a few other folks from the team there. Oh, and YouTube. Yes, you can find us on YouTube. Like, Jared mentioned Presby to cancel, please drop a follow over on YouTube. We're almost at 200 subscribers. I'd love to get us to 200. I'd love to get us To 500 in a couple years because there's some cool stuff we unlock with that. So we've been trying to grow both Twitch and YouTube as well as the audio. Our audio listeners have never been this high. We've been just doing so great over the last few months, which has been fantastic. So for those who listen to the podcast and those who are watching us on YouTube or on Twitch, thank you very much for your support.

Thank you.

I know a lot of you aren't on the Discord. If you're. If you're just lurking or listening. We still appreciate it. We see it. Like, I'm actually really shocked how many people listening to the podcast lately. It's been fantastic. So. But if there is something you want to say to us or reach out to us, check us out on Discord. Links are [email protected] otherwise, next week, I think we will try to do something retro. I think so. Unless you guys want to drop another random music episode on me. So we'll see.

That was a rough week. Okay. We. We just threw something out there. It wasn't Gary Oldman, but we did our best. I thought it was pretty good. Okay. Trent is gaming adjacent. It was all good. He is. But that's. I think that's an episode this week. This is press beauty. Cancel. Thanks very much for watching and listening. Have a great night.