Monster Hunter Stories 3 offers a dream sandbox to catch, train, and grow your team of monsters – but I just can't vibe with it

When the squealing young recruit and the yappy Palico screeched “WE DID IT” for the dozenth time after I successfully pressed square to land a basic attack on an enemy, I let out a despondent sigh. I’m not sure how long I can keep this up. More than anything, I’m disappointed to feel this way. There should be a lot about Monster Hunter Stories 3 that I enjoy. But, boy, does the tone make it tough to like.

I understand this is predominantly a me problem, and is something I wish I could overlook after spending time in the opening hours of the latest turn-based monster-catching spin-off of Capcom's behemoth series. This third entry offers another opportunity to get out of the harsh and untamed wilderness and instead visit the Ghibli-esque kingdom of Azuria, where you take on the role of a monster rider and heir to the throne amidst some political instability with another neighbouring region.

Since finally getting into the series with Monster Hunter World, and sinking hundreds of hours into every new title since (and even trying a couple of older ones for a fun, if humbling, history lesson), it felt like I would naturally vibe with a fun and lighter change of pace in this genre-flipped Monster Hunter Stories entry, too. That doesn’t seem to be the case.

Got to break a few eggs

At its core, I do get excited by what Monster Hunter Stories 3 promises. A tactical turn-based role-playing game (RPG)? Love them. Hatching, levelling, and building a team of my favorite monsters from across the series? The dream. A sprinkling of the item gathering and gear crafting from the main games? Perfect. Yet, while all of the ideas sound great individually, when mixed as a whole, I struggle to find the finished result all that compelling.

I don’t mind the combat, which does a good job of translating the cycle of a monster hunt into a static, turn-based clash. The main gimmick is a rock, paper, scissors-style mechanic that asks you to choose between a power, technical, or speed attack each turn. As you’d assume, one bests the other, while being weak to the third. So, it’s about predicting or learning how you think a monster will attack, and then choosing the best response to win the head-to-head.

Do this enough times, and you build up your kinship with the monster you choose to bring into battle with you, eventually leading to the point where you can ride the monster and combine powers to unleash some devastating and over-the-top special attacks. You also choose an AI-controlled companion from your monster-riding gang to join you in battle, who can also build up kinship and mount their own monster, which then enables another level of screen-obliterating joint attacks.

Add to that the option to target specific monster parts with attacks to stun or weaken targets, which will also topple the monster once you empty its stagger bar and let you unleash a Synchro Rush to bully the poor creature with a barrage of attacks while it’s down, and you can see that there are quite a few moving parts to the game’s combat. And that’s without mentioning the different weapon types, learned abilities, status effects, and elemental weaknesses that all play a part, too.

Even with all of these interplaying mechanics, I did find myself growing tired of combat fairly quickly. Most fights just fall into the same rhythm with very little dynamism, which flashy effects and attacks cannot elevate.

Squad goals

I thought the act of developing the local ecosystem to upgrade monsters and introduce new ones might be something to really sink into, but that was already wearing thin in the opening chapter as well.

It would quickly become a repetitive process of popping into monster dens dotted around the map (each one the exact same environment in the region of Azuria) and pinching one of the eggs inside to hatch back home.

You then have the choice of adding that monster to your squad or releasing it back into the wild for habitat restoration. Do this enough times, and you can improve the abilities of future monsters you hatch in the world or even spawn new monster variants in the local area.

Again, it sounds like a meaty system to experiment with, but I was getting bored with that quickly, too. Maybe this will appeal to the systems lovers who will immerse themselves in it to farm for the best monsters with the best abilities, but the loop isn’t enticing enough for me to want to do that.

When these main draws of the game aren’t clicking, and the presentation continuously grates (despite being a beautiful-looking game), then I unfortunately have to say that Monster Hunter Stories 3 might not be the one for me.

That said, I can see how it will massively appeal to those who want to dig into its systems to create the best monsters, master its combat system, and get swept up in its gorgeous anime-inspired world. If that's you, I'm quite jealous, to be honest. But I think I'll go back to dabbling with Wilds with every update – and waiting for the recently confirmed major expansion.

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