As someone who only recently was able to finally play and enjoy a Monster Hunter game a few years ago, in the form of Monster Hunter Rise on Switch, I’d been eager to take a crack at its less intense sibling, the Stories series. While absolutely cut from the same general cloth in terms of its overall worldbuilding, this series instead goes in a much more friendly turn-based direction which absolutely slows things down a great deal, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

Essentially a mildly-remixed 3DS title, visually it’s a pleasant surprise, with the characters and monsters sporting plenty of detail, terrific texture work, and usually a stable framerate. Of course, there are some sacrifices when you look at other details as you look around the open fields, with very simple static elements representing different resources you can pick up, but it does feel like the focus was generally put on the right elements so that’s still a win. In terms of play, this is absolutely a novel way to implement a “light” version of a series that can be notoriously hard for newcomers to latch onto, opting for a turn-based rock-paper-scissors combat system. The pleasant surprise there is that, remaining quite faithful to the complexities of some of the monsters’ attack patterns, as you get deeper into the game you’ll continue to have a tougher time keeping track of where the multiple monsters you may face are in their patterns, adding some tension to combat that at first can feel a bit too predictable.

Not having a basis of comparison with the full breadth of games in the series, or even this title’s sequel, I can’t tell you how it compares, but I will say as a newcomer I was more often impressed than not. While not all aspects of the experience are ideal, the egg collection aspect can get a little too grindy and tedious at times, I wouldn’t say that there’s anything that’s obviously a game-breaker either. I do remain a bit curious at precisely where the astonishing amount of crap you’ll get picked up is stored while you’re in the field, picking up entire carcasses and a wide variety of other large objects like bones, but I suppose it beats being space-constrained and constantly figuring out what you need to throw away by weight rather than staying in the thick of things. 

All in all, this was a title that managed to suck me in pretty quickly, even making my longest continuous video recording of just shy of 3 hours go by quickly. I do wish that it let you off the chain and got you having fun a little more rapidly, but given the volume of things you need to know in order to be successful I suppose that isn’t a surprise. Even if the egg collection may have been a pain, I did enjoy training up and then eventually recombining monster traits in other monsters, in order to juice them up and make them even more effective. While it may lack the roller coaster ride of intense action and craziness of its brethren, Monster Hunter Stories also feels like a great and much more gentle launching pad to discover this world through.