I am five hours into Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G now, so here’s a little impression on the game that is so hot now in Japan.

My general feeling after those hours is, the game plays and looks exactly like its predecessor, Monster Hunter Portable 2nd. Upon loading in the UMD, a new intro greets. While past intros shows a lot of the wild life and monsters, this latest one shows plenty of human, especially the people of Pokke Village. The intro is also a lot more colorful this time, and all the key characters in the village were introduced. There’s one new old lady (image above) that make weapons shown in the video, will we meet her latter? Does she hold any surprises later in the game?

Next up is the main menu, I skipped Media Install due to the lack of space (at least 580Mb is needed) and it can always be done later, plus those loading screens are actually good for me to take a short breath during an intense fight. On to the Character Transfer process, I chose to continue with my MHP 2nd save data. The thought of starting fresh never really cross my mind, because I simply don’t want to waste the 300+ hours to rebuild my character again. Luckily, it accepts my save data of the Asia version of MHP 2nd and it doesn’t destroy the old save data. The conversion is flawless except for the automatic rearrange of my carefully placed Items Box and the fact that I have to start at 0 hours again, 311 hours would looks so much better :)

After customizing my character (I switch to a girl character this time…), my hunter start on the bed again and from then on things are exactly like MHP 2nd. So yes, it’s like re-buying a game. I check out everything in the Pokke Village and found out the game is more hunter friendly now. Used to store rows of health items in the Items Box? A slot can hold 99 instead of 10 items now, this is just one of the many improvements made to the basic activities. These improvements also save plenty of time, for example in the Pokke Farm, I have to make one last try before knowing that there is nothing more to collect on the ground in MHP 2nd, now the game simply won’t allows you to mine or catch if there is nothing else to collect.

The first thing I did when I came out of the house is to buy an Otomo Ailu, the most important feature of MHP 2ndG. However, Ailus during missions isn’t exactly new to the series, they can be found in certain areas in previous games. The difference this time is that it follows you and tries to help and also provide some much needed funny moments during missions. After buying Otomo Ailus, you can train them in the kitchen and the animation of them training is just hilarious sometimes.

On to the quests, I have cleared the Village Quests before but MHP 2ndG added a few more to those previously cleared quests. I am fine with this but 20 crabs and 8 gold fishes? I’m not exactly sure what’s the point of these. On the other hand, Famitsu and Dengeki got their name in a couple of missions (previous games have their unlockables armors), I’m eager to get those Famitsu armor set just to see how it looks on my girl.

I haven’t yet unlock the much touted G-Rank quest, simply because I can’t get past the emergency quest that is required to unlock them. The quest involves repelling a giant crab with super long legs (Syengaoren, image above) and after four tries, I am still finding ways to stop it from forcing the gate open. I also managed to check out the download section, the newly released quest is there, so does some of the MHP 2nd quests, and there are news on upcoming downloadable quests.

So, after a few hours in, I’m not exactly sure sometimes if I’m playing a new game but Monster Hunter is such an addictive game that it doesn’t matter at all because once I’m in the game, all I want to do is to see what kind of monsters I will face in the next mission and to make money to collect all the armor sets. For those who are still sitting on the fence for MHP 2ndG, you probably need to see how far you’ve gotten in MHP 2nd. If it’s still early, then it’s better to get MHP 2ndG later unless you really love to have an Otomo Ailu to hunt alongside. If you are deep into MHP 2nd, then this game will eat hundreds more hours of your life.

Note: Just like MHP 2nd, there will be some guide on the game here a bit later. You can find out more about what’s new in MHP 2ndG here.

Posted in PSP on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 11:24 pm |
Comments Feed | Leave a response | Trackback