Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate and False Advertisement

Three games in recent memory come to mind whenever I think of the question, "What exactly represents the worst in video games these days?" The first is Valiant Hearts, a mediocre game loved by fans and critics alike because they are surprised that Ubisoft decided to put out a non-shooty shooty killy killy game and people want them to make more of it instead of their usual stuff. Perhaps the high praises that Valiant Hearts received resulted in Ubisoft giving more support to initiatives like Grow Home and Grow Up, but judged on its own Valiant Hearts is an utter piece of garbage which I have torn apart in an earlier post. The second is No Man's Sky, a game recommended to me on Steam because it is popular. Let's break it down. An ambitious game which people know very little about, that has been recently delayed and is launching at $60 full price, is the top selling Steam game that is at the top of my queue. The damn thing is not even out yet and people are pre-ordering a digital copy of a game that they know shit about. I would love to delve more deeply into criticism but I cannot, because there is no game to criticise nor play, but go ahead pre-order the damn digital copy because they will most certainly run out of those. 

The third game, regrettably, is Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate - or as I like to call it, Monster Grinder. There are many problems I have with the mechanics of the game, but I want to focus on the parts of the game that makes it qualify for this 'worst of video gaming' award, and that is false advertising, and how people are putting up with this bullshit year after year. 4 main points I want to go through here. One, the Field Of View. While the previous installment benefited from being on the Wii-U, a home console which means your FOV is the size of your TV, this version puts you on the tiny 3DS which makes everything so hard to spot. I guess it is time to upgrade to the XL. This would not have been such a big problem if the camera controls were a bit better, and you will say, well get the New 3DS then, it has a second thumbstick to control the camera. And thirdly, there is framerate dips and input lag because my system is the oldest of oldest of 3DSs, so I guess getting a New 3DS would make sense... until you realise none of this is actually stated on the box. MH4U is a shameless game that was designed for the New 3DS like Hyrule Warrior Legends, and is clearly not optimised for the normal 3DS, but refuses to state that limitation on the box itself because it fears not being able to sell more copies to people who own normal 3DSs. Nintendo's whole retarded move of calling the New 3DS literally the New Nintendo 3DS, similar to the failure of a name that is the Wii-U, does not exactly inspire people to upgrade their handhelds, nor encourage third party developers to push games on the new console. I will not blame Capcom (and Koei Tecmo in the case of HWL) entirely for Nintendo's failings, and it is just saddening that the optimal marketing strategy amidst failure of the console's marketing is obscuring crucial information that affects gameplay and enjoyment in order to sell games like MH4U and HWL. With Sun and Moon coming out this November, I'm hoping they don't pull the same nonsense here because even thought I will be eventually getting my upgrade to the new 3ds, I hope that friends can continue to play games together on their old systems too.

And this brings us to my fourth point about false advertisement, the focus on multiplayer. Jumping onto the MH4U bandwagon now is bad, because most friends who like the franchise are just waiting for generations to be out and have stopped playing this version for a long time. Monsters are extremely grindy on single player mode, and everyone in the world is telling me the multiplayer is more fun, I would like to point out that this game again, was not advertised as a multiplayer only game. Just admit it, if you need people to play with to make the base game even bearable, then clearly the single player campaigned is not properly scaled and balanced and it should be stated that the single player mode is simply a tag on. And the reason why this is important is that this means in order to get a party of 4 to play, we need 4 New 3DS XLs and 4 copies of this game, that's about $1600 for 4 people to enjoy this game. I recently spent $40 buying 4 copies of Papers, Please for 4 of my friends and made them really happy; so not thanks I will rather buy 160 copies of Papers, Please and make 160 people really happy instead. For what it does, the value proposition just is not enough to justify this game as enjoyable because it costs so god damn much.

Strangely enough, I am enjoying the game but mostly because I am really bored and have nothing else to play. But I am disappointed, perhaps by the hype surrounding it, but more so by the willingness of gaming carrotheads to be chopped by AAA developers, spending more money and blaming their own systems for being not good enough when in actual fact they have been screwed by obfuscation of information, marketing schemes and poor optimisation and design of games. I will probably criticise the game design one day, but as free and bored I am writing is still much of chore.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, MH4U, more like Me Has 4 Unstated problems that border on false advertisement and you should totally read reviews before buying this game that plays like crap on anything but a New 3DS XL.