​ ​​​​​Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate Brings Hardcore to Wii U

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​The best thing about Monster Hunter, unsurprisingly, is the monsters themselves. The iconic dragonlike and super-mammalian beasts in this series are among the most impressive creatures in gaming, and also among the toughest challenges. Take one look at the snapping jaws and electrified serpentine form of a Lagiacrus or the evil eyes and hyper-aggressive movements of a Tigrex and you know that you can expect an epic battle. Only after you know everything about a monster – where it likes to hide, how it limps when it’s weakened, which of its attacks you can block or dodge – do you stand a chance of bringing it down.

The best thing, though, is encountering a new monster for the first time; one whose movements and character you don’t already know. That’s the draw for Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, if you’ve already earned your Rathalos armour in previous instalments. Although it is in most ways exactly the same game as 2010’s Monster Hunter Tri, it brings several new monsters to the party, along with subtle improvements and embellishments to everything else. If you’re not already a Monster Hunter fan, then this is the best time ever to jump in, whether on 3DS or Wii U – both versions are the same, and you can transfer your save between the two if you buy both.
 

Most noticeably, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate on Wii U is HD, something the Wii couldn’t manage: it’s 1080p native. Unfortunately, though, it’s only been retextured rather than rebuilt in HD, meaning there’s still some blockiness to get used to. Tri was always a good-looking game, especially on its background, but in HD its graphical imperfections are more obvious – you can see the edges of the monster models more clearly, and the beautiful distant vistas you can see when you look out over the edge of a cliff don’t look quite so impressive in high definition, where their lack of detail is more exposed.

This is minor, though, in the context of such an excellent game, and the other improvements – especially the vastly cut-down loading times – more than make up for it. Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate boasts about 50% more content than Tri, but most of it sequestered away in the upper levels of the game (G class quests), so you’ll have been playing for a good long time before you see any of it. At Tokyo Game Show, Capcom showed off one monster that’s new to Western Monster Hunter fans: the Brachydios.

Best described as a cross between a poisonous rhino and an extraordinarily aggressive, volcanic  T-Rex, Brachydios enjoys slobbering explosive neon-green saliva all over its stumpy arms and then pile-driving you into the ground with them, leaving a residue of slime wherever it treads. He’s clearly a distant, vastly more dangerous cousin of the less dangerous Barroth, a mud-loving rhino-like monster that rumbled around the desert in Tri. Unsurprisingly, he kills me pretty quickly, despite the high-level armour and weapons and unrealistically-elongated health bar that I’ve been endowed with for the demo, but I get a good few stabs in on his shins with a gunlance before the green nodes on his head start to glow read and he erupts into rage mode. The monster stamina system has been expanded in Ultimate, letting you see more easily when a monster is weakened or hurt. They tire out more visibly.

Monster Hunter is at its best in multiplayer, when four people can complement each other’s strategies and weaponry, but in single-player Ultimate lets you bring two AI companions along: Cha-Cha, the little dude from Tri, and another wee chap called Kayumba. Cha-Cha and Kayumba sing stat-boosting songs and have the odd stab at a monster during battle, but their real purpose is to draw a monster’s attention away from you, letting you get a few hits in whilst the beast’s attention is focussed elsewhere.

The Wii U gamepad's screen shows your map (that might not sound important, but trust me, it really is) and can be used to fiddle with your inventory, which is hardly imaginative, but certainly utilitarian. Having a second analogue stick makes the camera easier to wrestle with, but the real godsend on both Wii U and 3DS is a targeting button that lets you actually lock on to monsters for the first time in the series' history.

At the moment I’m in two minds about whether Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate does enough to justify slogging through the early stages of a game I’ve already played for 100+ hours all over again. If you weren’t a Tri player, then great: you’ve got a lot to look forward to in Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate – it’s as accessible as Tri, which was the first game that really made Monster Hunter easy to get on with for beginners, in my opinion. If you were a Tri player, though, then you might not feel overly inclined towards killing another 50 Royal Ludroth and Great Jaggi, working your way up from nothing again to get to the really good extra stuff.

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Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is out on both 3DS and Wii U in March 2013 in America and Europe. As well as the improved graphics, it’s the Wii U version’s online functionality that will give it the edge over the portable version for many players; like previous portable Monster Hunter games, Ultimate is local-multiplayer only on 3DS. You can also play local multiplayer with one Wii U console and three 3DSes, if you have three friends who are up to the challenge. Monster Hunter is as vast and as hardcore as action-RPGs get; it's a huge score for Nintendo's Wii U line-up, and not just for Japan.