Monster Hunter Stories 3 preview: Complex yet compelling combat

Monster Hunter is all about long-haul fights where you need to carefully prepare, endure long battles, and continually target different body parts to take a monster down. That formula could easily become a tedious chore when translated to turn-based combat, which is what makes the success of Monster Hunter Stories all the more impressive. It leverages all the different systems the main series has and uses them to make a complex and engaging turn-based combat system that gives you long-haul battles that don’t feel like an endless slog of slowly whittling down a health bar.

At its core is the Rock, Paper, Scissors-style attack system with Power, Technical, and Speed attack types. Your party (of two people and their respective monsters) can choose whatever style of attacks they want, but the person who’s being targeted by the opponent will launch into a head-to-head with the monster, where whoever has the successful attack type will win the encounter and deal heavy damage, while the loser doesn’t get to act.

However, you don’t get any indication of what type of attack a monster is going to use — the only way to figure that out is by observing their behaviour during an encounter. It gives battles an interesting flow, as you have to spend the first couple of turns working out how they act before you can go all-in with your assault.

Even once you’ve worked that out though, there’s a lot more to consider. There are your monsters, which can be used in battle with a Pokémon-style system. Each of your monsters typically only has one attack type, so you’ll need to switch around which one is by your side to deal the right type of damage. Plus, if both monster and rider perform the same type of attack, then a successful head-to-head will result in a double attack for extra damage.

Weapon choice matters too. Your main character can freely switch between a slashing, blunt, and piercing weapon during combat, and different damage types are more effective against different body parts, because — oh yeah, the limb targeting mechanics are also a big part of this game. In fact, limb targeting is a big part of the strategy in Stories 3, as many of the boss monsters you’ll face are blighted with a form of corruption that makes them feral and more powerful. To weaken these enemies, you will need to shatter the crystals clinging to their bodies, but targeting them will unleash a powerful counterattack.

The big boss I got to fight in this preview used this to create a very interesting dilemma. It used an ability that powered up its arms significantly, but made the crystals on its back vulnerable. So now I have to make a tricky strategic choice between targeting the crystals to weaken the monster in the long-term, or targeting the arms to prevent being smashed by a big attack in the short-term.

All of that is without even mentioning systems like being able to jump on your monster’s back mid-battle for more powerful attacks, the break gauge you slowly whittle down with abilities, or the whole stamina system for using more powerful attacks. It’s perhaps a bit too much for the game’s own good, really. I’m a great lover of turn-based RPGs and can understand these complex systems quite well, but even I was feeling overwhelmed with the amount of systems being thrown at me in what was a relatively short preview of a very early portion of the game. While I dislike games that keep you in a glorified tutorial for the first 10 hours, I can’t help but feel like Stories 3 could do with slowing down the pace at which it throws all of this stuff at you.

Especially as, while the volume of tutorial dialogue is a little overwhelming, it does a decent enough job of injecting the personalities of its characters into it. It takes the classic route of taking you through a young upstart’s first day on the job – as rangers surveying the local monster population – as an excuse to teach you everything. Though in this case, you’re the experienced veteran rather than the excitable child, so you get to have the feeling of taking someone under your wing, which is a nicer vibe for people returning to the series than having every character speak down to you all the time.

Still, regardless of how you learn everything, it does all come together in the boss encounter, and I had to do a good degree of tactical thinking as I learned what attack types were coming my way, picked out the best monster to counter them, switched between my basic and special attacks to preserve stamina, and whittled my foe down by creating vulnerabilities.

Which goes back to the praise I heaped on the series at the start. Stories 3 continues the trend of taking a complex action combat system designed for long battles and translates it into turn-based mechanics really well. It’s a lot to wrap your head around, but the result is very rewarding and gives you a similar sense of strategic satisfaction as the main series.

That vibe carries through to more than just the combat too, as the visual style is also stronger than ever. This series goes for the more cartoony visual style versus the main series’ realistic effects, but it’s still just as beautiful, if not more so in some cases. While the monsters may not look quite as terrifying in this style, they do look a lot more vibrant and colorful, which helps bring out a greater sense of personality – that’s important in a game where you’ll be taming and fighting alongside monsters instead of just battling them.

It all means that Monster Hunter Stories 3 is keeping the series running as strong as ever. It’s always fun to see worlds like this in a completely different light, both from a gameplay and narrative perspective, and this is a series that understands that. The turn-based combat is quite complex but will still appeal to those who aren’t big fans of the main series’ action gameplay, while the story emphasises living with the many monsters of this world instead of viewing them in terms of how cool their skin would look as an armor set.

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