As I said before, I am not very familiar with the other games in the Monster Hunter series, because they are action combat games. But frankly, I’m not playing MSH2 for the story, so who cares if I don’t know the universe. The story is a bog standard “Your grandpa once saved the world, now it’s your turn” heroes journey, nothing to write home about. I’m playing MSH2 for the excellent tactical combat system, and a “collect and improve monsters” game loop that is more motivating than the Pokemon games. Monster Hunter Stories 2 is just the better Pokemon game!

I’m in the third region, which is still far from the end game, but certainly far enough to have understood the flow of the game. And that flow is excellent: Not only are there lots of different things to do, the game manages to make all of these options appealing. Whether you follow the main story, hunt for rare eggs, or farm for resources to craft weapons and armor, the game never feels boring or like a grind. That has probably to do with the huge amount of well thought-out quality of life features in the game. Not just the regular kind, like fast travel, but also surprising stuff like a button that allows you to skip trivial combat and still get the rewards. And the game balance is fantastic: Except for a few well-indicated and optional extra hard encounters, you are very likely to succeed on everything the main story throws in your way; and then the reward system is designed to encourage you to up your game, play better or improve your stats, in order to be able to get better rewards from the next fight against that type of monster. And before you get bored by a region, it is time to move on to the next one. When you find a new monster, the xp system works brilliantly for it to catch up in level with the rest of your team, so that you aren’t stuck in a bad choice between an old, high-level monster and a new, low-level one.

For those who like to optimize things, the monster gene system provides endless hours of entertainment. Each monster has a 3x3 grid of genes, into which you can slot genes of different types and color. You can build a jack-of-all trades monster, or you can try to match colors and types to achieve “bingo” bonuses. The genes to do so you get from the monsters you don’t need in your team, so even if you have a great team, you will always be looking for rare monster eggs. The whole system is very motivating and entertaining. And if you get good at building a strong team and using it in combat, you can do these bits of optional extra-hard content, like hunting for royal monsters. But if that isn’t for you, the monster that was extra hard and royal turns up as a regular monster some regions later, so you don’t miss out on ever owning one. If you wanna catch ‘em all, you probably can.

Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin is available on Switch and via Steam on PC. If you have the choice, I’d go for the Switch version, as the PC version seems to have a bug that in rare cases can corrupt your save game when playin multiplayer. In spite of that, the game has over 4,000 “mostly positive” reviews on Steam, with the negative ones coming from the people who lost their save files (understandably, ouch!). If you read this much later than the time I write this, the PC bug will probably have been fixed, and the game might be cheaper on Steam, while Nintendo doesn’t do this whole “discount” thing. In any case, if you might at all be interested in a better Pokemon game, I can only recommend Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin.