Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate Introduces Its Own Take On Delayed Wake Ups

Capcom’s previous episode of the video series showing Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate’s new features showed us the new and improved Charge Blade. In the fourth installment, they show more of the cooperative aspects that we’ll see in the upcoming game.

The video begins with producer Ryozo Tsujimoto and director Kaname Fujioka giving us another look at the player-assisted jumping attack feature. Next, they put their cooperative skills to use against the shark-like amphibious monster, Zamtrios.

At 2:50, we see that Fujioka’s character is paralyzed, but after being launched into the air by Tsujimoto’s Hammer, he is still able to land a nice jump attack.

A new action feature in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate lets you get up quicker after being knocked down by an enemy. At the 3:37 mark, we get to see what it looks like, with a faster rise on the left and a slower one to the right.

Sometimes you might want to stay down a little longer, or you might need to get up quicker at other times, so depending on the situation, you’ll have a choice to do one or the other. However, your character will automatically get up at some point, so you can’t stay down forever.

Another new feature is the auto-chat, that lets you set phrases to activate on certain moments. For example, you can have your character say “I’m on!” once you get on top of a monster, or “Sorry!” when you get incapacitated.

These features were introduced to help players communicate and cooperate more easily with each other, which sounds like it’ll be pretty helpful for taking on the difficult G-rank quests that will come with Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate.

As a last message for the fans, Fujioka says that some people have asked whether Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate will be much tougher, to which he replies that there’s plenty that can’t be experienced outside of G-rank, and the game itself will have much more to offer than Monster Hunter 4.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is slated for release in Japan on October 11, 2014, and in the West in early 2015 for Nintendo 3DS.

Food for thought:

1. It’s interesting how Monster Hunter is borrowing features liberally from other genres to fit into its own unique mechanisms. Specifically, in this case, the feature that lets you hasten or delay your recovery after a fall seems similar to the delayed wake-ups introduced in Ultra Street Fighter IV. When he spoke to Siliconera, director Kaname Fujioka did say he wasn’t against borrowing ideas that work well in general.

2. Another interesting point to note is that producer Ryozo Tsujimoto has compared Monster Hunter to fighting games in the past.