Hands-On Monster Hunter 3G: Hunting Horn Vs. Urcusis & Dual Swords Vs. Plesioth

Capcom released a downloadable demo of Monster Hunter 3G in Japan and I’ve been playing around with it. The demo has a thirty play limit, but it’s more of a 30 "run" limit. As long as you don’t exit the game, you can replay the two missions as much as you want.

I started with the easy mission, which has Urcusis as a target. This giant snow rabbit comes from Monster Hunter Portable 3rd. Urcusis starts its attack pattern by throwing snowballs and if you get hit you won’t be able to attack until ChaCha cracks the ice or Urcusis smacks you. The monster also slides on its belly like a deadly penguin hoping to bowl the player over. Both moves can be evaded with a well-timed a dodge roll (B button).

The controls in Monster Hunter 3G are a bit different. The circle pad moves your character and the d-pad rotates the camera. Yes, that’s right underneath the circle pad, so Capcom made a digital d-pad on the touch screen. Controlling the camera is sort of like having two analog sticks and if you don’t want to play with it (as much) around you can use the new target lock feature.

Tap the monster icon on the bottom screen and the game centers the camera on the giant monster you’re hunting whenever you press L. In the demo, this only works with target monsters, so you can’t hunt herbivores this way. Monster Hunter 3G also puts the mini-map (tap to expand it) and item lists on the bottom the screen.

Monster Hunter 3G has all of the classes from Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, so I decided to play with a new for 3G class, Hunting Horn. first. Characters aren’t customizable in the demo, but I managed to beat Urcusis using a mix of healing songs and wild swings. I had to chase him to a new zone, though! Urcusis retreats with a belly slide when he is low on life. Monster Hunter 3G is smooth, even with the 3D slider turned on. The game doesn’t have monster tails popping out of the screen (although some things do pop out if you spin the camera around fast enough). Capcom used 3D to add depth to the areas and make status bars like your health meter float. Losing the 3D sweet spot in the middle of a big fight can be distracting, but that only happened twice for me so far.

I tried to take on Plesioth after defeating Urcusis. He was lounging all the way at the top, four screens away. I dashed up as fast as I could with a Dual Swords character, a speedy fighter who specializes in close range combat. Probably not the best choice since I had to get really close to strike Plesioth. This aquatic monster returns from previous games with a few new tricks. It’s most basic attack is a tail swipe, but Plesioth also rams players too. Before spraying a gust of water, Plesioth raises its neck which means you should run away. Plesioth changes its attack pattern after taking damage and dives underwater. While submerged, Plesioth either tries to ram players, fire a cone of water or escape. Water slows down the Dual Sword class, so I wasn’t able to defeat Plesioth before the twenty minute time limit.

I’m going to try again, but next time I’ll use the Gunlance.