Monster Hunter Stories on Switch preview — Totally pawsome!

By David Flynn

Posted on May 20, 2024

I don’t know why, but I never played much of Monster Hunter Stories on 3DS. I got about 10 hours in, then never picked it back up, even after loving Stories 2 on Switch. Thankfully, I can now rectify that mistake with a port to modern consoles, including Switch. Thanks to Capcom, I’ve had the chance to play the first few hours of the game, so let’s get right into things. Stories is a turn-based RPG spinoff of the Monster Hunter series. While the mainline games have you playing as a Hunter and… hunting monsters, Stories puts you in the role of a Rider, someone who befriends monsters to… fight other monsters. Ok, it’s not all that different in what your end goal is, but the road to that goal is completely different.

If you’ve played the sequel, this does feel like a step back in some ways but the experience is ultimately familiar. You find monster dens to grab some eggs, hatch them to add a new monstie to your party, and repeat until you’ve got a party of super strong monsties. You can stick with your favorites or replace them with stronger monsties over the course of the journey. Either way, you’ll want a balanced team for both combat and exploration.

Battles in Stories go by rock paper scissors rules. Normal attacks can be red for power, blue for speed, or green for technical with red beating green, green beating blue, and blue beating red. Every monstie has a color of attack they’ll tend towards, so you’ll want to swap them out depending on what’s going on in battle. While you can’t control your monstie for the most part, you can choose your own actions for each turn. If you or your monstie attack an enemy that is also attacking you, a head to head will begin with the winner of rock paper scissors dealing more damage and taking less. If both of you attack the same monster using the same color and would win in a head to head, you’ll completely negate damage taken and deal a whole lot more in a dual attack. It’s a very simple battle system on the surface, but has a lot of depth to consider for even normal encounters.

The story starts off pretty slow unfortunately, with you becoming a Rider, helping the village with some menial tasks, and eventually setting off to see the world. I still found the world and characters to be interesting, especially with the new addition of voice acting, but I can see a lot of people getting bored before anything really gets going. Even so, if you enjoy the ecology side of Monster Hunter it’s always nice to see monsters in their natural states without hunters to affect the environment.

Stories is already available on 3DS and mobile devices, so what does this port bring to the table? Well, for one, it’s absolutely gorgeous. Either the game scales very well to higher resolutions or Capcom put a lot of work in to clean things up, because this game looks almost as good as its sequel. It even runs at a mostly stable 60 fps on the Switch. The lighting isn’t quite as good, but the colors still pop and the textures look crisp. As mentioned earlier, this version also adds full voice acting for most cutscenes, which is great because I find Navirou very grating without Wyatt Bowen’s charming performance. I don’t quite remember the voices in Wings of Ruin, but it does sound like other returning characters reprise their roles here too. The only real complaint I have about the game’s sound is the reuse of old sound effects, which sound heavily compressed compared to everything else, but Monster Hunter has been using those same sounds for a long time now.

While Stories 1 doesn’t have some of the game changing features introduced in 2 like swapping weapon types mid battle, it’s still a fun and charming game so far. I do wish Capcom would back port some of those features, especially being able to see monsties’ color affinities in the swap menu, I’m excited to rectify my mistake of dropping the game initially.

Monster Hunter Stories launches June 14th for Switch, PlayStation 4, and Steam.

Monster Hunter Stories on Switch preview — Totally pawsome!

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