Graphics: 85% Sound: 85% Gameplay: 70% Control: 80% Story: 50% Overall: 70%

You're going to need more than just "first aid" to take on this guy.   Look! I brought a friend! And so did that giant dinosaur...   Hey, if you want to trust cats to cook for you, who am I to argue?   Oh yes, there will be blood.

Monster Hunter Freedom 04/26/08 John Tucker

Dear Reader,
I didn't want to be the one to have to tell you this, but our friendship means a lot to me, so I'm going to do it anyway. I know Monster Hunter Freedom looks cool, and does fun stuff, but it really doesn't like you "that way." It's cool if you come along with your friends, but when it's just you and Monster Hunter alone, it's just not the same. No hard feelings, OK?
-John T.

Monster Hunter Freedom is fairly unusual in the world of RPGs. For example, as you play through the game, you never gain experience points, and monsters don't drop loot. Instead, you mine for ore, forage for plants, bugs, and fish, carve up the monsters you kill, and use those things to fashion better equipment for yourself. To use a word that's probably been overplayed lately, it feels like a very organic experience, and that's what I love about it. On the other hand, it's a brutally difficult experience, especially if you're playing it alone, and that's what I hate about it.

There's no story per se in MHF–you are simply an adventurer in a small village with a lot of monster problems. You talk to the village chief or the Hunter's Guild (sic) to take on individual quests that vary from "Go out, do whatever you want, and come back without getting killed" to "There's this gigantic dragon that's really causing us headaches. Can you go kill it for us?" The quests are all very standalone, although certain quests are marked as "urgent," and completing them will generally unlock the next quest difficulty level or grant you the ability to improve your farm. It's clearly meant to be an experience where you'd play some random quests online with a group more than you'd play alone. Unfortunately, while the PS2 version supported online multiplayer, the PSP version only supports local multiplayer, so you're limited to playing with your friends who have a copy. None of my PSP-wielding friends have MHF, but I bet it'd be fun to play with them if they did!

The basic structure of the gameplay is simple–you spend a bit of time in town getting ready for a quest, then accept a quest and head out. Unfortunately, there's very little in the game to guide you as to what you should be doing, so there's a very steep learning curve to almost all aspects of the game. That steep curve, combined with the difficulty even when you know what you're doing, will make you question your commitment to playing on. The good news, though, is that there's not really much penalty to saying "You know what? I'm just going to take this character and start over." Characters in MHF don't have classes, so you can just choose a different weapon and start using it instead, going back to earlier quests as often as necessary to gain the items you need to upgrade that weapon into something you prefer to what you had before. There's even quite a bit of satisfaction to be gained from doing so, because there's really something cool about knowing that the awesome (or even just decent) sword you're using is one you gathered materials for and made yourself.

In a game where you put so much effort into crafting your equipment, you expect the developers to pay attention to graphical details, and that expectation is fully met in Monster Hunter Freedom. The character creation is far more flexible than in most PSP games, and your armor and weapons have distinct looks that really make it clear what you're wielding. The first sight of a new weapon after an upgrade is particularly exciting. The animation is also quite solid, both in your character and the monsters you'll fight. As mentioned previously, some of those monsters are huge, and their animations do a great job of conveying an impression of their weight. There are occasional clipping issues, but they mostly show up when you're dealing with prey animals that you haven't attacked yet, so they don't create a significant problem.

Maybe I just haven't played the right games, but MHF is the first game I've ever played where one of the character creation options is what voice you use to grunt. It's kind of silly, but a nice touch. The music is good, and does a nice job of staying in the background and enhancing the mood. Probably one of my favorite moments in the whole game is sound-related. When you kill certain animals, you will carve off a chunk of raw meat, which even a barbarian like you can't eat, so you have to cook it. Cooking meat is timing-based. Push the button too early, and you get a rare steak. Too late, and it gets burned. Hit it right on time, though, and you not only get a nutritious well-done steak, but you get a hilarious little victory riff and a chorus of voices saying "mmm–that's tasty!" It's never failed to get a smile out of me, no matter how often I've heard it.

As happens frequently with PSP ports of PS2 games, the controls can feel a bit overworked at first, but are very manageable once you get used to them. With the normal exception of the somewhat clunky camera, the controls are a good match to the realistic feel that the rest of the game is shooting for. It's important to note that although you use the same buttons to attack with any weapon, they all behave very differently. A small sword and shield combination allows you to stay light on your feed and lash out for some quick combos, but deal a lot less damage than the enormous great swords, which move fairly slowly. The one weapon that works very differently is the gun, but it is so ill-suited for playing alone that it's best ignored, which means that you'd probably ignore it in multi-player as well. Using a gun allows you to add damage through improving your weapon and your ammunition, but requires you to stand still and stay far away from monsters that are very eager to close in on you. Also, anything better than the default ammunition requires more gathering and crafting on your part, which gets old very quickly.

To sum up: have you ever played a game and felt like it hated you, and yet you just kept going back to it anyway? That's been my experience with Monster Hunter Freedom since the first time I picked it up. MHF is definitely not a game for newbies, and it's not a big fan of loners, but there's some real fun to be had along with the frustration. It's definitely exciting when you manage to take down a pack of velociraptors for the first time, and you can allow yourself to feel somewhat justified in having died when a giant dragon five times your size takes you down. Still, this is the kind of game that you pick up cheap and play for the unique experience until something better comes along...something that doesn't make you want to fling your PSP at the wall.