Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection review

Bad news, folks: It's happening again. Another mysterious malady is making monsters even more monstrous, and the ecosystem seems poised to fall into ruin unless somebody bludgeons however many lizards it takes to get to the bottom of things.

It's me. I'm somebody. Specifically, I'm the prince and monster-riding ranger captain of a kingdom that stands on the brink of war, because unlike your typical Monster Hunter ecocrises, this rash of crazed, crystallized megafauna threatens something even more precious than the delicate balance of nature: It threatens diplomatic relations.

Warfare has often lingered at the edges of Monster Hunter history, but Monster Hunter Stories 3 is the first time it's threatened to break out where we can see it. The implications are chilling: Bad enough that humanity might turn its tools for slaying godlike monsters on each other, but what would we think about warfare—and about those who make it—if it meant those same monsters were brought to the battlefield?

Unfortunately, Monster Hunter Stories 3 doesn't have much to say about war except that it makes dinosaurs upset.

Combat prowess

Stories 3 is gorgeous: Environments and monsters are rendered in a lush cel-shaded style, and as someone who's thoroughly bought in on Monster Hunter, I was content spending many of my 40-odd hours with the game enthusiastically Dicaprio-pointing at monster animations I've spent years failing to dodge.

But the strongest thing about Stories 3 is the madcap complexity of its monster battling and breeding. It continues the series' magic trick of translating the flavor and rhythm of Monster Hunter combat into turn-based battling—not as a Hunter, but as a Rider, fighting alongside my hand-picked, bred-for-combat crew of my favorite creatures from across MonHun generations.

Or as Capcom's localization team settled on calling them in 2016, "Monsties"—a term which I'll be doing my best to avoid, because I'm 32 years old.

Stories' combat is essentially three layers of simultaneous, Pokemon-style rock-paper-scissors. When me and my monsters dive into battle with a wild Seregios, I'm keeping track of more than its elemental weakness to lightning. I've learned it favors technical style attacks that my monster and I can counter by choosing power style. Its tail's weakness to slashing damage makes it the best target for my longsword; if it was airborne I might be able to knock it to the ground by puncturing its wings with piercing damage from a bow or gunlance.

But as soon as a monster enrages or transforms—as MonHun monsters love to do—all those priorities change. When frenzied, that Seregios will switch a flurry of speed style attacks; some monsters might start attacking with new elements that'll force me to reconsider which of my monsties (help) I've got on the field, while others can manifest ice blades or hardened razor scales that will shred my team to pieces if I don't swap to a hammer and shatter them.

If that sounds like a lot: It is. After a few dozen hours, I'm still catching myself staring blankly at the screen as I struggle to hold all the moving pieces in my head at once. But successfully exploiting those shifting dangers and opportunities is a rewarding juggling act that I eagerly sought out, echoing the same fantasy of building and wielding weaponized monster knowledge as mainline Monster Hunter combat.

Hatch and release

Bolstering its battles systems, Stories 3 expands on an already-deep monster buildcrafting sandbox: As in previous games, monsters' abilities are determined by a 3x3 grid of genes that can be swapped between monsters using Secret Monster Rider rituals, providing additional stat and damage bonuses for every line of three matching gene symbols or colors.

Hatching eggs from nests gathered in the wild provides a library of genes to mix and match to suit your buildcrafting tastes. Am I troubled by the notion of pursuing monster perfection through applied genetics? Yes! But if I get a cool wyvern with a rude poison build out of it, I'm willing to pretend selectively breeding a genetic Frankenstein for combat is fine when there's a glowing magic crystal involved.

In Stories 3, those existing mechanics have been recklessly juiced by a new Habitat Restoration system, which lets me release the monsters I've hatched from my many pilfered eggs into world regions of my choosing. Doing so lets me manipulate spawn rates, grant increasing regional stat bonuses and perks to monsters hatched from that area's eggs, and even give monsters new elemental affinities (and color palettes) based on the environment.

Admittedly, I don't know if it counts as ecological conservation when I'm regularly releasing five fully-grown tyrannosaurs with molten sword-tails into unprepared biomes just to see what they'll look like if they pick up an ice element in a generation or two. But none of my ranger subordinates have complained, so it's probably fine—and you can't argue with the results. They're blue now!

Iffy environmentalist motivations aside, what's particularly cool about Habitat Restoration is that some monsters will produce mutant subspecies based on how you cultivate their environment. Some, like the Pink Rathian, just require the base species' restoration rank to hit a certain threshold. Others demand more specific conditions and environmental pressures before they'll mutate: The Glavenus variant will only emerge when a population of the sword-tailed tyrannosaurs has to compete with four other bladed monster species in the same region—kind of a steel-sharpens-steel situation, but with dinosaurs and giant crabs.

I happily lost hours tinkering with monster breeding and buildcrafting schemes. If carefully manicuring a garden of defense-crushing Anjanaths and glass cannon Yian Garugas is your idea of bliss, Stories 3 will provide the tools. Eventually, however, it started running out of satisfying problems for my monsters to solve.

Endangered

Outside of self-selected monster-making goals, most of the optional activities are a forgettable checklist of generic creature-killing and gathering requests from nameless NPCs. Invasive monsters are the main exception. Scattered around the four map regions, these encounters with one-of-a-kind, hyperlethal monster variants are puzzle fights: Their unique abilities can wipe an entire party at once, but their rampages leave clues hinting at specific monsters, abilities, weapon techniques, and items that can disarm their quirks. Successfully driving off an invasive monster awards a rare, endangered monster egg, letting me introduce monsters into the wild that wouldn't appear otherwise.

Unfortunately, as Stories 3's main quest advances and enemy monsters become more demanding, the battles that stood between me and progress started to resemble those puzzle fights in an unflattering way.

As optional pursuits, invasive monsters are an ideal diversion. By design, they're pretty level-agnostic: All that matters is finding each solution, but I'm free to leave if I'm stumped and return when I'm ready. As main quest fights started relying more on party-wiping gimmicks with similarly tight windows for preventing them, they felt stifling.

Rather than proving my monster team's general viability, I was expected to have equipment and monster setups built solely around ensuring my plot-mandated Fancy Rathalos was ready to shoot a fireball at the right moment—a task often made maddening by the fact that I can only direct my monster's actions by expending more of its limited stamina or after charging its ultimate meter, and can't control my ranger teammates at all.

Reworking my team for a late-game battle could mean a lengthy session of tracking down monster genes, grinding levels, or farming gear materials. In those moments, the prospect of undoing some of the work on my monster builds to clear a single battle wasn't exciting. It was exhausting.

Misadventure

I could better stomach those hurdles if seeing what followed felt worth the effort, but the story of Stories 3 struggles to do more than present a lot of things it thinks I should care about without convincing me why I would.

I'm told there are people suffering from the crystallization crisis, but it's mostly happening off-screen in the next nation over. I'm the prince of a kingdom that's about to be invaded and there are battle-armored monster troops crossing our border, but I barely get a chance to see how my people feel about it before I'm shuffled into self-exile to spend most of the game chasing dragon mysteries on the other side of the world. I'm following the path of my missing queen mother, who I've only interacted with in scattered seconds of flashback cutscene.

It's a scattering of motivations that I felt rushed through and literally distanced from, and when the plot returns to them they aren't given room to breathe: They're crammed into the brief minutes separating the hours I'm spending fighting wyverns so I can follow them back to their lairs, paw through their eggs, and hatch legions of combat theropods on an industrial scale.

My ranger companions are maybe the story's biggest miss. There's a reason why RPG companions tend to follow a standard model: You're introduced to an interesting character, they enjoy some time in the spotlight to illustrate their place in the world, and then they ease into the ongoing supporting cast dynamic to make way for your next new friend.

Instead, in Stories 3, my ranger crew is already assembled from the jump. They've known each other and my character for years—with one exception—and the writing and format doesn't carve out space for the quick, initial sketches of their personalities to develop more fully. All each companion gets is their own short side quest every chapter, but they only consist of brief interactions bookending a jaunt out into the wilderness for some monster fights. They're disconnected from the main plot, and as a result, don't have much to say in the space they're given.

Rather than exploring the rangers' thoughts about the looming war and calamity much, those side quests repeat the same character notes: One of them has a dead husband, but she's already in a healthy place about it by the time the game starts. Another has five cats and doesn't like me to tag along on serious cool guy business. Another forces me into a race with a giant hog once a chapter—the less that's said about that, the better.

Each companion ends their side story roughly where they began, but they each tell me how much our time together has mattered to them. For me, it meant time wishing we could have had a traditional conversation sequence and hatching fewer eggs than I'd like.

Stories 3 gestures at the threat of war, but when war's cost is mostly measured in crystal-maddened lizards, it's a threat without compelling stakes. Wouldn't it be horrible, it asks, if these monsters were turned into weapons? And I agree, it would. But speaking as the guy maximizing monster genes for damage bonuses, it feels like a conversation that was left unfinished.