Reading Report: 06 September 2026

モンスターハンターストーリーズ２

『モンスターハンター』プレイ日記 本日も逆鱗日和

I finished the MH2 part of this book. It wasn't as good as the first week's reading, and I think it's evident from the number of essays that start with an apology for a lack of updates that the author's heart was not in it as much during this time. In any case, there were still a handful of cute anecdotes like when he got bodied by ラージャン, and when he and three other team mates all equipped gunlances and tried shelling a テオ・テスカトル to death only to realise the heat aura was too oppressive and none of them had dragon damage to break the horn. One of the things I thought about reading this week was how so many mythical systems we've taken for granted in the English-speaking Monster Hunter community really started as early as like 2003. He writes several times about the 物欲センサー (what we call the Desire Sensor), a mythical game system that detects what monster part you desire and then refuses to give them to you. I wonder if these concepts came about in parallel or if the English community derived it from the Japanese community, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a derivation, and it just goes further to show how much of Monster Hunter as a game is about distributing information.

モンスターハンター

This week was mostly Monster Hunter XX. I decided to get into some gunlance in the game, and it was really fun. I did most of the village low rank, helping ココット村, ポッケ村, and ユクモ村 with their respective issues. I also struggled trying to upgrade several gunlances because basically all of them need 2-3 火炎袋 at a certain upgrade level, and the only monsters who drop that are イャンクック early on and リオレイア and リオレウス in the mid-game. It's annoying how other fire monsters like ディノバルド drop monster-specific power/sacs instead of generic stuff, but that's just a pet peeve. I was very pleased to see チャチャ in ポッケ村, because I love the way he and カヤンバ talk. They're two characters flowing with charisma and lacking any self-awareness, even just the brief conversation with the two of them was more enjoyable than most of the dialogue in the game.

モンスターハンターストーリーズ２

I played about 15 hours of this during the week. It's the loose sequel to Stories 1, which I played probably almost a decade ago now (time flies). The story concerns a young Monster Rider (my character) starting her career right as the worst disaster in history occurs. The island's 護りリオレウス dies, leaving an egg behind for a mysterious Wyvernian girl to take care of, and the ocean turns blood-red as a flock of リオレウス　flee (or emigrate) from the island. Important characters that show up on the starting island are ケイナ, a senior Rider who accompanies us on the island during the start of the game, and ガラ, the village elder who tells us what to do. After discovering a berserk アンジャナフ, we're given permission to go to the 護りリオレウス forest where we encounter エナ, the Wyvernian girl from the opening cutscene. She mistakes us for our grandfather, レド, a legendary Rider who befriended the Wyvernians and left us big shoes to fill, I guess. It's sort of insulting that they mistake my cute girl character for some dude, but I guess we just have similar aura. エナ gives us the egg she received from the 護りリオレウス and says we should go to her home town to consult with the elder there. So we set sail away from our tiny, isolated island to the massive continent to the west. There we meet アルマ, an older male Wyvernian who becomes our main team mate in ケイナ's absence (we left her behind). It's funny how Stories 2 has both the 護り prefix and a character called アルマ, two key words in Monster Hunter Wilds (though 護り shows up just as 護 in Wilds), though there's no relation at all. I guess it just makes me think the Stories and mainline teams are not consulting each other on key words at all. Reminds me of the whole "Apex" word confusion that happened between several mainline Monster Hunter titles.
The last thing that happened in the story so far is that the elder of the second village told us the egg we have is destined to hatch into the 破滅の翼リオレウス, which is obviously a bad thing, but we reckon we're built different so we're running errands for him to prove we're gonna be strong enough to bond with it when the egg hatches. We investigated a berserk パオウルムー, which tutorialised flash bombs, I encountered a(n optional) Tigrex which one-shot everyone in my party which felt kind of unfortunate, like no prep except grinding better gear would help me deal with the threat, and then we investigated a バサリモス which was hanging out in a valley full of rocks that look just like it, and honestly it didn't seem like a threat at all. That fight tutorialised using barrel bombs to do fixed damage to parts.

Speaking of combat, I like the way the combat works in this game. There are three damage types, but they put gunlance into the same damage type as bow (突) which I actually think is an inspired choice and I wish the main games had lances do the same damage type as shots (obviously with the game totally rebalanced for that to make sense). Targeting and breaking parts feels like a natural extension of the main games, though there are a handful of "breaks" that feel lacking (like destroying the イャンクック head part doesn't break its ears or beak, weird). Just like Stories 1, there's some frustration when the enemy AI just doesn't play along, refusing to do clashes with the player. Since clashes affect basically everything in combat, it's pretty boring when monsters spam non-clashable attacks or target a party member who is obviously going to fail the clash. I noticed that hammer especially suffers from being clash-starved, since the charge level depends on successful clashes. At least gunlance can charge a single shot each turn, and bow can use off-turns to charge (though it's a bit finicky).
The sweet spot for combat for me was when I did a side quest to hunt a 修羅パオウルムー and it was able to 2-tap me. Being legitimately threatened but able to pull through with item use and smart clashes really exposed all the game systems in a way that felt great. When the monsters do barely any damage it's sort of a let down, and when they one-shot アルマ and his lives contribute to a game over well... it's just not fun to feel out of control of the outcome of battle.

You get new オトモン (the cute name for friendly monsters) by stealing eggs from nests, and unfortunately it's about as boring to do as in Stories 1. I basically don't care to optimise my オトモン genes until the game unlocks systems where you can actually manipulate it yourself, because right now the gamba is just bad. I have a cool プケプケ though.