Get your comrade off his lazy bum and start readying your gear!
The hunt is about to begin!
When you take on a Hunting Quest, your mission is to go to one of the several fields surrounding your home village, track down and fight a monster in his natural habitat, and defeat him, either by slaying him or capturing him with a trap. Hunting Quests have a 50 minute time limit, and, if you take them from the village's Guild, you can play with up to 3 of your friends in a 4-person hunting party. But be careful! Regardless of how many people are in your party, monsters chosen by the Guild as targets are usually about twice as strong as the ones picked by the Village Elder.
The first set of quests will be the Low Rank quests: In these, you will be starting at a Base Camp, where you have a bed to rest and recover your health and two boxes, a red one and a blue one. We'll talk about the red one later, for now let's focus on the blue one.
Always remember to stock up before leaving!
The blue box is your Item Box; you will find in there the starting supplies you'll need for the quest. Usually, these supplies are some First Aid Meds, Paintballs, Smal Whetstones, Rations and the eventual bullets, poison vials and Tranquilizers, and of course, a Map. These items are essential to your success.
Hunter-on-Monster Mexican Standoff
In this picture, you can see the interface of the game, and we'll use it to explain the effects of the different items. So first, potions and food. The green bar on top of the screen is, as you might have guessed, your health, and Potions and First Aid Meds will replenish it. The yellow bar is your stamina, which will deplete when you perform actions such as running, rolling or blocking (evasive maneuvers in general) and some special attacks. This bar is replenished by Rations or Cooked Meat.
Be careful, though! When eating or drinking, you won't be able to move and you will be vulnerable to any attacks! Always try to satiate your needs in a safe place.
The Paintballs are an item of which you'll only appreciate the value once you don't have them anymore: upon impacting a monster, they will mark him, and if it leaves the area, it will be tracked on the Map by a pink dot. This is very important, since monsters that flee will usually try to sleep or eat to regain strength, thus lengthening the battle over the time limit or worse, outlasting your item supplies and defeating you.
Now, another item, the Whetstones. See the little sword icon next to the quest timer, in the upper left? That is the Sharpness Meter, and it represents the cutting power of your weapon (only melee weapons have this). Using a weapon will wear it, and this icon will get duller and eventually jagged, which will cause most of your attacks to bounce off monsters. Whetstones are used to sharpen up your weapons and make them effective again. But remember, every weapon has a maximum level of sharpness, which cannot be increased, no matter how hard you stroke that stone on the blade.
You'll notice after some quests that oftentimes the starting supplies are not enough. In these cases, you can buy more potions, meat and other useful objects.
Now, for the more hands-on explanation on weapons, I present to you, the Sword & Shield:
Looks simple enough, right?
A balanced weapon, the S&S boasts impressive mobility and defensive abilities, while it also has a couple more tricks up it's sleeve.
Armed with a short sword on your left hand and a shield on your right, you can cover yourself and quickly lash out whip-like strikes, giving the adversary a time window of mere milliseconds to strike. But be careful, using your shield to block will deplete your stamina, and you won't get it back until you stop blocking! Also, don't get to over-confident and forget that your backside is wide open when you block.
The other advantage of the S&S is that you can use items with your weapon drawn; you see, usually you drawn your weapon with the Square button, and if you want to use an item, you have to scurry away, put out your weapon, use whatever it is that you need, and pull the weapon back out. This not only takes time but also leaves you temporarily defenseless. With the S&S, you can simply push the Square button while your shield is up, and you will use the selected item without having to store your weapon! This will usually lead to very fast-paced battles, with lots of tactical choices and tight timing.
Of course, the downsides of this weapon are it's range and it's damage output: while you get impressive mobility, you still have to get within inches of a monster, and there's no shield that will help you if a Gravios decides to sit on you. The damage is definitely not bad, but it just doesn't compare to some of the stronger weapons such as the Long Sword or the Switch Axe. Then again, the charming thing about MonHun is it's variety, and you'll see that every type of weapon presents a whole new game!
That would be it for today! If you have any questions left, leave them in the comments! In the next issue, we'll cover some more complex items and we'll meet our first foes, the Velociprey and their boss, the fast and furious Velocidrome, together with their relatives from other lands! See you next time, Hunters!
