Twisted Reflection Is Set To Break Records

It doesn’t happen often, but if we’re lucky and we’ve been good little gamers, the stars align and we get to witness a game reshape the future of one of our favourite series. It becomes a turning point, a new standard that every sequel will have to follow. That’s what Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection has achieved. It redefines what MHS did before, refining old features and adding new mechanics to reach near-perfection.

Monster Hunter Stories has always been the kid brother to the main series. It swaps out the action combat to deliver a turn-based RPG, lowers the age-rating to broaden the audience, also bringing down the difficulty threshold, and features a more cutesy anime-inspired visual style. It takes what we know and love about Monster Hunter and turns it into an adorable creature-collecting and monster-battling game we can obsess over.

After spending more than 150 hours with Monster Hunter Stories 3, it’s safe to say my obsession with this series is stronger than ever.

A New Adventure

Monster Hunter Stories 3 is set a couple of hundred years after the previous games and focuses on two warring kingdoms dealing with the Crystal Encroachment, an environmental disaster laying waste to their lands. You play the royal heir to the Kingdom of Azuria, teaming up with your ranger buddies to find the source of the disaster and save both kingdoms. Along the way, you learn more about your ancestors and a war long past.

The fresh timeline makes it perfect for newcomers to jump in here and enjoy the series at its height, but for longtime fans, there are a few references aimed our way so we can momentarily feel special and pat ourselves on the back for being in the know.

This is the strongest cast and narrative to date in the Monster Hunter Stories series. Each of the main characters is unique and full of heart, and even now I find it hard to narrow down a favourite. The quality of the voice acting in the game elevates each individual, which was more noticeable than usual here because this has been a weakness in the series’ past. Another part of what makes each character so endearing is the Side Story quests you complete for each one in every chapter, learning more about their personalities, quirks, and pasts, with some rather sweet moments.

It’s easily the best storyline of all three games so far. I’d just love to see Capcom take it one step further and lose the overly obvious signposting, which I assume is a symptom of aiming for a younger target audience, and let us truly experience big reveals as they’re meant to be enjoyed.

The twists aren’t as fun when you can see them coming, but that’s the only narrative misstep. The game foreshadows or hints at them so much that you’re unsure how the characters themselves aren’t picking up on what it’s laying down. Still, it’s a great storyline with an intriguing central mystery as to how and why the Crystal Encroachment began.

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New Mechanics Set The Bar For The Series

The best way Monster Hunter Stories 3 elevates the series to a whole new level is Habitat Restoration. This allows you to establish camps within an area after defeating a specific monster, and then introduce new monsters to that ecosystem.

What makes this particularly interesting is that by introducing a new monster to an area it’s not naturally native to, it’s possible to then hatch a dual-type elemental variant of that monster, depending on the habitat’s local element. It’s reminiscent of being able to change your monsties’ element from the first game, but this evolution pushes the idea even further. For example, introduce the Thunder element Tobi-Kadachi to the Fire element area of Sunpetal Plains in Azuria, and you could hatch a red Fire-Thunder dual-type Tobi-Kadachi.

Monsters with high Ecology Ranks (the ones you’ve released a lot of into an area) also have a chance of hatching with rare genes and skills. Dual-type monsters have stronger skills of their specific element, and then you can use Excursions (another camp feature) to send monsters out to learn other rare skills. Combine this with Rite of Channeling to transfer genes between monsters, and it opens up the whole game to create a new level of meta gameplay; you can take your favourite monster and breed it into a powerhouse with the perfect skills and dual-type elements.

The Habitat Restoration feature also changes endangered and mutated monsters (previously called deviants in the series). You have to defeat Invasive Monsters (more on those later) to retrieve endangered monster eggs and reintroduce them to an area where they’ve become extinct. You can then unlock mutations by fulfilling certain requirements, such as ensuring the habitat has enough of a monster type of element. Some are fairly straightforward, while others require you to know your Monster Hunter lore, such as which monster is a rival to Mizutsune. Habitat Restoration is such an ingenious feature that it has to be a staple of the series going forward.

A Much-Needed Challenge

But let’s get back to the invasive monsters. These are a great way to add a whole new level of challenge to the game. They’re all optional after the initial tutorial monster, but they’re well worth sinking your teeth into if you want to test yourself. It’s not just a case of defeating these fearsome monsters and knowing the ins and outs of weapon types and elements to hammer away at a HP bar, either. You have to work out how to make them retreat so you can find the endangered monster den.

Some are as simple as requiring a specific weapon or monster to be used at a certain point to fulfil the requirement, whereas others took me far longer to figure out. The invasive Khezu in particular had me scratching my head for a good long while, battling through endless rounds as invasive monster HPs don’t deplete when you first confront them. You’re locked in until you can figure out how to get them to scram, or you die. I got there in the end with the Khezu, thankfully.

Once you’ve made them retreat and claimed your egg, you can always take the invasive monster on properly from within their dens, too, adding yet another layer of challenges for players to tackle and yielding a rare material for smithing with.

Calamitous elder dragons are yet another way to whet the appetite of would-be hunters. These only appear during the night if you continue to fight, though it’s random which one will appear when the storm sets in. While some are certainly easier than others, I imagine at least a couple of them will be the final monsters you defeat, as you’ll need to bring your A-game, your best monsters, and some fully upgraded gear. Between invasive monsters and calamitous elder dragons, the series has managed to deliver a sorely needed challenge to players.

Polished, Expanded, Improved

There are also a few improvements and tweaks that I appreciate. Multiplayer is gone, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s just about my monstie team and me, and that’s all I need. The inclusion of Poogie and track item collectibles offer a tempting appeal for completionists like myself, as well as a great way to encourage players to explore to the fullest. It might seem insignificant, especially to those who don’t want to chase them all down, but all these little additions add to a greater whole for a much more enjoyable experience.

While there are technically fewer areas in Monster Hunters 3 than the last game, each one is much larger and much more developed, offering a richer experience that properly utilises riding actions rather than simply being a gimmick to reach a certain point for a single treasure chest. Granted, there are still a few riding actions I just never bothered with, but I’ve always been lazy and just brute-forced my way. Why roar and scare monsters away when I can just run past them on a super-fast monster or fly overhead?

There’s also a new sense of verticality as each area will have you soaring in the skies, heading underground or behind secret waterfalls, swimming through lakes, and climbing up mountains. There was a better sense of range and environmental features, which made progressing and exploring all the more interesting. Some underground areas I didn’t even know existed until a quest took me there.

This sprawling scale is counterbalanced by the fact that dens are just a small area now, rather than mini dungeon areas that must be completed before you can raid the monster nest. It made egg hunting feel less like a chore, and as that’s one of the main things players obsess over, streamlining it was a godsend.

Meow, That’s What I’m Talking About

Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection sets the new gold standard for the series. It raises the bar on every aspect that we love about the series, but also reinvents its go-to template by introducing exciting new mechanics that overhaul the core monster-battling gameplay. While the narrative could have been less obvious, it was still an enjoyable adventure and the new cast of characters are bound to become fan favourites.

You’ll be perfecting your monstie team long after you’ve rolled the credits, and I’m hoping it will have the same amount of post-launch content as the last title for us to throw our monstie teams at, because the game is so good that I just want even more of it.