There’s a common thought that Monster Hunter is mean to be played with other people - that it’s more fun to do so.

While I won’t argue that playing MH with other players is the best social gaming experience I’ve ever had, I still prefer to hunt solo most if the time. Maybe it’s who I am, maybe it’s because the weapons I like, and maybe it’s because if the way I found Monster Hunter.

I have lived in Japan for over 10 years. I knew about MH and it’s popularity, but I had never really tried it. The first time I tried MH was portable 3. I think I played it for about 30 min. before I had decided it wasn’t for me.

The next time I would try it was MH3G (MH3U in the west). I loved my 3DS and had become good friends with the folks at 8-4, the good folks who were responsible for the localization of MH3. They were on their podcast (8-4 Play) talking about how wonderfully the game was and I decided at that moment I would try once more to understand and like it.

You have to understand that I had just come off of Pokémon Black. I had never played Pokémon before despite all the hype (worldwide). I had a lot of fun and felt that I should try Monster Hunter, not only since it was a social phenomenon but also because I was a game producer, and understanding popular games is something I started to feel obliged to do.

Excited, I picked up the Circle Pad Pro bundle and got ready to jump right in. No one at my company was playing the game – I think a lot of players were still reluctant to jump into 3DS and being a 3rd generation Monster Hunter, I know understand why a lot of them felt the desire to ‘sit this one out’. Alone, I fearlessly jumped in.

I started by trying Great Sword, since I knew that it was a popular weapon. I hated it. Before I even got to hunt my first large monster, I was completely turned off by the slow movement and ‘preemptive’ gameplay (setting yourself up for an attack, committing to it, then pulling it off). I decided to try Dual Blades instead, which I kind of enjoyed!

The first issue came when I saw Aoashira for the first time (Azuroth in the English version). I hit it and hit it and it didn’t seem to react or die. Then I died, and it upset me. I tried a few more times and after repeated attempts, I was about to give up.

After some 8 hours with the game, I was about to call it quits, then a coworker who had played the game in the past talked to me over lunch and explained the game cycle to me, as I was clueless. He told me my first mistake was going into it thinking it was an action game. It’s a hunting game – something I came to understand.

Armed with new knowledge of how to play the game I spent a few hours doing nothing but gathering materials to make a new weapon. I created it and then took on the Great Jaggi. I remember the first time I killed it – I felt so accomplished. Then I discovered I needed to kill it a few more times to get enough materials to make its armor – the task that my coworker told me to do. After hunting it a few times, I started to learn to be patient, and started to understand how to hunt. I got better every hunt. I learned how to break its parts, and then eventually made its armor. The first time I used it I immediately noticed a difference. I felt my skills as a DS user were improving and a new weapon/armor skills intensified my abilities. I was almost hooked.

The monster that gave me a lot of hassle was Quropeco. I swore to god I could not kill it – it was too fast, I didn’t understand its patterns, it called in bigger monsters… Like the game designers intended, it taught me how to truly hunt a monster, and react when I saw visual signs of what it was about to do. I was hooked.

However after playing a while, I was sick of Dual Swords. It took so many hits to kill monsters, so I decided to try Lance. I fell in love immediately. I ended up playing for about 8 hours a day everyday for quite some time. At that period, I had to go to the USA for work for 3 months. I laid out my goal: to make Agnaktor U armor, the best armor for a Lance user.

For those of you who know Lance, you like to have the enemy focused on you. Most of the battle you are directly in front or under the monster, so the last thing you want is it moving away from you (moving with a lance is very slow). I became annoyed with Kayamba and Cha-Cha so much that I removed them and let the monster focus on me.

I had played MH3G obsessively over the next few months until I reached G rank. I had heard how these quests were meant for 4 players and perhaps the gamer in me felt a challenge to prove I could do it alone, plus I was in the USA with no one to play with anyway. I did good on G rank until I ran into the double Bracchydios quest (HR7 urgent?). I had never been able to lance him well and I found myself totally stuck.

I decided to change weapons after hundreds of hours invested into lance. I chose the Sword and Shield. One thing that was a little boring about lance was that the skills and armor were pretty much set and there was little flexibility to be had. SNS on the other hand you could use any skill you wanted. I learned how to take down Bracchydios with it and fell in love with SNS.

It was around this time that I came back to Japan. I discovered that two of my coworkers had started playing MH3G as well, but decided to finish all of G rank alone before I played with them.

By time I cleared G rank alone, my hunting preference of hunting solo was locked in. Don’t get me wrong, I had an absolute BALL playing with them and hunting large monsters like Jhen Moran.

A long story short, I spent over 1200 hours playing MH3G, eventually going on to learn all the weapons, all of which I love for different reasons. Perhaps it was the first half-year and my obsessive playing habits that locked me into solo hunting, but I have always preferred solo over multiplayer.

I know each monster really well. I am obsessive about efficiency. So when I am hunting with other players, I don’t like that the monster isn’t focused on me. On the flipside, I have noticed that my solo skills allow me to contribute greatly to online excursions.

What you get by hunting solo that you don’t online

MH is all about planning, investment in time, concentration, and persistence to overcome the monsters you face and to dominate them enough to make new armor and weapons to take down the next big monster.

I find that hunting online robs you of the immense accomplishment you get for overcoming a huge monster and the exhilaration when you wait for the result screen to find out if you got the specific item you need to complete an item.

For example, if you need to cut off a monster’s tail and are playing online, you might ‘generally focus’ on its tail or even relegate that task to another hunter altogether. But done solo, you need to resist hitting the monster in other parts in order to keep it alive long enough to cut off it’s tail. You learn how to maneuver around a monster in order to hit that specific body part. And when that tail comes off, boy do you feel good – and you get better each time. However online, it comes too easy and hunts are over fast so you can just try again next time – no big deal.

I also find that hunting solo heavily affects how I feel when it comes to creating new armor and weapons. Say you wanted to make a new lightning element weapon – online it might take you an hour or so spamming a monster to get the materials. You try it out, you put it away and go onto the next thing to make. However, when you do it solo, it takes a lot of time and effort to make that sword. By time you get the materials to make it, you will have ‘mastered’ the monster it comes from, and when you finally make the weapon you feel incredible proud and happy. Then you want to use it, so you hunt other monsters. You discover whom it’s best against. You appreciate your achievement, and then move onto the next goal. All this is wasted if you get it easily online.

For a game that is so fun, with monsters so well designed that you can hunt them over and over again, and weapons that are so unique that it feels like a new game each time you change them up, why would you want to fast-forward through all that hard work and sense of accomplishment?

The only time I like to hunt online is after I know a monster well and have gone through the process described above, or for monsters that I have done the hard work of learning, but by sheer HP they take too long to hunt without it becoming stressful. Or for monsters that are dangerous enough that working together is essential to staying alive. I highly suggest you try solo hunting if you have not already – you will appreciate the game more, and contribute better online! After all, I’ve always said that good online MH is like Jazz – it’s when 4 skilled soloists come together.