Its time for your one-stop Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate information round-up
Sometimes good things come to those who wait and if you’ve been a Monster Hunter fan you’ll be used to waiting by now and while we won’t be getting the first version of Monster Hunter 4, we will be getting Ultimate. With this in mind and also because we’re going through something of an information dry period, here is your Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate information round-up.
The New Monsters
Say hi to the cover star Gore Magala.With every new version and generation of Monster Hunter comes of course more monsters to fight and at E3 we were introduced to two brand new Wyverns, the Tetsukabura and the games cover star, the Gore Magala.
Starting off, the Tetsukabura is a brutal and stubborn frog beast that will be one of the earliest of the new bread. It can use its fangs under its mouth to dig up boulders to either attack you or try to block oncoming blows.
With the Tetsukabura, you will be able to break both the fangs under its face as well as what looks like a stone growing on its tail. Breaking the part of the tail will increase the amount of damage you can do to the tail while its unknown what breaking the fangs would do. My guess however is that it would decrease the time it could hold onto the boulders.
The Gore Magala is a large black dragon with tattered black wings which on a side not resembles a cape if you look at it when it’s not attacking. The creature is still mostly a mystery to the hunters guild and its this mystery you’ll have to solve in the single player. One thing about the Gore Magala is obvious however, the creature is the cause of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate’s new aliment, the virus and nearly all of its attacks cause the virus to spread.
However the virus works on you is that after you get infected a bar will appear under your name in the corner. If the bar fills you’ll suffer a major decrease in your defence however it can be overpowered if you deal enough damage to the Gore Magala itself. Overpowering the virus will make up immune to the virus for a short while and to boot you’ll gain a nice boost to your Affinity or Critical Hit Chance. This adds a nice risk versus reward to things as you could always just cure it with a Nullberry.
Your not the only thing that can be affected by the virus however as the Gore Magala can show up in quests for other monsters and infect them too. In the event that this happened, things will get a lot harder for you because close to the infected monsters death it will appear to die before becoming fully infected by the virus, “resurrecting” the creature and making it fight in a more violent fashion.
New Weapons
Monster Hunter Ultimate 4 adds 2 weapon types to the series already impressive 9 types. These two new types are the Charge Blade and the Insect Glaive so lets start with the Charge Blade.
Charge Blade
The Charge Blade is a unique weapon which is a combination weapon which can switch its form from a Sword and Shield looking weapon into a battleaxe. This may sound familiar to anyone whose tried Monster Hunter Tri Switch axe weapons but the Charge Blade does have things that set it apart.
Of course the blade mode is weak, you’re hitting monsters with a sharpened handleFor starters unlike the Switch axe you can switch forms at any time and in the Sword and Shield form you can even block. Switching forms at will open up the weapon to move combo potential but these types of combo’s tend to case your sharpness to plummet so you may want to keep blocking to a minimum.
The Charge Blade is also unique in the case that you can five vials that you can fill by using the Sword and Shield form. When using these vials you axe form deals more damage in the form of a better set of moves per vial so these will go away quickly. At the moment it looks like these will only increase your weapons damage but like the Switch axe, there will probably be some other effects with different weapons like poison or paralysis.
Despite this the Charge Blade looks pretty balanced because for starters the Sword and Shield form isn’t a versatile as an actual SnS weapon and it’s not as strong. Also you only have five vials and you use one pre swing even if you hit nothing.
Insect Glaive
Relax, the giant bug behind you is part of the weaponNext up we have the more technical of the two weapons, the Insect Glaive. By its self the Insect Glaive isn’t that impressive. It has a limited move pool and it’s swing speed is close to that of the Long Sword. However it won’t be called the Insect Glaive without that oversized insect on your arm and this is where the weapon gets interesting.
With the Insect Glaive you can shoot the insect at the monsters your hunting to get a stat boost. There are three you can get ranging from Movement speed and defence increases to attack boosts. What makes the attack boost interest though is that along with increasing your attack you also get a much improved set of moves, one of which can be used to literally Pole vault yourself over monsters.
What makes these tricky is that you have to aim the insect yourself as he won’t just go and certain areas on the monster is guaranteed to give you certain boosts so your first fight with every monster will be spent finding where these boosts are. On the plus side you have a pheromone shot you can fire to guide the bug to that area for you. By now the weaknesses of the Insect Glaive should be apparent. You need the attack boost to get the good move pool and missing to pheromone shot will leave you open as you call it back.
Improved movement
It’s take long enough but Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is finally making your characters move in a more free-flowing and natural manner. Sure it may not be parkour but for a series like this, it’s probably as close as Monster Hunter is going to get.
Snake wyverns why did it have to be a snake wyvernOne of the simplistic changes added is that your character now automatically climbs ledges. This may sound small but after the previous games need to practically rub yourself onto the walls for a prompt to appear nonsense, this makes a lot of difference. Also certain weapons like the SnS can attack while climbing ledges adding more versatility to an already versatile weapon.
Besides being practical this small change means that environments have more varied areas with varied terrain types and levels instead of the mostly flat areas where used to. This gives these areas a more natural look and feel to them and also while it hasn’t been confirmed there are rumours to the removal of Tri’s water sections. Whether this is a good choice or a bad one is up for debate but the removal of these sections would make hunting water monsters a pain.
There has also been seen improvements with the climbing mechanics. In previous games, once you started climbing a ladder/vine your were defenceless till you got off it. Okay you could move up them faster through the use of stamina but your were still pretty slow regardless.
Now along with naturally climbing things faster naturally you can now dodge as well as jump off them to do an aerial attack on monsters which links me nicely to my last part.
Mounting Monsters
Of all the changes we see coming to the series in Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, adding mounted combat into the mix is one of the coolest. However unlike Capcom’s other hunting-em-up with RPG elements Dragon’s Dogma, here you can’t just walk up to the monsters and grab them. Instead Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate treats mounted combat sort of like its status effects so your going to have to build them up, in this case through aerial assaults making the Insect Glaives Pole vault move even more useful.
Just think of it as a rodeo, a more violent yet only slightly less moral rodeoOnce you build up enough damage, your next attack will latch you onto them and the worlds most violent rodeo begins. Once it starts your job is to build up as much damage as possible to build up a gauge. The idea is to deal enough damage to fill the gauge while at the same time staying on the monster while its trashing around. Do so successfully and the monster while fall on the ground and fail about giving you time to deal more damage and to boot it appears to guarantee a shiny drop.
However just like status effects monsters will become more resistant to this tactic if you try to spam it. Also it should be noted that all the footage shown of mounted combat was with armour with skills attached to make it easier to stay on so don’t expect it to be as easy as the E3 demo’s made it look.
Online
One of the main and most annoying gimmicks surrounding Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate once it got ported over to the 3DS was that it couldn’t link online. This meant that without a Wii U and a second copy of the game, 3DS players were stuck playing by themselves and missed out on one of the main draws of the Monster Hunter series.
On the other hand Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate will have online capabilities from the start though it should be noted that at E3, the developers admitted that they sadly have no interest in making a Wii U port.
So that’s your Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate information round-up but the game still isn’t due out till Spring 2015 so as more information and trailers get revealed, we’ll keep you up to date.
