Monster Hunter Freedom 2 Hands-On

While attending Capcom's Spring 2007 Gamer's Day in San Francisco earlier this week, we had our first opportunity to spend some time with the upcoming English-language version of Monster Hunter Freedom 2--a 10-minute timed demo of it, anyway. Already a huge success in Japan as Monster Hunter Portable 2nd, the action adventure game will see players battling against huge creatures, completing quests, and crafting new weapons and armor for themselves using items that they find on their travels. The game can be played solo, but is best enjoyed in an ad-hoc "hunting party" of up to four players, which is exactly what we did.

We weren't given any details of the quest that our party was attempting to complete--assuming that we were even on one--but it was clear from looking at the sizeable map that we had a lot of ground to cover and at least eight monsters to do battle with. The load time before we actually got into the game was painfully long, but the loads between areas were much shorter thanks to a new background-loading system that starts preloading the next environment into memory as you play through the current one. We also didn't have an opportunity to customize our character, although we had 11 different premade ones to choose from--one for each of the different weapon types. (The original game had only seven different weapon types.)

The controls in Monster Hunter Freedom 2 are intuitive and change depending on whether or not you have your weapon drawn. You can speed up your hunter's somewhat sluggish movements when walking or climbing by holding down a sprint button, but doing so takes its toll on your stamina bar, so you can really only use it in short bursts. You need to be extra-vigilant with your sprinting when climbing vines up rock faces, because running out of stamina completely will cause you to lose your grip. The third-person camera doesn't always do a great job of positioning itself as you explore the large environments, but the option to reposition it directly behind you by tapping the left shoulder button at any time looks to work reasonably well.

In addition to the large monsters that you'll be tasked with killing for quests, there are plenty of indigenous creatures for you to practice on as you move around the map. Those that we encountered weren't particularly aggressive, even after we hit them the first time, though to be fair they didn't get much of a chance to be. Depending on your choice of weapon, you'll be using the circle and triangle buttons for most of your moves during combat. Wielding the giant, slow sword that we'd opted for (which looked like part of a giant crab's claw), the aforementioned face buttons were used to perform horizontal and vertical attacks, respectively. Pressing both simultaneously performed a special diagonal attack, while the right shoulder button was used to block.

It's easy to get carried with away with some of the huge weapons that you'll be wielding in Monster Hunter Freedom 2, but you'll need to be careful using them in close proximity to other party members because the game's swords and such aren't able to distinguish between friends and foes--that's your job. We're not certain how flexible the gameplay options will be in the finished game, but for the purposes of the demo that we were playing we were limited to three lives for the entire party, and any player who died was forced to respawn back at the beginning of the map.

The finished game will feature more than 250 quests as well as a "treasure hunter" game that can be played either solo or with a friend against the clock. Based on what we saw during Capcom's presentation of the game, when you're not busy slaughtering monsters or looking for treasure you might be picking plants, fishing, mining, or hanging out in the all-new Pokke Village. You'll also want to spend any time in between quests crafting new gear for yourself, which could mean any of more than 700 different weapons or 1,400 different pieces of armor. Those are some big numbers, and they'll only get bigger when Capcom fulfills its promise that additional content and quests will be made available for download postrelease.

We didn't get to spend nearly as much as time as we'd have liked with Monster Hunter Freedom 2 on this occasion, but we look forward to bringing you more information on the game as soon as it becomes available. Monster Hunter Freedom 2 is currently scheduled for release in North America and Europe in September.