One of the first important things you study in language theory is that language is universally arbitrary. This means that the true, correct meaning of a word isn’t “out there.” You don’t find it out. You decide it, instead.

Of course this is only true as far as you also understand that modern languages are very well “synchronically codified”, there are vocabularies after all. But historically language is always in flux, always changing and adapting. Its rule isn’t about being “truthful”, but being useful (cue Wallace’s “The Broom of the System” and its many wordplays). Simply put, language is an agreement among a group of people. There is no fundamental correctness about the meaning or usage of a word, just what seems more useful and appropriate for the time, and reaching enough people agreeing on some common ground.

All this to say that what I’m going to do here is kind of pointless. I can PROVE that the use of “Quality of Life” is wrong, but as long I’m in the minority trying being pedantic about correctness, the other party will win (has already won). Yet, the current trend of the misuse of the word has pragmatic consequences: it’s blurring the meaning so much that the word itself is now misleading and pointless in practice. I’m not arguing about correctness, but that the continued misuse is having consequences that are pragmatically bad, based on instincts that are wrong.

“Quality of Life” is generally used, in game design, to define some system that has been simplified or streamlined, because, intuitively, it improves directly the quality of the experience. But while chasing this bland and widespread use, we’re actually losing the usefulness of the term. Because “QoL” in its true meaning isn’t vague at all, and can be defined very specifically.

“QoL” defines specifically those changes that DO NOT DIRECTLY AFFECT GAMEPLAY. That’s the proper definition. If it touches gameplay then it can’t be “QoL”, it’s instead a fundamental rule change that has to be consciously driven. Because, and here we come to the center of the argument, the usefulness of the concept lies in defining changes that are UNIVERSALLY positive. No one comes in and argues that some “QoL” change was “wrong.” It’s beyond question. You can improve QoL, but you cannot argue any before/after. It’s an useful concept because it defines those subset of changes that are always positive without any need for scrutiny.

So, for example, if a game requires some frequent command, that happens to be several menus deep, and then it gets changed so that there’s a shortcut to it, immediately available, THAT’S QoL! Because no one is going to say that the previous method of going through several menus to get to that option was “better.” And this because to qualify as QoL it has to have no impact on actual gameplay.

Yet, in many games the use of UI is itself “gameplay.” So, say in Monster Hunter, there’s a specific combos that is built out of a sequence of commands, and you decide instead to trigger it, and streamline it, to the press of a single button triggering the whole thing… that’s NOT QoL. Because it directly affects gameplay. It is not QoL, SPECIFICALLY, because someone can argue that this isn’t an objective improvement, but may streamline and simplify the game too much, fundamentally changing the gameplay. Being not-QoL means it defines an area of game design that has to be consciously driven. Chosen. You make choices in game design, choices themselves driven by motivations. Being overall a system so complex that it cannot be simply mathematically solved, making it a form of art.

The usefulness of “Quality of Life” was in separating the ART of game design, and so the conscious, deliberate choices, from what was instead quality of life in the sense that no one would ever argue for WORSE quality of their own life. The INTUITIVE term itself was intended to define that specific line of distinction.

That we lost. Because everything now is Quality of Life, precisely when Life’s quality is becoming utter shit.

Part 1 – Part 2

As written in part 1, my original intent was simply get into Rise. Then in part 2 I looked into mods to tweak the game, but couldn’t find anything worthwhile, but got some interesting mods for World instead.

Now, I dug enough to bring much of the same to Rise as well. So here’s the update with some more specific instructions to deal with it all.

– https://github.com/praydog/REFramework/releases (I don’t think there’s any point getting “nightlies” for this)
– https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterrise/mods/848
– my monster health x2 scaling
– https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterrise/mods/1061
– https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterrise/mods/1300
– https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterrise/mods/3225

The first is the usual basis to load mods, just one “dinput8.dll” that you place in the game main directory. The second is another dll file going into “reframework\plugins”, again used to load the rest.

The third is MINE. Since I couldn’t find a proper health scaling, I’ve done it on my own. The health scaling linked in part 2, for World, had a x2.6 increase on all monsters. I’m not sure if that may be even excessive, so for ease of editing and to be a bit conservative, my own is a x2 buff applied uniformly to everything. I have no idea how this applies in multiplayer (it’s possible that all other values are dependent on the ones I’ve edited, so everything grown in proportion… maybe), this was done just to buff health pools in single player for my own use. Just one file “system_difficulty_rate_data.user.2” going inside “natives\STM\enemy\user_data”

In case you want to edit it yourself, you need the editor. Then just load the file. I had no idea what I was doing, so I simply doubled ALL the values within “VitalTableRateList” and I’ve briefly tested this in game and it seems to work. I’m quite sure only a portion of those tables are actively used, but I manually edited all those 512 entries just to be sure… I found a mod that I used as an example, but that one only edited the multiplayer scaling, rather than base values.

Fourth link is to a loader for custom quests, used in the fifth link, that is just a collection of very hard custom quests. Adding quests seems relatively harmless since it’s just more stuff that you can optionally do. It shouldn’t mess with any of the vanilla content, so I just decided to install everything. Tho the quest editing is interesting, as it seems a relatively simple and flexible system to use and do whatever you want. This page being quite useful to have an idea of how things work internally and the type of control you have.

The last one, that I have not yet tested, removes scout flies effect from the game. The green glow same as the mod in World.

Beside that, there are a couple more additional mods that could be interesting. One is some AI tweaks for increased difficulty (beware that the page mentions some issues). And another is Follow Me mod that overhauls a bit the companions system so that you can sort of simulate multiplayer offline. You can basically bring more AI companions to a hunt and manually tweak both the damage they do AND the actual monster scaling. So this could work even as a direct replacement for my own edit and give you more control on how the scaling works. I’m not sure it’s a perfect solution though. One advantage of single player is to reduce the chaos of a fight. So using additional companions can be fun to mess with, but I prefer keeping the visual noise down. And I don’t know if you can tweak properly the scaling while also keeping the vanilla structure for companions. As I said, I haven’t tested this.

Just in case you want to browse internal files and extract solely what you want, or just need a vanilla backup to compare, you can use this. So for example to extract the one file I edited for monsters health pools, I loaded “re_chunk_000.pak.patch_001.pak” that I suppose is the patch to the main file, and so should have the most up to date data the game uses.

Part 1 – Part 3

I thought I was done writing about Monster Hunter. I started diverting the hype on Wilds to launch Rise+Sunbreak for the first time, and I thought it was it for me. That it was my way to satisfy the induced curiosity. But then a few videos on youtube lead me find out about Frontier and look into it, the lure of the harder gameplay, and that path ended up unearthing more and more. First the knowledge of the community effort to keep the game alive, and then the discovery of different “snapshots” that preserved the original progression from the damage being done by bad MMO practices…

The discussion of Civilization as a series, mixed in, wasn’t even planned. Now in retrospection I realize how fitting it is. Both games are the result of ongoing series that have their hardcore fans, but also got more popular over time. Both series have just released a new game recently, and both are being harshly criticized and judged as what looks like the WORST title in their respective series. The lowest point ever reached. Neither of them seems to be in a position that is recoverable. Issues run deeper than just a clunky engine and bugs. Some fundamental design principles have been broken. Both have gone through this as a very deliberate move: betray their “core” fans for the promise of mainstream. It’s all, once again, about money sucking the lifeblood out of everything that once had value, like a vampire. Until there’s nothing left and it’s time to move onto a new prey to destroy.

(Big companies are in pure pillage mode. A pattern that is repeating, this video explains it well)

On Monster Hunter side it looks like they won that bet, the game seems to have sold a lot. It’s quite unexpected for me, because we can argue forever about game design, but Wilds is also a technical disaster. Objectively so. The rendering system is one of the worst I’ve ever seen, made of badly dithered dust (this is obviously not standard, but it shows how the raw rendered is built). What’s happening to modern graphic engine seems like a disease (there’s reddit group and youtube channel about this). The game not only runs poorly but LOOKS bad. You can of course, as always, power through many problems by using superior hardware, but these days it’s not even something to brag about. No matter how popular it is, everyone playing it relentlessly complains about it. The game is just too bland and easy. Everyone is already chasing the chimera of the mythical update that will add interesting content and fix everything. I actually remember the release of World quite well (despite not having played it even for a minute). That game ALSO was plagued by technical issues, in some part even due to the layering of Denuvo along with others unnecessary forms of protection. But even the release of Iceborne had technical issues that lasted a long time. Eventually it improved significantly. The same happened on the design/gameplay side. World was not well received by the core community. At the time the “real” Monster Hunter was GU on the Switch, that was also just released. World lost a lot of the flavor that is part of classic MH. It was easier and the significant production effort done to upgrade monsters to a new generation “lost” some pieces along the way. Some of the love for the details and polish. But at the same time World continued to power through because it also introduced a lot, and had the inertia due to being the only game released on new hardware. Something that Rise didn’t even challenge, despite, in my opinion, Rise has the better engine overall (whereas World tried to punch above its level, and technical execution wasn’t good, Rise due to the Switch had a much more simpler and conservative engine, but also used it so much better. It was more solid overall.)

All this to say that World lost a lot, but also added a lot. A similar case for Rise, the game gets easier but it’s because combat is more expressive. To this day, no matter who you ask, World and Rise feel like parallel games despite being so different. They cannot compare to any of the previous games, but they do not really compare to each other. Combat is better on Rise, but World’s a better “game.” They continue to be relevant in different ways.

Wilds is not in the same position of World or Rise, NOR it’s in the same position of World at its release. It’s in a much WORSE spot overall, a place where it’s unlikely to ever recover. It will certainly improve, but it will never reach a point where it will become a “good” Monster Hunter. It will follow a similar trajectory of World, but I don’t think it will ever come close to the importance that World has gathered. Wilds is a breaking point.

Same for Civilization, but maybe even worse because Civ 6’s reception before 7 had been already lukewarm. It wasn’t simply divisive as in World’s case, Civ 6 wasn’t that good. And now Civ is way, WAY below even that point. I’ve now gone through some deep and detailed analysis, and it’s not a scenario you can recover from. As in Wilds case, things will massively improve, but for Civ 7 it’s not plausible to elevate the game back to a relevant position. The game’s completely broken.

None of this matters for me, outside of me being purely an external observer. The hype of Civ 7 drove me to Civ 5 (that I bought and never played many years ago), and the hype of Wilds drove me to Frontier, a dead game now brought back to life by the players who care. As my curiosity is pulled this way and that, I also dug deeper. It’s just something that is natural for me: I spend way, way more time gathering information about games than I do playing.

Back at the beginning, I thought it was enough for me, with Rise and then Frontier. Then Frontier and its internal different versions. But then I dug into my old save in MH3U. I still resent the controls on the New 2DS I have, so I decided to try how it feels on a emulator. At the same time, curiosity linked to Rise drove me, BEFORE EVEN STARTING ONE MISSION, to look if there were mods available that increased a bit the difficulty… I’m really not a great player, and despite everything I also don’t really spend many hours playing overall. Yet I love long, expansive games same as I love big, expansive books… while also being a very slow reader. I’m a very atypical player, I can spend hours tweaking options and mastering controls before even starting one mission. I usually probe the limits of the engine, to get a “feel” of what is or isn’t possible, before I am in the mindset of game progression. But because of this approach, I usually either play games at their hardest difficulty, or look for mods before even starting playing. I prefer difficulty ramping up from the very beginning, rather than a sharp curve at a later point.

I did not find anything worthwhile for Rise, sadly. But during that search I bumped into a couple World’s mods that diverted my attention to it. So we start from World.

– https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterworld/mods/1982
– https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterworld/mods/3473
– https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterworld/mods/6438
– https://www.nexusmods.com/monsterhunterworld/mods/1960

As it happens with the great majority of mods for all games, most of them are either cheats, power-ups of various kinds like increased drops, or just purely cosmetic changes. Stupid skins ported from other games and other hideous stuff like that that completely breaks the art style of the original game. More rarely you find mods that engage directly in game design and try to reinterpret it, rebalance, or increase the difficulty.

The first link is just a “loader” for mods. It doesn’t do anything on its own. Just unpack in main game directory and it’s done. The second claims to be a “performance booster” but it’s just a minuscule change to skip a memory check. It’s quite harmless, but there’s no reason not to have it. The third is the nice one that told me Rise wasn’t enough, and that I really wanted to try this. It simply applies, by default, the health scaling of a full hunting party of four, to solo play. That means that ALL monsters (I’ve verified this) both small and large, will have their default health multiplied by 2.6. They don’t do more damage, they simply have much larger health pools.

In other games you’d have to be careful making this type of changes because you can make the game unplayable. But here in the majority of cases it’s you versus monster, 1 on 1. Doubling or tripling health means simply a protracted fight. This not only works in MH if you enjoy the fight itself, but it can give more emphasis to other systems that would be otherwise skipped. For example in The Witcher 3 you can apply all sort of oils and poisons to the weapons, but in practice you can completely ignore the whole system since you can destroy everything with a bit of effort. In games where the fight is not simply execution, but also is layered with strategy and preparation, a longer fight is enough to push those layers back into relevance. Difficulty in games is often needed to make gameplay more expressive. Because gameplay is ruled by path of least resistance (and speed) that often make things very repetitive and boring. You make players dislike the game because the most efficient path is the one that requires no effort.

It can be fine in a linear game that you start and complete in a few hours. Lack of difficulty makes it accessible. Short term good, great sales. But it collapses over time, which is a problem for a MH type of game. Wilds got big, a week later most people I know are already bored and done with it. But MH isn’t a “game”, it’s an hobby. These days everyone is trying to gaslight you. First you’re told that games like Baldur’s Gate 3 can’t be the norm. That it was a thing only happening once due to unique circumstances. Now they are telling you that games need to be short. Six to twenty hours max. People don’t have time to play, they want snappy experiences. So that you progressively give them more money, while receiving less and less. And yet, those games that not only SELL, but also stay relevant and that you remember fondly are the Baldur’s Gate 3, the Elden Rings. And the Monster Hunters. All games that come up to the challenge, rather than bowing so low that they make no dent on the ground.

The fourth link is instead to a mod that completely deletes the “scout flies.” Basically removes all that green glow and sparks that litter the screen at all times. They are very invasive. I’ve seen there are different mods with different presets trying to only tone down the effect, but I think removing that system entirely is better. As in older MH, you’re supposed to learn where the gathering spots are, learn your way around the map. There are better ways to guide players, this system removes way too much gameplay that should be enhanced, rather than suppressed.

I’ve also spotted a mod that changes monsters’ AI to be more aggressive and deadly. But I think that’s something to experiment at the end of the game as an added challenge, rather something to start with. Those four mods listed above form for me a “package” that looks compelling enough to have pulled my attention away from Rise.

(an important info: due to the structure of MH, none of these mods invalidates saved games. And since all of them amount to “add more files”, if you find some problem or a mission is too challenging, you can simply exit the game, rename the folder, relaunch, and you’re back in vanilla)

But as I mentioned I was also looking into my MH3U saves, then try how it works on a emulator. But not a 3DS emulator… The thing specific about 3U is underwater combat, which makes the portable controls even more of a problem. 3U wasn’t just a 3DS game, it also came out on the Wii-U which, as mentioned last time, emulated through CEMU, has been spared from Nintendo. There should be no reason to play the 3DS version in emulation. But then I realized I was wrong… leading me down another rabbit hole.

The first big issue is that both 3DS and Wii-U versions of 3U have had their difficulty NERFED for… western players. This is nothing new, for example Dragon Quest series is well known to have the western releases playing completely different from original Japanese. Especially the first two games, if you play the standard English versions you really wonder what the deal is. They are nothing special. They are simple, straightforward games. So you conclude they are nothing special because they are old. Nope. They are nothing special because they have been neutered of all flavor. When a very simple game runs on a certain economy and tight game loop, BALANCE IS EVERYTHING. And when you nerf that difficulty to the ground, you obtain a different game. You are not playing Dragon Quest. Simply.

It’s then not surprising, as this was a general trend, that when putting together the version to sell to western players they decided to “adapt” it by nerfing the difficulty. But what’s curious about this specific case is that when I tried the game a few years ago I knew nothing about all this, and yet I was able to spot that something was WRONG. It’s the very first thing you notice in the game. You make a character, start the game, and you’re given by default a basic set of all weapons available, so that you pick what you want to use from the beginning, along with a standard armor set. If you check the stats you notice that each of the six armor pieces have “1” defense value. A total of 6. But when you check the character’s stats you see the cumulative defense value starts from 50. So you have 50 if you have nothing equipped, and 56 with full armor. It makes no sense to have such an high baseline because it greatly diminishes the impact that armor has. This is even more glaring as you start upgrading the armor set. After 10 hours I killed a Jaggi, got to craft the very first “custom” chest piece and it gave a total of +10 armor.

If this type of design seems weird, it is because it IS weird. In the original game you start with ZERO defense. Having +50 not only majorly shifts the balance, but stays relevant through at least HALF the game. It’s insane. So I read about players who actually, even in emulation, chose to play the 3DS version over Wii-U, because there were patches to fix some of these issues. Another being the infamous “charm bug.” There are some high level items that you can equip that are randomly dropped. These drops get randomly rolled on 17 different tables, determining the set you can potentially obtain. The “bug” that happens in 3DS and Wii-U both, is that the table you’re on is randomly determined at game start, and then permanently stuck. As far as I know you cannot even manually edit a save game. The problem is that some of these charms are much better than others, and some of these tables again offer much better sets. The only solutions you have are either doing some very tricky time-RNG manipulation, to pick one of the tables that is more convenient, or simply restart the game multiple times until you land on a table that isn’t crap. But this requires a couple of hours into the game, to analyze the loot table you get in order to also guess the actual table number, and start over if you got a bad one…

We got no fix to this table problem, on the Wii-U, but at least we got a fix for the defense buff. Which was a bit of an ordeal because this patch only works on a EU version of the game. It won’t work on US version. Not only, but it only works on the updated version. So I had to find my way through…

– https://github.com/damysteryman/FunKiiUNETThingy/releases
– https://github.com/VitaSmith/cdecrypt/releases/tag/v4.8
– https://github.com/chantox1/MH3U-RPX-Patcher/releases

(to be complete you also need to download some event DLC quests that you copy over directly the save files, but I won’t link to that)

The first is a program that apparently lets you download updates that would be otherwise unavailable normally. The program will ask you for a “titlekeys.json”, I’m not going to point to these type of things, but you should be able to easily find one by simply searching on the internet. Once you load that file with the database, you will be able to look for a title, and then download just its update files. But then I realized the update for 3U-EU came in the form of a bunch of sparse files in a different format. So I figured out I needed to decrypt them. The second link points to that, a program that converted the update into a format I could use with the patch. And then the third link is the same one above, with the patch itself. Follow the instructions on github page and the program will prompt you to press capital “Y” two times to apply the two patches. It will then be very easy to verify if this worked or not, since you can just load a saved game and see if base defense is either zero or 50. There are two patches because this also optionally solves the “Debloated Attack” issue, which is another MH standard. In order to make appear certain weapons powerful, the damage value shown in game is usually “bloated.” The silly part is that this is purely cosmetic. That damage number is a LIE. The reason behind this choice is to buff certain weapons in the perception of the players. The number tells the truth when you compare different weapons of the same type, because it’s just a fixed multiplication, whereas it will be wrong when you compare different weapon types, because they get applied different values in order to “compensate.” Just a way telling you developers are trying to pander, rather than respect the player.

But here we are, in Wii-U 3U:

My brain is now at ease. I feel like I restored or reintroduced some kind of natural order in the world. Things are fine once again.

I thought I was done, but I was not. This 3U ordeal wasn’t closed. If in both 4 > 4U case and XX > GU case the “U” version is the one to play, because these branded as “U”, or “G” in original japanese are just massive expansions that enhance the game, the story with 3 was different. Moving up from MH2, the third was going to be a leap to entirely new hardware. MH2 came out on PS2 first, and PSP in its popular “Freedom Unite” version. Whereas MH3 was first intended for PS3, then redirected to the Wii to cut some costs. But it was massive in scope and ambition, a major engine upgrade that had to be worked from scratch. A major new entry for the series that led to MH3 being one with the smallest roster of monster by far, only 18 large monsters, compared to the 58 in Freedom Unite (but FU was also the final complete version of that line). When 3U came out in the west in the form of Wii-U game, it wasn’t a port or upgrade of the Wii version, it was a straight port of the 3DS version. If Tri-Wii had its own native art assets, textures on the Wii-U were UPSCALED from 3DS. But not only there were these widespread visual differences, gameplay itself was SIGNIFICANTLY altered, in many cases downgraded or cut. Tri has a different progression, monsters hit harder, day/night cycles were completely cut, mission structure was simplified, and more.

But that’s not the whole deal. The real big problem with Tri is that its upper half of the progression, the so called “High Rank” (this is Tri without the “G”, so there’s no Master/G rank), is EXCLUSIVE to the multiplayer hub. As the servers shut down, everyone lost access to those missions, whether or not a real console or emulation.

This video explains really well the true nature of MH Tri.

The difference is that now all of that is preserved. Even in this case, as it happened with Frontier, we have a working emulated server that restores all that missing content. Here too you can ideally host it locally for proper single player, but setting that up is a lot trickier. But you can always just patch the game and use the community server. You aren’t forced to multiplayer, you can always pick up a mission in the hub and set it as “solo.” The emulated server just restores the content.

– https://github.com/sepalani/MH3SP-patcher

That’s a link to the patch and instructions. It should be mostly straightforward at this point (only connect to the first server type, or it will fail). Also consider that Tri, contrary to 3U, didn’t have the defense buff mentioned above, so no need to solve that part. Btw, you may want to disable the very strong bloom effect in Dolphin emulator. Right click on the game listed > Properties > Patches tab > bloom off

EDIT: I wasn’t done. I found out there’s an “Ultimate Monster Hunter Tri” patch… Basically adds some harder custom quests to simulate a G rank, with faster monsters, and a few new weapons to craft with new textures.
Since this requires a few steps, and getting a file from “Monster Hunter Tri” discord, this time I’ll try to host the final version here to save one step, but in case someone complains I’ll delete it. This is the long, standard way. There’s a video showcasing the patch, in its description you find a link to a download. On discord someone made an additional patch to copy over, here’s the original description the file itself is pinned on #modding channel of the already mentioned discord and already included in the archive I’m going to provide:

– Ultimate Monster Hunter Tri

Instructions: right click on the listed game within Dolphin emulator > Start with Riivolution patches > Open Riivolution XML > select “MH3SP.xml” (this is the first patch mentioned above that you download from github, wherever you unpacked it) > you’re now back to the same screen with “Patch Server” “Enabled”, without closing it, again > Open Riivolution XML > select “RMHE08.xml” that you find inside the Riivolution directory of the file you just downloaded and unpacked. Notice there are two files, one is RMHE08, the other is RMHP08. The first is for US version, the second for EU, but in case you select the second one, the patch described on discord isn’t active. There’s a more elaborate way to update the patch to work even on EU version, but in that case it’s better if you look directly on discord > after that file is selected you can see that there are now more options. I left one highlighted, “Mode” “Default”, because here you can select different modes, what these modes are is explained in a text file you find inside “\Riivolution\codes” but essentially the “Default” mode mostly just adds the custom quests, while the “G mode” adds the custom increased monster speeds and weapons. “Tiny” mode instead is same as G, but also adds speed boost to small monsters as well (I may be wrong about this). Before you launch this, rather than repeating the process EVERY TIME, you instead press “Save as Preset” so that you can then use a direct shortcut. Remember to remove bloom as described above, and also remember that if you want to change the G mode, you have to redo this process.

Verifying whether it worked or not should be easy, since you can check the new splash screen:

Is this the end of the road? I never looked closely into MH1 & 2, I usually just draw the line at Frontier Unite. And about FU I thought it was just what it was. Just the very last and very best incarnation of that series. But of course I was wrong :) First because much of what happened with Tri, happened with Dos. In the transition from PS2 to portable, lots of the game actually changed. Dos/PS2 had seasons, that were completely cut from the portable version. But as I said, I drew the line there. Yet the matter of FU also wasn’t quite complete.

I learned about the existence of… Freedom Unite Complete. Another community project to restore some lost content.

The quirk about this one is that the patch isn’t even applied to Freedom Unite, it’s applied to the Japanese 2G, that is then patched to become Freedom Unite Complete. The reason behind this, as you can read from FAQs on that site, is that the Japanese version not being multilanguage offered more memory space to work with. You can read also on the site a detailed changelog, but the bigger feature is that all this was meant to restore a number of exclusive events and missions.

Gotta Patch ‘Em All.

Thankfully I’m done here (I think?). I messed enough with GU years ago (at the time of World’s release). I don’t think there’s much to say on 4U, it’s on 3DS and I bought it along with 3U. Having opened all these options, now priority for me is to continue Frontier on its F5 snapshot, and play a bit of Tri to get a feel of what’s different in its progression. If I ever exhaust it, I already have the patched, unnerfed 3U Wii-U version. Knowing myself, I’ll probably postpone indefinitely both World and Rise.

A last thing, I think I like much better unfiltered textures. You could make a case about shadows, since they look better when smoothed, but overall the filtering never looks as good…

Remember that, as a working generalization, developers don’t care about what they do. Players do. You could say that without all of that there wouldn’t be anything for the community to take care and patch. But imagine if something like Monster Hunter was developed as an open source project. Imagine if source code was released after a number of years. We live in this shitty world so that we can imagine a better one.

P.S.
Oh no. Someone has mentioned Phantasy Star Online 2 (the original, not the bad, recent spin-off). Please, I don’t want to go down another giant rabbit hole.

I wanted to write an addendum to Monster Hunter endless post, but here we are instead.

I was commenting on bluesky how it seems increasingly strange that GOP itself doesn’t react to some of the most unhinged things going on. That they are unbelievably servile. But I don’t think it’s a valid point, and it can actually indicate how this whole way of interpretation is completely wrong.

So I’m offering the way I’m reading it all…

As it happened with Musk Nazi gesture, and as I wrote at that time, there was a main purpose that I guess now is also widely shared: it was meant to troll. But there’s also a second purpose, and it was to compact ranks internally. To regroup on their side. To send an internal signal, distribute an “official” interpretation. To “seed it” and see how it is received. Because by observing the reaction you would immediately know who’s a “traitor.” Who can potentially oppose your power later.

The overall strategy we’ve all seen for the past month+ is actually a very, very old strategy: a purge. There’s a change in the government, someone new takes control and proceeds to purge all positions of power in order to secure that power. In medieval times this would have been simply violent, we’ve seen it exemplified in Games of Thrones and similar. Musk’s “what did you do last week” letter, in his words wasn’t meant to scrutinize, but to simply disguise an attempt to check if the person on the other side was even active enough to read and answer a mail. To find some literal dead ends. But there was another hidden purpose, the same that applied to the internal letter at the time of twitter: to root out POTENTIAL internal dissent. Because you can be sure that there are people in the government that don’t like this thuggish way of doing things and so wouldn’t answer the mail on principle, because they don’t want to bow that low to that arrogance.

That’s precisely the intent: whoever DOESN’T ANSWER the mail is a potential traitor. That mail is a simple test. A deliberate provocation to observe the reaction. Carefully observing who’s out of the line.

It’s just a purge, and it keeps going until Musk completes his idea of “tabula rasa.” They are trying to establish a very, very hard “core” that they can trust. That will be faithful to the regime, no matter what. They are planning “hard times”, and so preparing in order to sustain what is going to happen.

Everything that happened, from that point onward, is to go deep the rabbit hole. Perform the most radical purge possible.

They aren’t fighting Democrats. As I said, it’s a two-pronged strategy, one one side they TAUNT AND TROLL the Democrats, garnering approval from their base, and from the other side they keep PURGING THEIR OWN SIDE. The main fight is internal. The main purge is within the GOP. They are looking for FUTURE traitors in order to neutralize them long before they even THINK of potentially being critical of how things are being run.

It’s all a test. They are carefully observing if someone dares complain, and then neutralize. That’s why it’s an unhinged escalation that keeps going on and on. It gets more absurd in order to progressively tighten the noose.

The GOP is being destroyed, because that’s precisely how they build the regime they want. We’ve seen this already. There’s nothing new about it.

Same old moldy playbook.

Part 2 – Part 3

Write down five monsters you hunted this week, or you’re fired.

I’ve hunted two Bulldrome, myself. What? Are you saying Bulldromes aren’t even in Monster Hunter Wilds? Are you crazy? Why would I play Wilds?!

Honestly, I checked and the most hours I logged in a save in a Monster Hunter belong to MH3U, on the (new) 2DS. Where I have a grand total of 10 hours. But I did kill a Jaggi. I’ve also started many times Freedom Unite, but only played a few hours cumulatively. An hour or so in MH4U. A couple hours in Generations Ultimate. I never touched Worldborne. But I did, too, felt the worldwide hype for the latest, Wilds, and that’s why it’s now the PERFECT TIME to start playing the previous: Monster Hunter Rise (+ Sunbreak).

That’s what wise hunters do. A Monster Hunter game doesn’t exist until it becomes “G”.

So I did install, for the very first time Rise, and spent a couple hours just messing with settings and options, testing a few of the interesting weapons, like the Insect Glaive, Charged Blade, and Switch Axe. They did a pretty good job with animations. The only aspect that is really BADLY DESIGNED is PC controls, because they are hardcoded… You can feel the legacy of handheld controls and then gamepad. You’d expect this one being one of those games built for those controls, and so unappealing and clunky with simple mouse + keyboard controls, but that’s actually false. It feels absolutely fine. Not only it is playable, but it’s at the same level of playing with the gamepad. But here comes the bad design part: it could easily play BETTER, much better with mouse and keyboard.

I’m not sure many games get this part right. The one I do remember is “Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.” Like the current Batman games, it’s all mostly based on counters, you see an incoming attack, press the counter button, and the character will engage in a elaborate animation to perform a perfect counter (as long you get timing right) by orienting and moving the character automatically. It means your actual position and facing is irrelevant, because the counter is always just a button. This again means you are free to rotate the camera around your character, no matter the actual facing, your counters will always work, and your attacks will always hit. You have a perfect auto-aiming turned on at all times. This sounds bad, but plays relatively well (if shallowly). But the part where mouse + keyboard excel here (since all I’ve just described applies uniformly to gamepad as well, you pan the camera with right stick as you would with a mouse) is that certain specific attacks do take the SCREEN CENTER as an active direction. For example there’s a very useful attack where you forcefully grab a nearby enemy, and then shove it away. The grabbing part you execute by pressing just a button, the character will grab a nearby enemy, no matter the orientation. But the SHOVING part can instead be directed, and it goes to the center of the screen, irrelevant of the character position. This means that during the grabbing animation, when facing is ignored, you can pan the camera, and then release the shove in the precise direction you want, for example a fire, tossing the enemy right into that fire.

This creates a sort of rhythm game where you alternate moments where you’re locked into elaborate animations with moments where you have very tight controls. It creates an empowering, liberating feel, because you do feel in control, while also have moments to think and plan the next move. Very few games feel this way. Another is Doom Eternal, where you are always precisely where you want, even amidst chaotic situations.

Monster Hunter Rise (on PC) could be easily in this category, if controls were well designed. I can even prove it, because the way they are designed and hardcoded is actually INCONSISTENT. Monster Hunter has always been a game more of strategy and preparation than action-reflex. In most cases you wield bulky, slow weapons. When you attack you are committed to the animation, that means you often start swinging your weapon only to realize the monster has already ran away. You can’t do much beside observing that elaborate animation taking place, and your weapon missing the target by a mile. Because from the moment you start an attack to the moment that attack actually hits, it’s like two whole seconds. The gameplay is about pattern prediction. You need to learn and anticipate the monsters’ moves. Because of this, and because camera controls were clunky on portables, attacks are always locked to the character facing. You can see your character from the side, and your attacks will continue to flow in the facing direction.

The part where it becomes inconsistent (and poorly designed) is that when you press “W”, to move the character forward, the character doesn’t actually move FORWARD. It instead moves toward the screen center. So if you hold down W while panning the camera, then the character starts running in a circle. Attacks are locked to the character facing, while movement commands are locked to the camera. I tried for a while, and there’s no custom setting to tweak this behavior. And no, I don’t want to replicate the “tank” controls like the early Resident Evil games, obviously. It’s not the movement part, following the camera, that needs to be tweaked. It’s the attacks part. The attacks should be AIMED BY THE SCREEN, rather than character facing.

You see, in Monster Hunter you cannot turn the character. You press forward, the character moves forward. You press left, the character runs left (doesn’t turn). If you press backwards the character doesn’t backpedal, it immediately faces backwards and runs that way. This means that, being attacks locked to the facing and the facing locked to movement direction, every time you try to AIM an attack, you also need to MOVE FIRST. This is a problem in this game, because you are often in melee, monsters can be quite large, and in so many cases they obscure the screen and move around a lot. You are constantly re-targeting. It’s quite clunky when you are pressed right against your target, but aiming the wrong way, so you have to further moonwalk toward the target to re-aim, and so attack in the correct direction. You can’t actually give the target a convenient minimal distance. You are constantly pushing AGAINST the collision box of the enemy model to be able to also aim…

It would play so much better (to the point of making the game feel better, and so significantly easier without touching any actual behavior), if you could simply aim attacks with the camera, rather than character facing. Imagine making the leap in the air with the Insect Glaive, execute the forward move, and as you’re locked into that animation, sweeping forward in the air, you have the time to pan the camera around and prepare the aim of the next attack. This doesn’t break any of the internal “rules”, you can do just the same with current controls, you just have to press W in between to reorient the character. It’s just more clunky. As another example, the Charged Blade has a shield mode, but it works poorly because again if you move backwards the character immediately FACES backwards. The game doesn’t know what “strafing” is, and it doesn’t know how to make a character walk backwards while facing ahead, as you’d do when wielding a shield. It’s a game still locked in the “tank” era of controls. And all this could even be proven without a single line of code. You could ideally write a script where for every attack input you precede it with the W key for a split second. So that all your attacks are aimed with the camera. It’s really that simple: attacks have to be aimed with the camera.

But nope, because of this you’ll always have your character’s face smushed against the monster’s model, always pushing into it so that you can properly aim AT it. Which is the actual opposite of what you’d do normally. Wielding a sword is all about keeping proper positioning and distance. You can’t swing anything if you are at kissing distance of your target. You aren’t sword-fighting, you are headbutting. In many cases I want to simply turn and attack, not move. But because of hardcoded controls you cannot simply aim and attack, because aiming is locked to movement, like a tank with its cannon locked forward. So you always have to move, to then also aim and attack. You won’t understand how big a problem this is until you try and feel how much better is the alternative…

(by the way, now I’ve heard that MH Wilds somewhat addressed the control problem I’ve just described… by COMPLETELY DESTROYING the delicate balance the game built up to now. Rather than improving things as I suggested, they decided to allow attacks to be aimed DURING ANIMATIONS. So that you can wield a Great Sword, aim, start the attack, and then TURN DURING THE ANIMATION. Essentially destroying the commitment to attack patterns and all the strategic depth of the game in the name of convenient, cheesy controls. Why should your warrior feel sluggish and heavy?! Make him faster! That’s what money does to things. Enjoy your “modern” Monster Hunter.)

All this wall of text isn’t why we’re here, though. It was just a glimpse into my two hours of testing Rise. Which by the way, due to its Switch origin, plays really well and light on PC. The perfect game to sink… Countless hours.

While looking into Monster Hunter things my attention was stolen by something else. Another little sidetrack here… The PAST week was instead absorbed by another derail, into Civilization games. Exactly like Monster Hunter, Civilization is another of those game series with a big history (a layered statement), with relatively small improvements from a version to the next. Like Monster Hunter, it’s a series where previous games don’t simply cease to exist. They somehow all STAY relevant, as long you aren’t a “gamer” only chasing the last trend. While there’s a substantial number of gamers who identify Monster Hunter solely with World (and Wilds now), if you ask the actual passionate MH player, they are all great. They are all memorable and still worth playing. What’s the BEST Monter Hunter? Well, it depends. It’s usually either 4U or GU. 4U being the “mainline” best. The classic at its top. GU being more “wonky”, a nostalgia collection, but also a giant game with an insane amount of content. But why would you skip 3U, it has some of the best monsters roster, and the only game to have underwater combat, which is now quite good to play when emulated with modern controls (on the completely forgotten Wii U, so forgotten that its emulator, CEMU, was spared from Nintendo’s 2024 deranged and destructive rampage). But these games being great (and each offering hours of content into the thousands) still doesn’t remove from the table early games like Freedom Unite, or even the original 2 and 1. All these games continue to stay relevant, despite being the same game. It’s quite an achievement.

Civilization games follow a similar pattern. If you ask, most people would say the BEST Civilization game is either the 4th, or 5th. The 7th just came out, but is victim of the same “streamline-simplification” plague that also hit Monster Hunter. They get honed and streamlined until all personality and flavor is rubbed off. Monster Hunter Wilds is so easy that when you win those big fights they all leave a bland, unsatisfying taste. The fights themselves are a lot of fun, but winning them feels shallow, unearned. You never really care, you are never really required to put effort in it. It’s all mislabeled Quality of Life, making your life so effortless it’s now bland and pointless. You are playing monster Hunter but you aren’t monster hunting.

(imagine, then, being lectured on this by me, having logged 10 hours in MH4U in total, can you feel the irony?)

(I’ll also leave it here, but BEFORE the Civilization sidetrack I was into another sidetrack, the meaningless, for you, acronym HOMM3 HOTA, just as another example of games that Just Won’t Die (this upcoming one also looks great, hopefully it’s not another miss). And btw, the similar King’s Bounty in its last decent version, Crossworlds, ALSO has an ongoing mod that is still being worked on…)

I was talking about Civilization, the 7th. It’s not terrible, but even some motivated design choices, that are made to improve the game, simply break patterns too much to be considered good solutions, for example the resets with the different ages. But somewhat the same applies to 6th. It has some improvements over 5th, and as it always happen the game only gets good with its expansions. But while 6th is not too bad, it never became solid all around. And it looks like with a lot poorer mod support, meaning that it doesn’t move very much from what it is in vanilla. Outside of those improvements over the 5th, Civ 6 is known to have a weak AI. It plays better on some specific things, but overall it’s flawed. So as a whole Civ 6 stays as a nice concept with some good ideas, but as a complete package it will continue to be considered well under Civ 5 level. Which is King. Not simply because it’s a solid game all around on its own (as long “on its own” means including expansions), but because it has a significant all-around improvement due to a custom mod, Vox Populi. Including significant improvements to AI, that was already at its best in the vanilla unmodded version… (btw, even if I have an history of experience with modded games, this patch defied me. I couldn’t install it correctly and had to waste a couple hours to figure out. You can see something is not right by loading a game and looking at the top bar, it looks wonky. The solution to all this is that you need not only to install the mod, but also load it WITHIN the game, every time. When in the mod menu you check the checkboxes corresponding to the required ones, the mod ISN’T loaded. You need to press the “next” button, then wait the mod to load, if you then exit that page at this stage, the mod gets UNLOADED AGAIN. What you do to play is to launch a custom game from within that menu. This is what you see AFTER the loading screen, after you manually loaded the mod. It looks like the ONLY option is “back”, and that’s what happens if you try pressing ESC. You go back to main menu, as you’d expect, but this UNLOADS the mod again. What instead you have to do is press “single player”, because that heading you see in that image is an actual button, and the only way to play a modded game is to launch directly from THAT UI a custom game. You cannot go back to the main menu to select something else…)

That was Civ 5, already considered the King in its vanilla version, whose position gets even more cemented by the mod. But as it happens with Monster Hunter games, the other Civs continue to be relevant. 1 & 2 because they have rather unique, straightforward gameplay that stays addicting. With AI that works fairly well because the game’s simpler. But there are players who are all about Civ III. There’s a good youtube channel all dedicated to it, and the whys. And then there’s Soren Johnson, aka Civ 4 (he’s the designer, who’s now working on Old World, which is a Civ-like game with a tiny bit of Crusader Kings sprinkled on top, not to be confused with Amazon’s New World). Civ 4 not only is a solid game on its own, but also came out directly with a deep mod support and so has a near infinite amount of content, that keeps going on even today. In my personal case, if Civ 5 with its already mentioned mod delivered the most complete and faithful package, Civ 4 instead provides the crazy “beyond.”

There’s one significant problem with Civ 4, though. It looks like no one has cracked the 32bit problem, meaning that Civ 4 has some severe memory issues when it comes to mods that push its limits. In this case I’m talking about Caveman-2-Cosmos (this is not a modding guide, but installing this can be tricky, if you look at the bottom of that page there’s a link to the SVN beta option that explains things well enough, you can skip setting up Git and simply download the repository and launch it from there, but it means you have to manually delete everything a redownload whenever you want to update). These are mods that have been going on for 15 years… And they can still feel quite rough because the scope is ridiculous. As the name implies it goes from ancient tribes living in caves, to the far future. If a standard Civ game usually takes around 10-12 hours, here we’re talking about games that can last 20k turns. Someone in the forums who completed the whole tech tree, in a compressed 3k turn-game, had the thing going on for almost exactly 800 hours. If the standard game has 92 different tech to unlock (including expansions), C2C mod has somewhere over 940 of them… But as already mentioned, there’s a memory problem, meaning that in the advanced stages of the game you start going out of memory and crashing. From what I read in the forums it seems like a solution could be progressively removing some unit models, as you progress through the ages and them stopping being relevant, in the hope of freeing enough memory to continue playing.

In case you instead wanted a more standard and polished experience, but still as an extensive, elaborate mod, there’s always “Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization”, which has even an official wiki page, since it was part of the expansion. But of course that one mod has gone through countless iterations, and mods of mods, until the recent one (which is still one of many, but probably the most prominent): Dawn of Civilization

Do you think I stopped there? Nope. That youtube channel I already mentioned about Civ III also had a video about Civ 2, and so I wanted to try that. The video shows graphics and UI that didn’t look like the Civ 2 I remembered, because, it turns out, they come from a newer version that is called Test in Time. Now qualifying as abandonware, so you can freely download, for example from here. Problem is, if you scroll to the bottom of the page, there’s a RIP 89Mb version and a 1.1 patch. Don’t even try downloading the patch, it won’t run and will stay loaded in memory. This took a whole lot of time for me to figure out, but a simple solution is to get a different patch, from here. This one will work, but beware that it will likely end up pasting the files in the wrong directory, so just go manually copy them back into the main directory. Why do you want 1.1 version? Because the community patch only works on top of that one. And just in case you want to mess some more with this, there’s also another patch to turn on music again. And oh, here’s the manual. Now you can play Civ 2 :)

(now consider being lectured on Civilization games, again by me, having some 20 hours played across all titles, can you see the pattern? I can bullshit my way through anything)

But wasn’t all this supposed to be about Monster Hunter? Why does it take 3k words to even arrive at the BEGINNING? Because it’s a pattern. I was looking at all these different things, then got caught in the Monster Hunter craze, installed Rise+Sunbreak, tinkered with it for a while, to end up complaining about controls, then started watching a number of videos on youtube… and finding out my MH knowledge was incomplete. I missed Monster Hunter… Frontier. The game in the series with the reputation as… the HARDEST by far. That’s how you magnetize my attention. I can’t pull away anymore. And so I had to dig… and the digging required two full days to gather the knowledge.

Here we are. What the hell is Monster Hunter Frontier? Why should you even care about it? Why should you play it? Rather, how do you play it?

Well, at the very least it’s free. Maybe in that gray legal area. It’s not quite abandonware like Civ 2, but has been literally abandoned. Monster Hunter Frontier was an MMO that shut down in 2019, exclusively online, aggressively PAY 2 WIN. But it was also a GIANT game that went on for over 10 years of updates. It packs at the same time the very best and the worst of the franchise. And now it’s all in the hands of modders. You can play it fully offline in single-player, even if doing that is quite tricky, so you can settle instead to play on private servers that are fully non-profit (well, some of them). As far as I understand, it’s a “fake” multiplayer game in the sense that all gameplay is run locally, so outside accessing some dialogues and menus you won’t feel any lag, and all monsters will behave as they should. The server code is only there as a database, not to run the actual gameplay. Meaning that it’s much simpler to “emulate” and run.

More specifically, Monster Hunter Frontier runs on a fairly ancient engine that is basically the same of Freedom Unite. Slightly enhanced and running natively on PC, but it really does play and feel like that game. In perfect MMO tradition, it completely collapsed toward its later eras. It packed so much content that it would have taken lifetimes for new players to reach the endgame, and so, again following the tradition of awful design choices, it started to “compress” the early game, “mudflating”, aka pushing out of relevancy the greater majority of its expansive content. To then get locked in the most insane power creep ever. The perfect plan to kill a game, and kill it they did.

The game’s demise is our success, though, because now you can download and play it, even with its “early stage” restored. From the infos I gathered the game had three/four general phases. The first lasted the majority of the time, and it’s the standard experience. Then they added the “G” tier, and finally the Zenith tier that marks the ending. Between G9.1 and G10 updates there was a MASSIVE compression of the overall structure. In the first phase this game went from High Rank 1, all the way to High Rank 999. That’s a thousand levels to go through. But not only that, I think somewhere around HR500 it split into two different paths (SR, aka Skill Rank, a leveling system that is instead weapon-dependent, used to unlock alternate styles and SR skills). Then G rank was stacked on top, also going from 1 to 999 (also having its own dual Skill Rank path, as “GSR”), but I think at G200 it then merged with the Zenith content. But with the G10 update (not rank, the content patch) all those early HR 999 levels got compressed down to… six. HR1-30 became HR1-2, HR31-99 became HR3-4, HR100-500 to HR5 (with a significant difficulty spike happening at this point) the final HR501-999 becoming HR6. From there you are already in the G tier. But as I said there were different phases, because around G5 update the game gave players a number of freebies that messed up the balance and progression, so even without altering the structure the compression took place by simply offering content skip in the form of overpowered equipment given for free.

There are a total of 181 monsters in Frontier, which is a huge amount compared to the other games. But as you can expect, the latest ZZ update speeds so much the older content that the majority of it becomes simply irrelevant. You bypass it in the matter of few hours. Thanks to the community all that content is preserved, because you can play right now two different “snapshots” of the game. The latest version available, with its rush to endgame, but also the “Forward 5” aka F5, the last update before G rank was patched in, preserving the game exactly as it was in its biggest phase, with its 999 High Ranks to go through with their original balance. What’s currently missing is only an in-between faithful “G” phase, because as already mentioned through the life of G rank the progression was also butchered and most things were designed with a different mindset.

Consider that from what I’ve seen this is a minuscule community. Being tiny means there’s no money involved, and with no money involved it means people are there just because they care. They are helpful and working together. Playing all this is relatively easy, especially if you stick to the modern ZZ snaphsot: you download the client, optionally copy over a couple of additional translation files, launch it by giving it a username and password, and you are in. No e-mails or other registration needed, no other patching process, you download the client and play. The only downside is that usually download links are given within discord groups, so you need to go there at least.

I’m not going to give direct discord links because they have an habit of becoming invalid quickly, and I like to avoid keeping broken links here. But looking for them shouldn’t be hard:
– PewPewDojo, this is where the bigger community is, and when you find links to play the latest Zenith version.
– Forward.Fivers, this is instead the server for the F5 snaphot, to play the preserved HR1-999 structure.
– Erupe github, this is the github repository of the server emulator, in case you wanted to try hosting it locally for single-player, it requires setting up a database and it can be tricky to do all of it on your own, especially if you want to set-up something other than Zenith.

And here are some of my own FAQs, since it took me a long time to figure things out:

– The game’s locked to 30 fps, no one figured out a way to hack it up to this point.

– The client you download from PewPewDojo is complete at just 5Gb. An english translation is already included, but there are a couple more patches you can add, within #mhfz-info-updates scroll back there’s a “Tore_Dialogues.7z” from November 2023 and “Diva_Full_Main_Story.7z” from May 2023, the client itself “MHFCT4.1.7z” has been the same since April 2023. This is likely to change with time, as some progress gets made in adding translations and newer server releases. It’s all playable if you have some basic understanding of Monster Hunter. All items and stats are in english, NPC dialogues are usually in Japanese.

– When you run the launcher you can type what username and password you want to use, there’s no other registration. But you have to select a server. Most people stick to the “Rain” servers, if you want to experience the multiplayer aspect that’s the better option, but for some better balance it is advised to use “Renewal (US)”. Your actual location is not important, as gameplay happens locally. Latency is not an issue here.

– This is the old engine, the camera controls can be mapped to the mouse (or the second stick on gamepad), but you’re stuck with only the “horizontal” axis. You can map keys or buttons to lift/lower the angle of the camera, but it’s the old, clunky way. And camera mouse movement still has the old school inertia. It’s surely playable but not great. Remapping controls is a bit of an hellscape, you’re better off using a gamepad.

– As already mentioned, the main ZZ/Rain servers have a rather messed up progression with a rush to endgame content. But there’s also an expansive, step by step guide to follow here.

– On the other hand, the F5 client you get from Forward.Fivers discord is even more ancient and lacking some more options. I had a huge problem because using two monitors I couldn’t find a way to lock the mouse pointer to the game window. Meaning I can’t move the camera without the pointer going to the other monitor. I tried for hours looking for all sort of potential solutions and hacks. There’s one option available through “key setting” > type > “padless type”. This indeed locks the mouse pointer, so it’s good. But for some absurd reason if you pick this control type you CAN’T redefine keys. So for example I had default gunlance behavior that wanted me to press “9” to be able to shoot. With WASD + mouse controls that means moving the hand away, it’s really bad. I was forced to use a gamepad, that in my case is an old 360 pad with one shoulder button broken. I had to remap some buttons there, especially so that the right stick only commands the horizontal axis of the camera, while regulating the height through different buttons. Even in this case you STILL need to tinker with the options, because the default one also doesn’t let you to rebind keys. By the way… Monster Hunter often uses combination of keys, like press Y+B. HOW THE HELL I REMAP THIS? The UI only picks one button. If you, like me, spend an hour trying to also simply cancel a control, consider that you can right click on the option. You can then clear or initialize that field.

– Other than all this, playing on F5 is a bit rougher, and things slightly less translated. At some point I got stuck. I logged in, and an NPC automatically triggered a mission and moved me into the mission area. I couldn’t abort that mission, nor I could exit the area. All text was in Japanese. Turns out I simply needed to take one object from a box and put it in another, but through this ordeal I found something new that revolutionizes the accessibility of this whole thing… While in game you can press Win key + SHIFT + S, these are default Windows shortcuts unrelated to the game. This triggers a selection screen where you can grab a screen area, like an untranslated text box. It gets automatically copied to the clipboard memory. If you then have a second monitor with Chrome and google translate page, switch to “images”, there’s an handy button paste from clipboard, you press it and you get immediately your translation delivered! Since it’s so fast and convenient I started to use it even for all that untranslated flavor dialogue in the game. So there’s no need to worry even if not fully in english :)

That’s about it. The Forward.Fiver option requires you to download a separate client, then a separate launcher to copy over, and the latest translation files. BUT it also requires you to edit the “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts” file to add a few fields there so that the launcher redirects to the community server. It’s not a big deal but some people dislike messing with system files. Right now there’s no other option if you want to play this version.

My whole experience amounts to logging in to the ZZ/Rain version, struggling with controls and options for a while, and getting very confused about where the “beginning” of the game supposedly is. I logged off without even starting a single mission, then set up the Forward.Fiver version. In this case it’s much closer to standard Monster Hunter. There are several introductory quests. The first one I decided to do asked me “Deliver 6 unique mushrooms”. The second one I picked was “Slay 8 Bullfango”. And the third “Hunt a Bulldrome”. And I got my ass kicked multiple times… The gunlance is extremely slow and the Bulldrome keeps charging unrelentingly. All the while there are other Bullfangos that charge at the same time in different directions, so it was downright impossible to find a proper attack window. I tried a few times, failed all of them, ended up picking up a long sword that is a lot more agile. Even here I had some troubles but eventually succeeded. By the time I completed this third mission I was already HR4 and with tons of money and bonus points. In fact I believe this is fairly unbalanced because by default you have active a few “bonuses-rewards” in the form of “courses” that as far as I understand were dependent on some pay2win component. Basically subscriptions you had to pay for, like premium passes of current online games. Right now going “status” > “personal”, there’s a box saying I have “Hunter Life Course”, “EX Course”, “Premium Course” and “Certified NetCafe” all apparently active. You can actually MANUALLY toggle these on and off, for example typing in chat “!course premium”. Just in case you want more, unadulterated grind :)

Consider that the F5, even with the bonus of those courses, preserves the original grind that not only builds much of the Monster Hunter games, but that here is enhanced by the “MMO” nature and the game going on for multiple years. It means that as you progress things will require tons of materials. It’s both hard AND grindy. On the other hand, the more popular ZZ is a lot more messed up in balance, but speedruns you right to the endgame. This is where everyone will say this stops being a “monster hunter game” and becomes something else, because the formula is completely different. Endgame in ZZ amounts to what is called “Hunter’s Road”. It’s a separate mode that basically works as a boss rush. You won’t go out anymore exploring between different maps and collecting resources. Rather, you just fight monsters in arenas, collect points, and buy EVERYTHING from a separate shop. That’s all it is. For some people it is cool, as it goes to absurd levels of gameplay, but it’s definitely not Monster Hunter. In theory the content is still there. You can still pick up missions in the traditional way. But the rewards and progress you obtain from that path are nothing compared to “Hunter’s Road.” As it happens in so many badly designed MMOs, even if all that content isn’t deleted it’s still useless in practice.

Of course investing tons of hours playing on a community server could mean losing that progress at any time. Who knows if the server will be still available tomorrow. But the hosters are friendly and I think you can ask for your save files.

IN THEORY it’s even possible to port a F5 save to the latest ZZ, though as far as I know this requires some manual editing. I’ve seen some ideas about doing “progression servers” that update progressively with patches to follow the original flow of the game, but I don’t think there’s a significant necessity of it. If you want to experience the original game, then there’s F5. If you then want to move on ZZ you can as well start from zero, since it will take just a few hours to get to a similar point. It’s like the project that tried to merge Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 + expansions all in one seamless game. It does work, overall, but, as you’re fighting limitations, it’s probably more straightforward to move from one game to the other as separate set-ups. It doesn’t really matter.

There’s always the option for hosting it locally and only depend on yourself. As I already said, the sever will just sit in the background and take next to no resources. All this is so ancient in technology that should easily run on a weak laptop.

Entirely unrelated to the topic of Frontier, but this page has links to neat standalone programs, one for each Monster Hunter (but apparently skipping World, and Frontier of course), where you can browse offline/outside the game the whole content. All the data in each game, monsters, quests, items, everything.

Follows here a number of sparse quotes that I’ve snagged from various places. I could edit this part later to add more to it.

I prefer the experience up to G9.1 before the compression kicked in, so all of the players by that time liked to play the game for what it was, that endless grind and all, after Z expansion it all went down and that’s the experience most of the community had by now… But for those willing to have the experience how it used to be, the server code now have some retro compatibility to run them, I highly recommend playing it without any of those broken courses.

i just think g9 is not worth it cause the only thing it has going for it is “basically all g rank content without compression”
but it still suffers from all the bad things cog did to GR in late MHFG
so you might as well play ZZ

is there any difference in the hunts (meaning HR1-999) between F.5 and G9.1? one would think they are the same considering that G version is prior to the Great Squishing
hr100 (hr5), hardcore, and supreme monsters got nerfed sometime in g
g9 has all the content from g-rank (minus swaxe and guanzorm) but
it also has all the powercreep that came with tenrou, origin gear, and so on
to me that’s a dealbreaker

g5 is the last version in mhfg’s “golden age” (g3-g5) and has a decently balanced game, while having a great amount of g-rank content already

ya we’re the only public f5 server that’s actually alive
renewal has a beta g9 server
but that’s it

I do remember when I tried F.5 there, that the amount of items required was beyond insane lol
it’s going to be like this in every version before project R (so g10)
and even post project R, you’ll be hit by the true scope of the grind the moment you enter G-rank

It was an online only MMO and has now been shut down after 12 years. It was in my opinion easily the best MH game thanks to the awesome exclusive monsters, faster and more aggressive combat and tons of other smaller things. It’s sad that it was never localized so not many people outside of Japan and Taiwan played it.

It was classic a MH game with the added twist of combat being more evasion based which led to monsters being very aggressive and punishing. Hunters were limited to enhanced versions of the old Gen 2 weapon movesets for most of the game and the main difference was that weapons got a few new mechanics and some kind of attack and parry/counter with iframes in it to allow you to keep attacking while dodging to keep up with the monsters.

The game was very challenging and fun but sometimes excessively grindy thanks to being an MMO and around G9-10 the MMO problems of massive powercreep making old content pointless and content compression started showing up.

By the end the game was horribly compressed and a balancing mess thanks to massive nerfs to monster stats and the Extreme weapon style (which gave weapons several new powerful attacks and the ability to run unsheathed) being unlocked right away at G rank instead of the intended G200 where you unlock Zenith monsters which are what Extreme style was designed to fight. This in addition to rank compression making all of low and high rank into a total of maybe 20 quests and the ridiculous freebie gear made it so you were rushed to endgame in less than a day and never properly experienced 90% of content. Amazing game but it had a lot of questionable progression and balance changes later on.

What an ordeal writing all this. I thought it was going to be a short and quick recap.
Since it became a grab bag of so many different sidetracks, I’ll add another. While doing all this I also wrote down a list of TV shows that I’ll have to watch.

Here it is:
manifest – succession – white lotus – yellowjacket – from – severance – silo – disclaimer

What would they have in common to belong to the same list? Why now? Well, I’d need another 5k words to explain and this is not the time…

Maybe now I can play something rather than writing about it? Nope, I have to go back to writing ore processing recipes for GregTech… Sigh.

I wrote this on a forum about a year ago. It was a discussion on GRRM (Martin, the writer, for those who might not know) and specifically a gloomy post he wrote at that time that people interpreted as a sign of him becoming senile and nostalgic. It’s important to read for context. Especially now.

—
It would be quite nice if all of you were right and it was just another case of “old man yell at clouds.” His perception changing due to him getting older rather than an actual change simply described.

Or maybe he’s wrong and just old and pessimistic, and you are all right. For sure we’ll see this type of ending in the real world sooner than Winds of Winter. It will just happen to happen to you rather than to a character in a fantasy book.

—
I add this bit of Zweig straight from wikipedia, for more context:
Zweig begins by stating a law: no witness to significant changes can recognize them at their beginnings. Even after his failed coup, Hitler was merely one agitator among many in this period shaken by coup attempts, and his name quickly faded into insignificance. However, organized gangs of young men in Nazi insignia were starting to cause trouble. It was unthinkable when Germany imagined that a man as uneducated as Hitler could come to power.

(obviously “Hitler” here isn’t Trump, who’s merely a complacent puppet, but Musk)

On the other side of this duality of blogs I wrote a review of Ruocchio’s first book and mentioned in there that I had started casually watching the “booktuber” island of content. So I eventually bumped into Daniel Greene. His videos looked more like artsy style than depth, but I appreciated a recent review he posted about Ken Liu’s series, it satisfied a lot of the curiosity I had. That first book was part of a big lists of books I planned to get next and the result of having my curiosity quenched was that I decided not to order it. Not because the review was mildly negative, or because I decided not to read it, but with that initial curiosity gone I just don’t feel a priority about it. Sometimes things go in weird way (the order ended up being, Robin Hobb’s third in the first trilogy, Empire in Black and Gold by Tchaikovsky and… Duncton Wood. Plus other non-fantasy stuff. In the list I still have Ken Liu, The Mists of Avalon, The Sword of Kaigen, The Tainted Cup, The Justice of Kings, A Memory Called Empire, The Failures, The Emperor’s Blade… as you can see a few more of youtube-induced curiosity.)

But the topic here is the drama that popped up recently. Literally popped up because it started for me with a video randomly shown (and now gone, apparently). Titled: “I Received a CEASE AND DESIST from Daniel Greene”

I watched that video without knowing about anything else and I had a similar reaction to most of everyone else, I suppose. It was a strongly emotional video and quite damning of Daniel Greene. After that, my feed got populated by other youtubers sharing that general area of interest, showing support to this Naomi King. One of which especially got my attention (also gone now), from this other guy. It got my attention and now I regret of not having downloaded a copy. I know how these things go and I suspected it could have gotten deleted, eventually, but what do I care? The video was simply very good. It was again very emotional and honestly heartfelt, but didn’t stop there. It commented the situation with such a strength and clarity that I thought it sent a very powerful message, that superseded the specific drama. That was important outside of its specific moment.

And now it’s all gone. Everything is gone. All these youtubers are withdrawing their previous emotional reactions and support for the abused side, and now apologizing to the other.

I get it. And I do feel somewhat the same. There is a certain uniformity to these “community” reactions where (for once) I’m no exception. I feel and behave like everyone else. But I do think these erasures of previous comments do not really help, the community as a whole, to move forward and LEARN. The point is that YOU CANNOT (we cannot) level accusations to someone only, a few days later, withdraw everything and apologize. EVERY SINGLE TIME (every time this happens, I’m not implying accusations are usually proven false.)

It’s obviously perfectly fine to correct your stance on some event, while more information is disclosed. This is the basis of everything. But we have to learn to suspend judgment. I know there are implications. I don’t know Daniel nor Naomi, I only watched a few videos. But for some people it’s a big deal, because maybe they joined their discord, are more involved in a community. Those people have to decide whether to continue to support someone who, they find out, is not someone that aligns with their views. So you also HAVE to make a choice.

But the main topic here is not the drama, but the way I (we) react from the very beginning. Naomi’s first video didn’t leave much space for doubt. Daniel’s first response (still up, but may be gone soon), if anything, confirms the negative judgment on him. Now everything turned around. Are we all just wind vanes who turn today in this direction and tomorrow in another? Are we all just slaves to whims?

This is why I think history is important. Why these videos that are published only to get deleted two days later only contribute to these mistakes happening again, rather than learn from them. We need to ANTICIPATE these paths rather than continuously get surprised by them. Pretending ourselves naive and innocent. That’s why I think the video mentioned above by Jackson Dickert CONTINUES to be an important video. Because Daniel is just another guy, and Naomi another woman, and these things will continue to happen, and as a community (in the broader term, not related to booktube here, but as a whole society) we should learn to anticipate the outcomes.

I usually suspend judgement, and I have, innately, a much more indecisive nature. I always have a perception of things being way more complex and, on the internet, involving people that I don’t personally know, I just arrive at the absolute conclusion that I simply don’t have ways to know things well enough to be able to judge them. There is no way, for me, to be sure about anything about the private life of whoever else (like an agnostic stance applied to worldly events). My opinion is IRRELEVANT. But, as already said, sometimes you don’t have the luxury of indecision, sometimes you have to make choices. For me, the empathy I felt watching Naomi’s video still RINGS TRUE. This doesn’t mean that empathy turns into hate toward Daniel, or that I still defend the merit of Naomi’s position. I just think that we all are too fast to cling to certain positions, only to then being too fast again forsaking them and apologize. I see that as way too cowardly, because it’s innately dishonest.

As I said, if you want to judge other people, then you have to anticipate the outcomes. You need to have doubts. So you want to “doubt” women when they gather the strength to publicly denounce some abuse? Of course not, but then it’s a contradiction. For me, when these twists happen, it’s important to double down on the initial reaction. To UNDERSTAND why it was legitimate. Not because I prefer to persist in the error rather than be exposed to hypocrisy (it would be deciding between two faulty positions), but because reactions have reasons. It is always more important to understand, than to judge.

That’s why deleting all those initial responses isn’t helping. Those reactions are ALL legitimate. Rather than simply apologize and move on, we should instead stay, for once. Not to understand what truly happened with Naomi and Daniel, but to understand how this society is shaped and reacts. It’s important to not just transform it in another field of battle between two factions. It’s important that empathy doesn’t get simply stopped by doubt, or then reversed by more information.

OWN those reactions, even in the light of new information coming up. You can’t constantly erase the past. Every truth stays truthful. Those initial reactions to Naomi’s video stay TRUE. You can’t simply pivot from “Daniel is a monster” to “Oh, sorry, Naomi is the monster.” It’s not a binary war, and truth is never binary either. Things move contextually. Truths are never falsified, in the real world, they are only revealed partial, as more light is cast.

Stand your ground.

[The lives of others come together in fragments. A light shining off a separate story can illuminate what had remained dark. Brains are miraculous; humans storytelling creatures. The shards draw themselves together and make something whole.]

Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff

P.S.
Some context: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1iqs8lv/naomi_kingdaniel_greene_megathread/
Oh, and now I watched Dickert’s second video and he has an on-screen transcript of the previous. So that part is not completely gone, even if I think the video itself was more powerful. “The way I worded this was flat out terrible.” Nah, it was good. May have been imprecise about details, but the message was legitimate and important.
A look at the comments under this video also tells a lot about the “climate” around these things.

Because why not, this video is related. From gossip drama to science, it all comes down to basic epistemology.

I’ve always had a problem with satire. For a mind like mine, made of fundamentals and principles, satire was ever too blurry, hard to pinpoint.

If something like body shaming is universally wrong, why it is generally widely accepted as satire? Even historically, but also in modern times? Maybe you do remember all the controversies about Charlie Hebdo. Where is the line drawn?

There are certain groups of people that are sensible to certain topics. In general you make sure to avoid bringing them up, with a specific audience. But in the case of the internet a message doesn’t simply reach its intended target, it has the potential to reach everyone. So does this mean we avoid everything that can potentially offend someone out there, since everyone is potentially present? Of course not, it’s not even practical.

Something similar happens with “pronouns.” It’s absolutely okay to misgender someone by mistake. But if you then get corrected and refuse to acknowledge it, then you immediately are at fault. This becomes an attack, a deliberate offense that needs a strong response. Not so many people agree here. For some, the content of something said can already be at fault, universally wrong and to be condemned. But for me instead the distinct dividing line is on intent. Intentional, deliberate offense or not.

But intent does not solve satire, where the intent is often to explicitly INSULT. And yet we say it’s fine.

Well, all this until I figured out what satire actually is. It’s now a solved problem.

The way I understand it now, is that satire is not a problem of content. Whether what is being said is allowed or not. Because again, if that was the case you’d end up with too much ambiguity. Ambiguity that instead goes completely away when you realize what satire TRULY is: a contextual message.

That’s why body shaming, that would be unambiguously wrong as content, becomes totally accepted in the context of satire (not fully, it still retains moral implications, but lets say it stays lawful). This because satire doesn’t define a content, but a context. The relationship between who says something, and who’s the target.

Satire defines a message that ALWAYS has a “bottom up” trajectory. This is the line of distinction. It always origins from someone (or a group of people) who are vulnerable, toward someone who holds the power. That’s why, as a society, we accept it. Because it is a category outside judgement, regulated as a form of universal balance: even if a person is attacked, mocked, insulted… maybe even hurt, it will always be someone in a position of greater power. If money defines not happiness but a multiplication of possibilities (if you get ill you can die even if you’re rich, but being rich multiplies your chances of survival), then the satirical power is a power of destabilization for more stability. And if positions get reversed, then even application of rules get reversed.

A thing REVERSIBLE in application, but UNMOVABLE in its principle. It’s specifically one of those absolute “weak makes right” rules.

This is also why a member of the parliament cannot mock and insult another member of the parliament. For satire to apply you need a contextual imbalance of power, it doesn’t work between equals.

That’s why powerful men hate satire, it’s something they cannot control because it is defined outside their reach. Unless relying on active censorship.