By Wes Fenlon

Copyright pcgamer

I don’t want to say it’d be impossible for Capcom to screw up “Monster Hunter, but Pokémon,” because in the decades since Pokémon’s debut on the Game Boy we’ve never really seen an imitator come close to its level of success. Still, combining one of Japan’s other best-selling game series of all time with the hook of catching monsters instead of killing them and you’ve got what folks in the biz call a sure thing. With Monster Hunter Stories 3, Capcom finally seems to be giving its RPG spin-off the scope and budget it deserves to really pop off.

This light turn-based RPG series, which casts you as a young monstie rider instead of a monster hunter, didn’t come to PC until last year, even though it debuted on the Nintendo 3DS in 2016. There was potential even then, but the YA story and rock-paper-scissors battle system seemed guided by the mistaken impression that the audience for Pokémon-likes is still first and foremost kids, and not the thirty/fortysomethings who grew up with them.

In the 45 minutes of Monster Hunter Stories 3 that I played last week at TGS, it tried to distinguish itself from the jump. The art style now resembles Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild rather than an after school anime, your adult protagonist is already an experienced rider rather than a tween in training, and the combat is more like playing rock-paper-scissors with a cyborg hand: the basic triangle’s still there, but now you’re constantly morphing your fist into garden shears or a boulder to land precisely the right attack.

The Stories 3 demo served as both a tutorial for me and one of the RPG party’s companions, a young rider learning the ropes of adventuring. While the tutorial was guided enough to keep my options pretty straightforward, I was surprised by how many things it gave me to keep track of by the time I arrived at a boss fight:

Determining what kind of attack a monster’s going to make (power, speed or technique) and outplaying itSwapping out your own partnered monster for one with an advantageous attack type or special abilitySwapping between weapons like the bow, hammer, greatsword, and more to deal piercing/slashing/bludgeoning damage, which different monster body parts are weak toSetting up combo attacks with your monster companion by using the same attack type at onceSetting up team combo attacks by staggering a monsterBuilding up a kinship gauge with your monster so you can jump on its back and deliver another, more powerful type of attackLearning how monsters change their patterns when enragedLearning how monsters change their patterns and counter-attack when buffed by a sort of crystalline infection, which ties into the plot

I didn’t even get to touch the bigger picture game systems like monster capturing and breeding, and already I found myself sitting there in battle scrutinizing all my options for the best move each turn. That’s very much in line with the developer’s intentions, according to an interview with Japanese publication 4Gamer; the new combat systems are there to reduce the monotony of fighting monsters once you learn their basic attack patterns. It feels like the possibility space of how to handle each battle will really explode once I get to start freely exploring the world and tracking down monsters to assemble my own team.

How freeform that experience will be is hard to judge right now. The demo was as linear as they come, with a mountain pass funneling me from one tutorial fight to another and one tutorial field “puzzle” to another, like picking the right monster to ride to fly over a gap or climb up a sheer cliff face. But some of the footage Capcom’s shown off looks far more open-ended, with big zones to explore from the back of a flying Rathalos.

While Stories 3 still looks a bit like the younger sibling of Monster Hunter proper, that gap sure seems to be narrowing. Wilds has disappointed longtime players by removing too much of the friction that gave the older games in the series character, while introducing new season/weather systems that ultimately added very little to the experience. By contrast, Stories 3 is giving you more weapons to choose from in battle than its predecessors, making monster behavior more varied, and expanding on what you can do while riding around in the overworld, with more interactivity between monsters and the environment.

I don’t know how that stuff will sustain over the runtime of a full RPG, or if the story will be such a breezy, tropey affair that it sucks out any motivation to see it through; storytelling has never exactly been Monster Hunter’s strong suit. But my gut feeling is that this could be the kind of breakout hit for the Stories games that Monster Hunter: World was for the main games. Not to the same extent—World is Capcom’s best-selling game ever—but it seems primed to bust out of the narrower audience of young players who like Monster Hunter and JRPGs to take a bite out of the much bigger target of Pokémon likers.

Monster Hunter Stories 3 is likely too earnest to match the absurd meme-driven sales of Palworld, but part of that game’s phenomenal success was the simple truth that people really like survival games, and want to play one featuring Legally Distinct Mons. Pokémon’s far and away the most popular Japanese RPG series of all time, yet with every passing year its biggest fans are becoming more and more fed up with how ugly each new game is. If they’re looking for a jumping off point, Stories 3 seems like it’s going to be ready to offer them a ride.