July 4, 2021, – 100 days to offload countdown #83

I spent over 8 hours in the free demo of Capcoms upcoming Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin. I have done almost everything there is to do – I don’t think I’ve visted every monster den, and I still need to defeat 3 monsters in at most 5 turns in the second trial-quest, my best is 6 so far. I need a bit of luck in addition to perfect execution. I have five days until the game arrives – hopefully – I will get to five before then.

The game makes a distinction between monsters you fight, and monsties you hatch, grow and fight alongside against monsters. Monsties have special abilities like jumping, swimming, climbing, detecting plants, monsters, monster-dens, etc.

The game is very much story driven, there was no real grind in this demo. I advanced to the end of the demo the first time without having completed all available sidequests, and avoiding most of the fights in this last region. After that, I returned to the last autosave before completion and took care of the remaining quests. There is a growth limit - one cannot advance beyond level 11.

There remains a lot to discover in the main game even in the region available to peruse in the demo, as there are parts only reachable with monsties with abilities not available in the demo – like swimmers, or climbers. So once the main game has read my demo safe file, I know a couple of places I’ll visit first.

The game has a gorgeous art-style. The fighting-, crafting-, and hatching systems are not overly complex, but your choices there have real consequences, so it’s engaging and interesting. I highly recommend trying out the demo, if you had fun with RPGs like this in the past – it only costs you bit of time in the worst case.