Monster Hunter Freedom [PSP]

As far as hack-and-slash action games go, Monster Hunter isn't much. The combat isn't very fluid and the monsters are just dumb animals. As an RPG, there's not a lot to sink your teeth into in terms of a story or characters. You don't get to choose a class and there isn't any leveling. You won't cast a single spell. Dialogue trees and meaningful non-player characters are entirely absent. But none of this changes the fact that Monster Hunter: Freedom is an impressive action-ish RPG set in a free-form world, offering a lot of choice and variety.

If you've played Phantasy Star Online, you'll have a sense for the basic mechanics: from a central town, you take missions, which are set in a handful of areas that you'll revisit. You can team up with other players. The combat is real-time and skewed towards action gameplay. If you die too much, you fail, but you can try missions as many times as you like, and you can replay them as often as you like. You're taking it all at your own pace.

But the Phantasy Star comparisons don't get you far enough. Unlike other RPGs, Monster Hunter isn't a game about leveling up and getting loot from monsters. Instead, it's about visiting dangerous areas to gather resources, which you'll use to create better equipment and weapons, which will allow you to visit even more dangerous areas to gather better resources. You're fighting that dinosaur not because he's going to give you 100xp, but because you're going to cut off his scales and use them for better armor, or because he's standing between you and a vein of ore you need to mine.

You're not always fighting. In a way, Monster Hunter is like a less girlish version of the Harvest Moon games. There are plenty of peripheral activities: fishing, farming, foraging, slaughtering herbivores, beekeeping, exploration, doing fetch quests, or snatching eggs out from under the watchful eyes of giant dragons. But it's all in the service of that basic paradigm that everything you do is for the resources needed to craft better items. There's even a skill system, but it's based only on what armor you're wearing. And guess where you get that armor. You make it.

The actual fighting can be confusing in the beginning. This is partly because you start off with the world's worst weapons (a bit of advice: at first, sell everything you find until you can upgrade your basic sword a few steps). But combat is also confusing because each weapon works very differently. Hammers, lances, swords of varying sizes, and crossbows are all used in unique ways, and they all have a variety of upgrade options that can make them even more different from each other. Anyone trying to whack a nimble raptor with an enormous hammer is going to conclude that the combat sucks. But it's like turning a screw with a mallet -- you need the right tool for the job.