Released back in 2021, Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin was the much-anticipated sequel to the original 3DS outing. Now, it’s seen a release on PS4 alongside a remaster of its predecessor. With the original title now under our belts, let’s see how this game manages to improve and iterate upon it.
A Boy and His Rathalos
One of the things that becomes immediately apparent upon starting Monster Hunter Stories 2 is how different the tone is. It still maintains quite a bit of that silliness that the original game had, but it shows more restraint in favor of a more consistently serious story. All told, it’s a more somber game that aims to tell a tale about grappling with loss and the hardships of accepting others.
Like in the previous game, you play as a Rider—people who aim to co-exist and train monsters rather than hunt them like most of the world. A number of years have passed since the first game, and the world has slowly but surely become more accepting of Riders and their ways of life. There’s still plenty of lingering tension between Hunters and Riders, and most of the themes of the first game are further explored here. There are still lots of questions about humanity’s role in the balance of the world’s ecosystem, and the player even plays a more direct part in that.
Early in the story, the player is tasked with raising and nurturing a Rathalos prophesied to destroy the world with its titular Wings of Ruin. Guided by a Wyverian (a sort of elf-like person) named Ena, you learn more of this prophecy while uncovering your grandfather’s legacy. It strikes a wonderful balance between being simplistic, yet highly emotionally resonant. Returning characters from the previous game add that extra flavor of friction to the player’s journey.
All in all, Monster Hunter Stories 2’s writing and plot sit head and shoulders above its predecessor, which I already liked. The more mature and reserved slant it takes with its plot worked wonders, and that added splash of goofiness from the first game keeps things feeling whimsical. Seeing how returning characters changed and evolved here was also a nice bonus.
The Monster-filled Yonder
Like in this previous game, you’ll be set loose in huge open zones filled with areas to explore, monsters to fight, and things to collect. It’s not really all that different in terms of exploration or progress, the main difference now is that areas are bigger and more freeing than before. Thanks to the larger monster roster, there are also far more monsters to see and battle against. This comes to a head with the new Royal Monster system.
Royal Monsters are a bit like the Unique Monsters from the Xenoblade series. They’re especially powerful enemies that either sleep or prowl around the fields for the player to challenge or avoid. It’s ill-advised to just fight them without thinking, because they’ll immediately wipe the floor with your team without sufficient preparation. The reward for defeating Royal Monsters is the chance to add them to your team, allowing you to use especially powerful monsters long before they’re available normally. We’ll go into greater specifics on what battling them entails later, but suffice it to say that Royal Monsters add a nice layer of choice and risk to the exploration.
Otherwise, everything good about the exploration from the first game returns here. Monsters are allowed to flex their personalities outside of battle via their Field Skills. You can stealth around hostile monsters with Nargacuga’s invisibility skill, punch through boulders with Brachydios, take to the skies with Rathalos, and more besides. These aren’t particularly nuanced moments of exploration, but having monsters play an active role in your searching lends a nice layer of personality to the world.
Tamago Get Some Eggs
Just like in the last game, a huge pull of Monster Hunter Stories 2’s gameplay loop is gathering new monster eggs to hatch. Rather than capture monsters or negotiate with them, you instead sneak inside their dens and steal eggs of the monsters you want. Once you’re safely back in a town, you can hatch the eggs and add that new monster—now dubbed a “Monstie”, to your team. What makes this system especially brilliant is the added degree of luck and risk involved in getting a monster.
To open a den, you have to defeat a monster in battle and force it to retreat, which will then open up a nest where you’ll find their eggs. Dens are also filled with a gracious amount of rare supplies and items, and the Eggs themselves can vary heavily in the innate stats a monster possesses. Sounds great, right? Well, there’s a big catch to this. These dens are the homes of the monsters you’ve just beaten. Each action you take, be it item collection or egg collection, brings with it a small chance of that monster reappearing. Sometimes, the monster will be sleeping near their egg nest, and taking too long will risk waking it back up.
With this in mind, you have two options. Play it safe and collect only what you need, or get dangerous and risk fighting an empowered version of the monster you just beat. Many of the toughest and most desirable monsters in the game are essentially boss fights, so knowing when to pick your battles is important. It’s easy to want to fill out the Monsterpedia (this game’s bestiary) when the simple act of egg collection is this engaging. It’s not changed much from the original game, but simply having more monsters to collect means it’s an improvement in my eyes.
Ride On, Again
Combat in Monster Hunter Stories 2 is a straightforward, iterative upgrade over its predecessor. Many of the same rules and ideas have been carried over and adjusted. You’re still working in a turn-based battle system that relies on a Rock-Paper-Scissors setup, wherein you predict what attack type the monster uses to try and counter it. A constant pet peeve in the original game was that monsters were far more random about what attack type they could use, so the player could constantly be punished based on dumb luck. This time around, what attack a monster uses is more consistent, but the game makes up for that by being punishing in other areas.
This time, the game places a great emphasis on breaking specific monster parts. Like in the mainline games, you can target specific parts of a monster’s body and break them, which changes their mid-battle characteristics and nets you more rewards. What kind of weapon and element you use is also important in breaking body parts. Slash-type weapons will slash off limbs faster, while blunt weapons will break faces and armor more quickly. It’s a great system, and choosing to prioritize which monster part to break adds a nice coat of pressure and strategy to the combat. You can additionally swap what weapons you want to use mid-battle, which helps when fighting groups of enemies.
The biggest change to combat is the addition of more ally characters in battle. In parts of the main story and postgame, you can team up with both Riders and Hunters to bend the odds in your favor a bit. Like with your monsters, you can synchronize skills and attacks to launch more powerful moves and essentially nuke your enemies. Just like with your main monster, you can’t assume direct control over them, but you are given a heads-up on what their next action will be so you can plan around that. When taken with more punishing battles and a higher number of monsters to fight at once, battles can feel more chaotic in all the right ways.
Overall, the combat in Monster Hunter Stories 2 is a big improvement over the original game’s. It’s more flexible and generally more demanding to compensate for that flexibility. It trades randomness for consistency, which helps in creating sound strategies and team building. It’s a lot of fun, and even in the postgame I wanted to see how much further its depth could go. This is further enhanced by the addition of co-op quests, allowing you and a buddy to take on a smorgasbord of bosses as a team. The rules of engagement don’t change from single-player, but this is a great feature that brings Stories 2 closer to the appeal of the mainline games.
The Breathing World
Monster Hunter Stories 2 is a stunner of a game, plain and simple. The changes and technical improvements made to the art style of the original outing make for a feast for the eyes. Characters and monsters are proportioned more realistically, while still maintaining the same anime-esque texturing and cel-shading as before. The end result winds up being a sort of mixture between the first game and the modern Zelda outings. Colors and lighting are incredibly vibrant and evocative, giving life to the environments and surrounding scenery. Monsters especially benefit from this, with their portrayals feeling larger-than-life, just as they do in the mainline games.
Where the visuals particularly shine are in its excellent cutscenes. Be it in the emotionally heavy moments that require a lot of nuanced expressions, the downright epic monster introduction cutscenes, or the numerous action sequences, it nearly does it all. Couple this with great voice acting, and it’s easy to get invested in the story even without its already strong writing. Rathalos is one of my most loathed monsters due to how much of a bastard he is to fight in the main games, but the animations given to your partner Rathalos are simply heart melting. I wanted to care for this creature as if he were my real dog. There are occasions when the game will rely on simplistic bobblehead-style cutscenes where characters are standing around with basic expressions, but it doesn’t happen often enough to be grating.
The music follows the typical Monster Hunter tradition of being highly context-driven, much like the first game. While out exploring zones and dens, there’s no background music to accompany the many sounds of nature and fauna. While the sound design of the game is very impressive, I am left wishing that the open areas did have music of their own. It gets a little lonely and isolating, which might be the point, but I don’t really think it fits the character of this game all too much. Even some ambient music would have gone a long way in alleviating that. Thankfully, the battle and cutscene music are quite good, always befitting the moment-to-moment situations they might enhance.
Verdict
Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin proves the age-old rule that, sometimes, bigger really is just better. A more mature storyline coupled with an improved art style and deeper gameplay makes this the definitive Monster Hunter RPG. It keeps just about everything good about the original game and makes it even better, all while sacrificing none of the charm. If you’re a fan of the monster collection genre, then this will almost certainly appeal to you in many ways. If you’re a fan of Monster Hunter, it may just make all of your dreams come true.
MONSTER HUNTER STORIES 2: WINGS OF RUIN IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another JRPG, you might want to check out our review of Granblue Fantasy: Relink or Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince.
This review of Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin was written using the author’s personal copy of the game on Nintendo Switch.
A hobbyist who took up the pen to write about their favorite pastime: games. While a lover of many genres, Isaiah Parker specializes in Platformers, RPGs, and competitive multiplayer titles. The easiest way into his heart is to have great core gameplay mechanics. Self-proclaimed world’s biggest Sonic fan. Follow him @ZinogreVolt
