Відео

It's kind of unfair that you assume I'm lazy, or dumb, and just want a game that hands me everything. I play plenty of games that don't have maps, or have other more demanding expectations of the player. My problem isn't with what GTA III does; it's with how GTA III specifically does what it does. It's unfair to conflate the two. Right now I'm playing the game Outward, which if you've never played it, it gives you a map, but doesn't show your location on it. There are no interior maps. You burn maximum health and stamina as they're depleted, and you have to sleep to gain them back. But if you don't guard while sleeping in an unsafe place, you'll get jumped. That will also pretty quickly deplete your hunger and thirst, while also rotting your food, so you'd better be prepared. Diseases are common, take time to recover even with using tea to help, and they can get worse if untreated. You have to take off your backpack for combat, or getting hit in the back will damage your goods. And with most bag types on, your dodge is significantly worse. But you also had better not forget it. There's no fast travel, and travel between regions requires resources, and also expends time. Heck, the game starts with you at risk of losing your home (so a safe bed, non-resetting storage, and a kitchen) if you don't come up with a hefty sum of money in a few days, in whatever ways you can. Losing in combat doesn't reset you. Instead it plays out a scenario that might lead to you ending up in a worse situation than before, like in a cell in a bandit camp full of enemies, with your backpack on the other side of the camp. Again, I'm no stranger to games that demand a lot out of you. Like, the devs for GTA III knew they had limited ability to make each individual building and street stand out, due to hardware and disc storage constraints. So why are so many of their important locations on random, nondescript side streets? Especially since it's not even like you can memorize street names like in real life? So why not put Ammunation or whatever somewhere more memorable and distinct? It's up to devs to meet us halfway, and design their game to work in tandem with choices like a lack of a map. Like, please tell me what 'logic' I'm supposed to use to find some of the gang cars? Some are pretty obvious, like the one with the blower and flames, or the mafia one, or even the yakuza car. But the rest just look like regular cars, especially for the early 2000's US. When the game barely tells me anything about any gang, there's not much 'logic' to go on. As for GTA V ruining things by adding checkpoints, I disagree. You don't have to use the checkpoints if you don't want to. You can load back to your last save, and there might even be a Restart Mission button upon death (I can't recall). But also, I used to think the same thing back in the early 2000's, when games like Halo came out with recharging shields and mid-mission checkpoints. I cut my teeth on things like Medal of Honor, or Perfect Dark (in terms of FPS games), which didn't give such luxuries. But what I realized as I played more games, is that concessions like those in Halo were often just a different way to balance encounters. It's not inherently better or worse. Just different. If you balance a mission around no checkpoints, (and in the case of Medal of Honor, no recharging health), you have to balance it around the weakest average players. The players who might make dumb decisions, or just not be very good. And as such, encounter design is often dumbed down to compensate in games like that, because they don't want people getting super upset, not finishing the game, and then refusing to pick up future games in the series. In contrast, if you make sure the player basically always has the resources they need to tackle a challenge, you can ratchet up the general difficulty of each encounter to compensate, because you know they'll never have an ammo, or health, or money deficit or whatever that they can't climb out of. Halo's individual encounters and difficulty options could get FAR HARDER than anything you'd find in MoH or similar games, because they didn't have to guess about what resources you might foolishly or accidentally waste. A game like GTA V isn't as hard as something like GTA III, but that's because of GTA III's jank. If you turn auto-aim off in V, I'd argue it's actually harder than both Vice City and San Andreas on average, in spite of the fact that the last 25% of your health recharges, and you have checkpoints. Because it's able to throw longer missions with harsher enemy configurations at you, and ensure that you will have the ability to push through. Challenge is not just found in the consolidation of all of a mission's encounters. It is also found in the individual encounters, and I think arguing checkpoints remove all challenge ignores that reality. It treats a mission purely as the sum of all of its parts. Again, it's not better or worse inherently; it's just a different design structure. But to clarify, my issue isn't with a lack of checkpoints in missions or anything in GTA III. I just brought stuff like that up because the actual jank of the game makes those systems feel clunky by proxy. You can see this in how much more I enjoyed Vice City in my video on that. The lack of checkpoints in San Andreas or Vice City is nearly always perfectly fine, because the games aren't (usually) near as jank as GTA III. When you pair such punishments with a lack of polish, they end up being more punishing than intended, and THAT was my complaint.

You probably could, but that wouldn't make for a very interesting video, so I didn't do it, lol :D

@@LibraScope Fair enough. I enjoyed watching this.

@@etonasama Glad that's the case :) I appreciate you taking the time to watch such a long video.

@@LibraScope I do like watching longer videos while doing things.

Definitely not a bad idea, because that would also allow the use of icecreams, which could be fun with the added weight of being the only way to enter Command Styles.

Totally fair!

I never said there was anything wrong with that... it shouldn't be used as a crutch to fix bad AI or anything like that, but there's nothing wrong with rewinding.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. I don't think there weren't many great options, but still.

I don't know. Which part?

@@LibraScope When you said the system itself is "dead" even though it's not.

@@RacerC45 There are multiple ways and reasons you can consider something dead.

People can like the game all they want, for whatever reasons they want. And it has improved, even though they're still lying to people in their update material. But it still only just feels like it's in a state worthy of being launched, as far as I've seen.

"Defend" is not the appropriate word, because I'm not in some sort of 'game quality' war with people who dislike it :P

🙄🙄🙄Yeah, okay. Just go watch more Spoony.

@@LibraScope Who's that?

Well, I'm glad you're enjoying NFS Heat at least :D I enjoy it too.

Ugh, I tried to reply to this and UA-cam broke. Lemme try again. So it's fair that you feel like there's something missing if Cloud doesn't grieve and experience Aerith's death at the same time as everyone else. But you didn't exactly give a reason. In the original, she dies, and then almost immediately he's so caught up in chasing down Sephiroth (which worries everyone else in response), that he arguably doesn't properly grieve then either. And then an hour and a half later he falls into the Lifestream, and we don't get a single coherent moment with him again until after Tifa and him fall in once more and she helps sort his mind out. What part of that section is integral to his character growth and necessitates he grieves with everyone else, and is therefore incompatible with him grieving separately? As for the Zack stuff, just because FFVII utilizes science fantasy elements like Mako, Sephiroth's influence, and Jenova's Cells to bolster Cloud's mental struggles, doesn't mean these things don't occur in real life. People who go through serious traumas - including the death of loved ones - can compartmentalize them to such a degree that they forget that it happens. And trauma can also cause people to dissociate and develop alternate personalities just like Cloud does, as a way to cope. These issues can also be recurring, if the traumas are recurring. You mention that Cloud is at his most vulnerable when Zack dies. But how is he not equally vulnerable here when Aerith dies. He still has yet to face any of his previous traumas, and he's got a fresh new one to deal with. Sure, he's not currently dealing with severe Mako poisoning. But on top of the trauma of Aerith's death he's now got Jenova's Cells/the Reunion, and Sephiroth's influence pushing him and keeping him emotionally raw and vulnerable. If anything, since Cloud has yet to really face ANY of his previous trauma, I'd argue it's pretty safe to assume that he'd react very similarly to Aerith's death. He's yet to do ANY healing. I also personally think there's a bit of inherent beauty in it being Aerith AND Zack (since they were a couple) that Cloud needs to realize are no longer alive, and start to grieve over... rather than just Zack, who in the original we barely know anything about even AFTER the secret scene with him. That feels intentional.

That's definitely not a bad idea at face value! I'd worry that in order to keep the party dynamics element in play, they'd have to be kind of reckless to some degree, otherwise you run into the same issue of allowing players to get away with simply 'maining' a single character. But, it's certainly a solution that's simple enough that it could probably be balanced around!

Hahaha, I'm personally bored to tears of historical/story recaps, unless they're for a game I've never heard someone discuss. And I find them very boring to make :D I'm glad you enjoyed the video!

Yeah, okay. You do you, bruh. Thanks for the engagement.

@@LibraScope you are welcome.

...That's the same in the original though... whether it looks like Sephiroth or not, it's ALL Jenova in both versions, and Jenova loses every single time in both versions. Also, it's made abundantly clear through his teasing of Cloud that this is Sephiroth (through Jenova) just toying with Cloud. The context matters, and you don't get to arbitrarily remove it just to make your point :P

@@LibraScope oh yeah. I forgot, every game always ends with you fake beating the bad guy lol. There is a difference between fighting Jenova which was not the ultimate bad guy in the original, and fighting Uber multiverse sephiroth who is the ultimate bad guy in the remake trilogy. This "game" is 3 parts. Each part being an entire full length game. I guess it's peak intellect to have the final boss of each full length game to just be a fake out. That's terrible design. Which is why rebirth sold terribly compared to remake. The original game designers took inspiration from Jaws the movie when designing Sephiroth. Less is more. Yet they added him like crazy in this new series. Why? Because they said "everyone already knows who he is". I don't know what's worse. That doing that was because they were lazy or because it was a blatant cash grab.

@@ericmcmanus5179 You're not fighting 'uber multiverse Sephiroth' dude. You're just making stuff up and ignoring context to make your weak points seem valid, because you NEED to have something to complain about. Go do it somewhere else.

@@LibraScope so the sephiroth you fight at the end of remake and rebirth is not the sephiroth between worlds? I think you may need to replay those games if you didn't know that lol.

@@LibraScope what context am I ignoring?

Nice! Glad you enjoyed it!

Hehehe, thanks a lot for the compliments and kind words! And for taking the time to watch such a long video! I have a friend who's in a similar position, having only just recently gone through the original game, and then Remake/Rebirth. He too was kind of upset about how the Aerith stuff was handled. And as I said in the video, I was taken aback as well. It's certainly a shock to the system. My thoughts and similar ideas from other people could absolutely be wrong, but for me personally, these developers have shown me that they deserve faith. Faith that they have some sort of vision, even if it ultimately doesn't end up being the one I would've had in the end. And as long as that vision is realized... I think that's enough for me. And yeah, I really hope they recognize the tedium of the Materia menu for the next game. Or preferably, in an update that maybe releases for free alongside any DLC chapter they might make for Rebirth. I think just including nested Materia and the Weapon/Arm Materia moving system from the original would be absolutely transformative to the ease of use for that menu.

Thanks for taking the time to watch the video! As well as thanks again for all of the feedback and help with the channel art stuff!!! I really do think DOING something for a bit can help balance a perspective SO MUCH. Once you've done a bit of work related to the things you're criticizing, you not only start to understand the amount of work and expertise it takes, but also tend to find that you want to learn more about how things like this are put together. And understanding is a quick path to respecting. Hahaha, the original version of this script was a lot more hot-headed. I still wanted to draw a clear line, and stand my ground in relation to things that are genuinely toxic or just plain bad faith. But I'm glad I ultimately kept it more on track than it was originally going to be.

@@LibraScope of course! always happy to help :) And YESSSS agreed. And that’s definitely a more healthy way to be passionate about something as opposed to being a killjoy lol And is that so? Haha now it’s time for the UNCUT VERSIONNN (jk)

@@jazzy_okami Lololol, I DO still have that 'uncut' version of the script 🤣

Developers don't control anyone's thoughts. Plenty of people didn't have the same thoughts the most spitefully negative crowd did. So the problem clearly isn't the developers or the scenes. The problem is the part of the fandom who refuses to think for themselves. And after so many of the supposedly indisputable fan theories were proven wrong, you'd think these people would take a step back and reassess their biases. But instead they succumb to the sunk cost and just dig their heels in deeper. They FORCE the game to contort to exactly what they demand to see..

Agreed. If it didn't come with such hostility and hubris, it wouldn't be a problem. It's healthy and smart to sometimes just say you don't know, or you're just guessing, and to keep the possibility that you're wrong open. If you go into a piece of art with a bad mindset, it's going to affect how you see every aspect of it. That's not to say we all have to go in completely devoid of any concerns, or cynicism, or with a completely chipper attitude. Being over-hyped can be just as problematic in the same ways. I guess the best way to put it is sometimes when you have an immediate reaction to something, it's good to step back for a second and as "Why is that the reaction I had?". Think about how much of it was the content, and how much of it was related to you and outside aspects that are independent from the content.

@@LibraScope❤

@@marcusolsen96 :D

@@LibraScope Was a very good and well thought out video and I especially like and agree with this comment about just… “Taking a moment to consider things” instead of just throwing out whatever the first thing might be that comes to mind whenever you feel upset or ‘triggered’ by something… if only more people could learn to do so 😌

@@marcusolsen96 I agree. And it would certainly make discussing media more enjoyable at the very least.

Pretty much summed it up, lol. And yeah, the optional objectives for the area hunt enemies certainly could've been more varied; maybe more heavily tailored to the specific type of of enemy you're fighting.

Thanks! I really appreciate you taking the time to watch the whole thing!

Agreed! :D

Hahaha, yeah it definitely sucked, especially right at the end of the game :D

Thanks :D

Ahhhhh, sorry! I knew I forgot to add something! This video was such an editing nightmare, that finally putting it all together was a bit of a nightmare. I'll get on that right now! Thank you for reminding me!

Yeah, big creators especially have big targets on their back from these people, purely for not spreading specific narratives, which is just so unacceptable.

Hahaha, totally fair :D

Yeah. I'd really hoped the release of the PC version would allow dataminers to figure it out more fully, but I personally haven't found anything online that suggests that's the case.

I had a similar experience with my first playthrough, except I got stuck at the boss in Mount Nibel, then the wall in the Temple, and then finally at the boss before you take the submarine :D

Hahaha I never noti- err... I mean, yeah. That was totally intentional... 😎👀😎

It certainly is satisfyingly simple and straightforward :)

@@LibraScope Yep, I used to play driver 2 for fun because of the police

I'm not sure what you mean... Like... it's a moot point because people shouldn't be going to the Switch for anything but Nintendo games?

@@LibraScope more like… if a game could be played on PC why play on anything else? If I were making a console, I wouldn’t be trying to compete with PC specs. I’d be carving out a niche like Nintendo has done.

@@AJGsTV I mean, I guess that's fair. But Nintendo's niche is still undeniably both misleading in some ways, and also hostile to developers. Nintendo's niche is more of an Apple style walled garden of insular choices that often come at the expense of customers and developers. But also, I'm not sure I ultimately agree, because there is still a wild gulf in ease of use between PC and a high spec console, and port consistency. And that's before we even get into the massive difference cost required to buy into PC in the first place. You're not playing the latest games at console equivalent settings for the price of a console. That has never been a thing, outside of the very end of a generation, or a really savvy consumer who knows exactly what they're doing. Either way, my point wasn't that Nintendo bad because console poopy or anything like that. Nintendo bad for dozens of other reasons. My point was specifically that the Switch itself is dead, because the new tools being used for making games fundamentally cannot work on the system. Whether one is okay with that or not is up to them.

@@LibraScope Seems like a minor disagreement... if any at all. My PC was cheaper in the long run. I'll never need another high end console again. I got this thing before the PS4 released and it runs Elden Ring today. So long as console exclusives are a thing, Nintendo is wise to focus on cheap and stylish ones. Even so... While I don't really care for infinite growth; I cannot deny I am pumped for the next Nintendo console.

@@AJGsTV I'm certainly interested in what they'll do. In particular, I'm interested in how they'll handle the tougher problems ahead in terms of hardware balance, as well as how they'll approach the fact that the handheld 'console on the go' market is now super saturated with solid options.

Why not?

@@LibraScope cause

@@Summer-us5ql I'd have to see it to believe it.

I agree. I appreciate that he seems to have a very limited amount of time he can spend flying in each phase. And if you can pull it off, flinch shotting him while he's flying is super useful. But it still feels kind of bad in a fight with phase timing like this. Especially in the Dragon phase, because it more or less means most weapon types can't really hit his head to contribute to breaking the horns.

@@LibraScope For me it's not because it's harder to break the horns it's because of the time wasted, I don't like standing there and either trying to get a hit or two or trying to smoke bomb but sometimes it doesn't work

@@duarteribeiro1520 That's absolutely fair!

I think you've kinda missed the point of this video. I really do appreciate the comprehensive and kind comment. But my argument was never 'you have to grind better gear'. It's not about better gear. It's about different gear. It's that you almost certainly don't have the type of gear that the game wants you to be using; at least not to a degree that it would create a whole build for you. So you end up needing to spend time grinding hunts to get that gear. And since the gear is new, it's probably a good idea to do some basic Augmentations and Upgrades to that gear, which depending on your circumstances might take more grinding. If you want to go in with a specific charm you don't have upgraded, you'll have to grind for that. It's not about needing to go in with the best of the best or something like that. But rather, something that's suited for endgame, and more specifically, this fight in particular. It's NOT that you're grinding like you would in an RPG, where you're trying to get HIGHER stats than normal for the fight, that trivialize it. It's that if you don't have access to things needed to make a build for it, you have to go out of your way to gather all the pieces of that build. Normally in Monster Hunter, that's fine, because that's an elective choice. I wanna try being a team healer? I gotta get healer stuff. I wanna try using a Paralyze weapon build? I gotta reinforce that concept. But it basically NEVER asks so demandingly, that you to spec into a specific type of build for a single monster, because its specific challenges are SO punishing. The closest I got to that before Alatreon, was feeling like preventing Blastblight was necessary for me, to do Raging Brachydios. It's important to recognize that I said in the video that you do indeed have options, and then as an example I listed the many ways you can deal with Dragon damage and Dragonblight. It's not that you don't have various routes you can take. Instead, it's simply very unlikely that a player is going to have everything they need, based on the strategy they want to go with, and the skillset they might be best at. No other hunt so universally stops the average player and says "Change your build, or else the only way you're getting through this is by absolutely mastering every hitbox and every timing window, etc." And skillset diversity is important to think about when assessing a fight like this. We can talk about how you can technically beat the fight this unintended way, or with that unintended setup, or if you just master these hitboxes and such all we want. But not everyone is going to have that skill, or even an interest in playing MH that way. And up until Alatreon, that's okay, because you can usually play to your specific strengths as a hunter while still having a buffer of forgiveness when you make mistakes or your skillset has weaknesses. Alatreon removes that buffer. The less rounded your build is for his specific pain points, the more punishing he becomes the SECOND you make any mistake. It's the variety and severity of his punishment types COMBINE, that make him so deadly without a well rounded build. Again, my point was not about 'good gear'. It was about most players who aren't complete masters needing THE RIGHT gear, which they're unlikely to have unless they grind for it. This fight is several notches MORE SPECIFIC in what it wants from your average player, when compared to the rest of the game. Lastly, I'd like to note that it's kind of strange to argue that Alatreon's mechanics aren't outlined well for beginners, and that makes him uniquely punishing... but that you don't think it's reasonable that Alatreon breaks the trend of most monsters giving players little guidance. Is it not already breaking a trend that he's got such specific, narrow mechanical expectations? The reason other hunts don't need heavier guidance than the minimal amount they have, is because they don't make a habit of doing things like hiding unavoidable instant-kill party wipes and progress-negating phase transition gimmicks from you. The intended mechanics of other monsters are generally not NEARLY as rigid and specific as this, and as such, the player can more effectively learn through experimentation and failure. It only stands to reason that if Alatreon is going to break the trend of rather relaxed build demands for your average player, they should also break the trend of relaxed communication about their mechanical demands, and give us some more direct information, right?

​@@LibraScope It's possible that I'm misinterpreting things, both in the video and in this comment, so sorry if I get things wrong. Let me start with the grind you've brought up in the first three paragraphs. Yeah, there are a lot of skills that will make the fight substantially easier in different regards. The biggest is Health Boost, followed by more Elemental damage, then having generic damage skills, and lastly some utility/resistance options. While the vast majority of the game up to Alatreon can be cleared with sets that aren't optimized in that manner relatively easily, I don't find it a fault with the fight that it pushes the player to either learn the fight or compensate by enhancing their build(s). However I do find it problematic that Alatreon is unlocked as early as it is, because if you start the encounter close to the rank it's unlocked, you won't have encountered most of the hunts that are similar in difficulty. If Ala, and Fatalis by extention, were locked behind something like MR 100, it would give players the chance to both refine their skills and potentially sets. If there's one thing we both can agree on, I think, it's that the fight is demanding and punishing. That being said, I don't think Ala is as big of an outlier for it's spot in the game. When Alatreon was released in the second to last title update, most of the community (at the time) had already overcome MR Kulve, Safi, and if you go further back, Behemoth, who all had similarly punishing mechanics/damage thresholds. None of those fights are spelled out for you mechanically speaking and all of them have mechanics that can lead to immediate failure when not dealt with appropriately. Most players at the time Ala was released would have beaten Lunastra, along with the majority of arch tempered elders like Nami and Kirin (at their respective ranks), and would generally recognized that yeah you'll want to have skill tailored to dealing with them to make your life easier. You mentioned Raging Brachy, but there are other monsters with similar attack speeds and mechanics to Ala. It's fight is designed to be fairly challenging for players that have intimate understanding of everything that came before him, and have built up a catalogue of skills and sets from most of those things they've encountered. Basically I don't expect beginners to run in with whatever build they're comfortable with and clear it without issue. If they did, Alatreon wouldn't be a proper endgame encounter. Despite that I think with enough familiarity with the fight, you could genuinely run a lot of things and you don't actually need much (in terms of armor skills) to clear the fight. I don't see players that recognize monster attacks and find safe positions to be "masters" of the fight, it really doesn't necessitate dodging every attack. I had two friends new to Iceborne, with no insight into it's mechanics, clear Ala as a duo, with Nami armor, a wide range talisman, and Velk weapons. They just failed it for a while and eventually caught on, by breaking the head in a run, and learning when/where it was safe to attack. Yeah the fight has two specific things you'd likely want to do to clear it, being get the topple and break the head. I don't see that being all too different from luring Behemoth away from meteors, hiding behind them, and doing enough damage to avoid getting nuked without them, nor do I the judgement as being all that different from needing to do enough damage to MR Kulve's weaker hitzones to avoid immediately failing the timer before she flees, if anything it's less punishing then that. With a strong enough grasp of things you can still do neither of the previously mentioned mechanics, (at least when playing solo/duo) and still kill Ala. It doesn't require a "well rounded" build, just one that is geared towards doing enough damage. Also in your last paragraph, I'm pretty sure you misunderstood what I was saying. Yes, it would be nicer at least mid-hunt for the NPC dialogue to be a bit more specific. The tutorial text box that pops up beforehand does outline things a bit better, but they do set you up for a rough first couple of hunts. Honestly I think that's fine that it doesn't, but I also come from an era of Monster Hunter where failing quests repeatedly was the norm and wasn't a problem. There wasn't any information on your first couple Crimson/White Fatalis hunts letting you know that you'll need to deal with armor mode, nor any advanced warning that Yama might one-shot your entire team with the his suction with no way for you increase the number of carts you have. Ala back in Tri never really gave you much indication that he'd be weaker to some elements over others, but we learned as a community to overcome it. Players in that era would just accept the challenge, slowly adapt, and there's no real major punishment for failure, just a use of time to learn the fight. Not every fight needs to teach the player in the same way, and having fights like Ala that initially favor the monster are some of my favorite in the series. Again, a lot of this is just subjective, but I just don't see the demands of Ala's fight being outrageous. It could just be me, and the group of new players I played with, but I'm not particularly bothered by the way the fight is presented and handled. It certainly could be better, but I personally found it a fun time to learn and watch others do the same. Anyway it sounds like you felt things were insurmountable/impractical without upgrading/grinding, and were bothered by it which is fair. I don't have the same outlook on the fight. If you do end up tackling Fatalis, I wish ya luck and I'll be interested to see what impressions you walk away with.

@@mh-united I think we're reaching something closer to an understanding. I think 'impractical' is a good way to describe how it felt to just run headfirst into Alatreon. I think the length of time MH fights often take also has something to do with it. I play a lot of very difficult games. So I'm used to high challenge, and used to having to figure things out on my own. But usually, a boss or whatever in other games might take 5 minutes. Keeping up such a high level of play for 2-3x as long, or longer in MH is already fairly taxing. Doing it against an enemy that can crush a player as quickly as Alatreon, or Fatalis is definitely a lot. Also, for me, Alatreon is different from Safi'Jiiva, or Behemoth, etc., because it's 'required' insofar as that other fights are locked behind it. I forgot to mention in my previous reply that I do absolutely agree that putting the fight behind MR 100 or something would've made a lot more sense, though it also makes sense for very, very experienced hunters to be able to get to him as soon as they'd be capable of defeating him, especially for repeat playthroughs. I think it would be a good idea for MH to maybe introduce a second, "Recommended" HR/MR rating for superboss style hunts like that. So people have a general idea of how experienced they might want to be, even if you unlock a hunt at a lower rank. Similar to you but on the opposite side of the spectrum from your friends, anecdotally my friend and I were already nearing MR80 by the time we really tried Alatreon again, and it didn't feel like it made any meaningful difference, because our problem wasn't a lack of experience hunting; it was the things I've illustrated already. A good compromise might be to give players an option for some sort of... more advanced investigation for fights with gimmicks like this, that way if you feel you need it, you can fill out special pages of the hunter's journal that give you more direct knowledge about the monster. That would fit well with the whole ecology layer of the series. And specifically with Alatreon and some of the other monsters, it fits well with the "Oh my gosh, there's a big mystery as to why this monster is here/acting this way/so dangerous." story elements, because you'd be more actively finding that information out through means other than simply fighting and cutscenes, more often. But if you don't want to do that extra work as the player, you could just skip straight into the fight so it doesn't hold up those veteran players. If you beat the monster, all that info will fill out in the journal automatically. Monster Hunter is a difficult one to tackle, because there are several layers to skill and mastery that all have WILDLY different timeframes. Like... after nearly 500 hours of ANY game series, it's hard to argue someone like myself is a beginner. But at the same time, I also wouldn't quite call myself an expert, despite the fact that if you compare MH to something like Souls, you could 100% every Souls game, and Bloodborne/Sekiro in less than 500 hours and be a master in spite of the challenge of the series. Despite not being unfairly grindy the vast, vast majority of the time, and despite MH's slower pacing not being an issue, Monster Hunter progression is kind of protracted in a way. And so you can gain heaps of experience... spend 200 hours in Low and High Rank, and still feel kinda noob-ish against what Master Rank throws at you in terms of skill. Ultimately, I think it's important to recognize how many people have a problem with this fight. I don't disagree with you that the fight itself is fine, as I said in the video. The fight itself is fair, and strategic, and really solidly balanced. But when so many people have made videos on this topic, and so many commentors on those videos express frustrations, even after these players might've spent hundreds and hundreds of hours playing, there's gotta be SOMETHING the fight is doing that's rubbing people the wrong way, that could be improved. And for me, I didn't want to argue that it was just that the fight sucked; it doesn't. I just think it needs a bit better conveyance, and that it's not particularly well suited to MH's usual gameplay loop and pacing.

Right, that's kind of ultimately what I was getting at. It's a very rigidly demanding fight. Which once you have a build that works, the fight works well. But that doesn't gel well with Monster Hunter's 'figure out how monsters work on your own' approach to strategy, Monster Hunter's core conceit of allowing tons of different types of builds to be viable and engaging for most other fights, and the central grinding balance the game has designed entirely around that wide variety of builds. That one change in strategic demands to this one fight, completely upends the rest of the game's central design; they're incongruous :)

@@LibraScope Now that I think about it, there are far worse fights in MHWI… I mean, it’s not Ancient Leshen. Thank Dog, *that* fight wasn’t required in order to fight Fatalis.

​@@Deoxys_Used_Mimic Hahaha. I'm actually unsure if I ever did Ancient Leshen. I know I did the normal one, but I don't remember much about it other than playing as Geralt.

@@Deoxys_Used_Mimic Just thought it would be funny to mention that I finally did Ancient Leshen... yeah that fight sucked hard, lololol.

So each world has a battle level shown on the world map. The higher it is, the tougher the enemies, but the more EXP they'll provide. There is a glitch that once you've beaten every chapter of the game, has a chance of applying a very high battle level to Radiant Garden for some characters, at random. As of the last time I checked, there's still no consensus on exactly how the glitch is triggered, or how to make it apply to each character. Some claim you can just repeat the Final and Secret episodes to eventually activate it. Some say that never worked for them. Because of that, while this method is still one of the fastest, HOW fast it is will depend on who's world glitched to be max battle level. I would try to research and activate the glitch if you can.

Hahaha! Touché

AGREED!!!

What can I say other than that this is truly a banger comment. Absolutely agree! My next video is going to end up tackling some of those ideas head on at points, and I've had to work pretty hard to make it clear and intentional (as well as valuable to the topic of the video itself), without being too salty, lol.

@@LibraScope I'm looking forward to that upcoming videos of yours. It can be difficult wading through the turbulent waters that are "fandom" and their preconceptions, so I wish you luck!

@@majine.2606 Thanks :D

Very true!