14 DAY TRIAL // Ryozo Tsujimoto and Kaname Fujioka are the names of the producer and of the director responsible for the runaway success of the Monster Hunter series from Capcom. The six games they have so far created have sold almost 6 million copies in Japan and the latest Monster Hunter has driven up the sales of the platform on which it was launched, the PlayStation Portable. The two developers recently decided to talk to the media about how they see the development of the next game in the franchise, called Monster Hunter 3.
Japanese magazine Famitsu managed to get an interview in which they revealed how the game was set to reinvent the whole idea behind the series while keeping all those elements that players loved so much in the releases. Ysujimoto said, “Stating that we're trying to return to basics might give people the wrong idea, but the basic concept behind this project is to re-evaluate the Monster Hunter series from the ground up. The ideas we've come up with as part of that re-evaluation process are finally beginning to take shape in the game right now”.
As in the previous games, players will be cast in the roles of mercenary hunters that roam the game world accepting quests from various sources, like the local village elders or the city's power broker. The missions always involve one monster, be it a dragon, a giant bird or something else entirely, that the player has to track and bring down. You will need to employ a variety of skills to defeat the monsters, which will now be more intelligent, with an AI that is designed to react to the player's moves and to the movement of other nearby monsters.
The game will be developed with the Nintendo Wii as the main platform and that means that the entire control scheme will be different from what we know. At the Tokyo Game Show, on October 9, the game will be showed in a playable state for the first time and we'll know more about it then. No release date has been unveiled yet.