If you’re new to the monster hunter series, you’d best take this guide, Monster Hunter Tri Tips: Newbie’s Guide to heart. The game takes skill and patience to play the game. Sure you can interact with the environment on it’s own well enough without knowing anything but carelessness in combat, even with very experienced players is never a good thing.

Combat in Monster Hunter happens in real time. There’s no hand-holding system like a lock-on, or a pause when you’re accessing your items. If you need to set a trap, drink a potion, roast some meat, check your inventory, mind your surrounding. It’s this sense of urgency that puts off a lot of people from playing Monster Hunter because of the level of difficulty yet at the same time, it’s the very reason why many fans like me love it. Then, there’s your preferred weapon type. More often than not there’s a very specific weapon or element that a monster is weak to or strong against. If you’re stubborn and stick to your favorite weapon instead of what works, chances are you’re going to have a frustrating hunt at your hands.

Aside from minding your surroundings, you should also be flexible enough to adapt to the games seven weapon types: the Sword and Shield (SnS), Great Sword (GS), Long Sword (LS), Hammer, Lance, Switch Axe and Bow Gun. Note that if you’re coming from Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G or Freedom Unite, you’ll notice that there’s several weapon types missing and one added, the switch axe (which is currently my fave btw). All of these weapons play very differently from one another, with varying strengths and weaknesses so knowing when to use and when not to use a weapon against a monster is very important.

Weapons and armors also carry attributes and can give you unique bonuses or penalties depending on the skills that your equipment or the gems that you insert into them give you. Try out different combinations and see what works for you or what works with the current monster that you’re hunting.

Lastly, since you’re role playing as a hunter, you might as well act as one. Huh? Well instead of just typically trading blows with the creatures of the Monster Hunter mythos (which I’ll personally guarantee that you’ll loose, granted that you’re trading blows with the boss of the current hunt :)), you can opt to do it like a real hunter and study the monsters you’re hunting by learning their strengths, weaknesses, attack patterns and behaviors. Realistic? Not really but it’s tons of fun even if you’re getting hammered by a Rathalos because you dodged right into a fireball (but that’s probably just me).

Ok looking back lets do a bit of summary, in order to be a successful Monster Hunter player you need to:
Mind your surroundings. Check.
Know your equipment. Check.
Hunt like a hunter. Check.

Gameplay and Controls

But how does it play? In a word, flawless. Past Monster Hunter games have always been praised because of their superb controls and Tri is no different. While there are three control schemes for the game, one for the nunchuck and two for the classic controller pro and while you might prefer using the add on controller instead of the wiimote, I’d suggest you take the motion-controlled scheme for a spin. Why? Because it gives you more commands to access. Give the pictures below a click and see what I mean.

Of course, you might be the type of gamer that prefers less options (since those actions available only on the Wiimote + nunchuck control scheme can still be accessed albeit not easily from the Classic Controller Pro) so simply pick which control scheme fits you. Whichever you pick, do note that you’ll need quite a bit of mastery over them to successfully pull off your hunts.

Yeah, I hear you. This should’ve been the first installment of my post under Monster Hunter Tri Tips but since I already covered most of what needs to be said in my currently playing post, so I revised that a post a bit and stuck the newbie guide parts here. If you have any questions, post a comment.