I have been with my wife for over twenty years. She was my first and only partner and has remained so to this day, which makes me a little bit happier every day.
At the same time, however, I have read in respected magazines about relationship crises, aristocratic marriages and family dramas that you have to keep refreshing a relationship so that it doesn’t become boring and you don’t eventually get on each other’s nerves. My wife and I consistently follow this advice by thinking every few years about how we can refresh our life together.
Currently, for example, to save our relationship from the doom predicted by magazines, we bought a new tablecloth for a small end table.
Over twenty years of relationship happiness have proven to me that there definitely must be something to the whole refreshing thing. That’s why I’m transferring it to video games. The Monster Hunter series represents a perfect example here.
My first Monster Hunter was Monster Hunter Tri for the WiiU and 3DS. Yes, I got both versions right away, as you could move game saves back and forth between the two consoles. This allowed me to chase the fun on both the TV and the handheld. Of course, I also bought this weird thing that you could stick the 3DS in to have two joysticks and use it as a melee weapon at the same time.
Just as my wife is one of my all-time favorite women, the Monster Hunter series is one of my all-time favorite video games. And to keep it that way for a long time, I also refresh this relationship from part to part. However, I don’t do that with the help of tablecloths, because unfortunately there are none in Monster Hunter. Only too gladly I would cover a captured Diablos with a flower tablecloth to give its horns a natural touch of floweriness. But I can’t. Although you can spend several hundred euros on DLC for the current Monster Hunter Rise alone, there isn’t a single tablecloth.
That’s why I resort to another method of refreshing the series that’s somewhat comparable to tablecloths: the weapons. After all, there are people who put samurai swords on tablecloths, for example. So there’s a logical, almost natural connection there.
The weapons in Monster Hunter all play differently. Some more, some less. To master them, you need to spend a few hours with them. Your character moves differently, the rhythm, animations, damage, controls and so on differ from each other, making them the perfect way to keep the game interesting. That’s why I change my main weapons in every “Monster Hunter” part.
My first weapon in Tri was the longsword. It looks like a katana and that’s why it’s often chosen by players who want to be cool. In the next part of the series, I chose the double blades, two one-handed weapons that can be used to cut vegetables properly if you like to use giant monsters as cutting boards in the meantime. Next I chose the sword and shield combination, half of the double blades, but with the cutting board I brought myself. Then came the morph axe, which I definitely can’t describe in one sentence at this point, but is just as cool as the name suggests.
Currently, I’m playing Monster Hunter Rise and have switched to the lance. You carry around a gigantic lance and an equally gigantic shield, you can hardly move forward because of the weight, but you deal a lot of damage once you master the combination. For this, I watched a forty-minute tutorial video a few days ago first, which I’ll probably watch once or twice more in the next few days to take notes. After all, that’s how refreshing relationships works in Monster Hunter. Patience, spit, and notes.
Presumably, this will continue for the next few years. A new Monster Hunter part is released, I buy it, play a bit with the weapon of choice from the last part to get used to the innovations, and then choose a new main weapon to kill creatures with for two hundred hours to carve clothes and weapons out of their skin.
And if the day comes when Monster Hunter introduces tablecloths, my wife and I will buy weapons from now on.
In Monster Hunter you hunt large monsters to make clothes and weapons from their body parts so that you can hunt larger monsters afterwards.
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