Game:

Monster Hunter (2004)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 27:08

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2

Saving the best for last, we move onto our third target... and also a weapon choice that's near and dear to my ever-monstrously-genocidal heart, the Charge Blade. I'm not one to "main" in a game where there are so many distinct styles of play, but the Charge Blade just... always... feels right... in my virtual hands.

Like the Insect Glaive, the Charge Blade was also introduced in Monster Hunter 4... but it has essentially been tinkered with quite a bit each revision and game since its inception, changing rather drastically even just between 4 and its own enhanced remake... but the details in that journey is beyond the scope of what we're here to do.

The Charge Blade is what happened when a game like Monster Hunter, with its variously complex and nuanced weapon styles is asked a rather insane question... are these weapons a little TOO easy to understand? The result is... a weird transforming combination chargeable sword, shield, axe... a "schblaxe"!

I mean, many weapons have since the earliest games had a complex-looking unsheathe animation wherein they reveal storage-unfriendly spikes and ominous glows and a tendency to unfurl mechanically other such relatively cosmetic effects... we're talking about something of a trend in truly outlandishly fantastic multifunction weaponry started back in Monster Hunter 2 when they stuck a shelling mechanism inside a Lance to make the Gunlance and in Monster Hunter 3 with the two-mode Switch Axe.

Like a couple other weapons, the Charge Blade makes use of some nondescript containers for some unspecified, presumably chemical component accumulated in Phials. In this particular case, your Charge Blade begins with five empty Phials. By swinging the short sword component around, specifically through enemies, you build up energy in the blade. As it fills, you can store this energy in the Phials, allowing you to collect more energy. Overfilling the sword without banking it into the Phials will eventually render your sword unable to pass through enemies at all until you store it again. Once stored in Phials, this energy can be unleashed explosively by discharging them in a variety of axe mode attacks.

In case this all seemed a little TOO underwhelming a level of complication, there's more! Instead of unleashing the Phials particularly dramatically by the axe mode's longer-windup discharges, you can actually redirect this energy stored in the phials back into the weapon AGAIN, this time into the shield... which is also the axe head. The benefits of doing this is essentially twofold, it makes your guard stronger and it makes your axe mode attacks stronger. It also enables an even bigger and flashier discharge attack that will consume all your stored Phials AND your shield's charged state.

The true mark of mastery with the Charge Blade is learning to shift fluidly from one form to another, building up energy and economizing it as you use it to power up your attacks while remaining guarded in transition. Indeed, many attacks have frames in their animation that count as blocking incoming attacks, referred to as Guard Points. (So go ahead and chomp your Rumble Ball... in moderation, and become an impenetrable mass of fuzzy doom for your foes!)

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This time, I'm using the Adept style... most non-standard styles for Charge Blade give up a couple of attacks or opportunities to transform the weapon... in this case, you lose a shortcut to a branch in the axe mode that gives your shield a lesser charge, which for all intents and purposes, you'd want to avoid anyway... so... really not much of a downside there. Furthermore, it turns the entire charge-up animation for the most lucratively viable means of charging sword energy into one long Guard Point, which is nuts.

I... actually don't feel bad at all that I don't very much use the universal purpose to the Adept style at all, which is actually supposed to revolve around guarding or dodging at the last possible moment for an immediate and generous period of invulnerability and counterattack. That's how intoxicating the Guard Points are.

...I still have much to learn... and I love it.

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Oh right, there's a monster here! ...I... really don't know much about it, except that its name is Valphalk (don't belabor the argument to a more literal interpretation of its katakana, because "Barufaruku" is the literal combination of "Valor" with "Falcon," just like "Jinouga" has ALWAYS literally spelled "Zinogre" in a language that doesn't naturally contain a means to express those loanwords any more accurately than that), and it's... basically a jet-powered dragon. Yeah, It's... Bad. Ass. And totally absurd. Let's kill it!

This is... literally my very first encounter with the beast, so I'm learning how to fight it in real time. I'm sure nothing at all can possibly go wrong with this! Monster Hunter isn't... like... some game based ENTIRELY around lengthy preparation, observation, and planning! Lemme whack it with my pointy hurtstick!