The Most Annoying Thing About Monster Hunter Stories 2. The NPC Companions, Why they don't Work.
125Stories 2 is not doubt the best jrpg in the last years, but it has a huge issue.
The main problem of the NPCs is that they are truly playing a random rock scissor game. There is 0 intelligence behind their decisions.
Original pic used for the title:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MonsterHunter/comments/n8ew0g/think_hunter_think2/
This is not a problem for your companion monstie because the game gives you the tools to change their actions.First, every monstie has a preferred attack type and you can carry with you six while solo play and three while in the online modes.When you swap into a different monstie, free once per turn , they always will attack with their default type, no randomness involved.Carry with you two of every type and it doesn't matter what, you will always get the chance to use any of the three types for free without cost.And alternatively, you may spend their “Magic points” called kinship to force them to manually pick a special attack. If the magic is full, you may even ride it, fusing both characters and be able to directly control it and other stuff.If you can’t solve a situation, it is practically your fault because you used your resources wrong or because you didn’t build a balanced party. Anyways it is in your control.These kinds of failures are much better than when something goes wrong because rng.When you fail at something when it is under your control, you may learn from it.But you can’t learn from bad randomness . You can’t learn a lesson other than ‘try again until you get lucky’. And unlike the monsties, the other NPCs are 100% uncontrollable randomness.And you are forced into them without choice in a lot of situations.In the main campaign you are forced for plot reasons to bring along buddies,And if you try to play the online missions solo, you also are forced into having a 100% random npc.For the post game where you can manually pick any of the buddies, there is another issue in which one buddy is infinitely better than all the others and is because of the AI.I’m going to talk about that first.In the game, there are two types of buddies. The riders and the hunters. The riders are like Kayna where they bring along their own monsties with them.The hunters come solo and the game, to ‘compensate’ for it, they have much more health and have much more power.The problem of how the game works, having three npcs is way worse than having two.As said before, the backbone of the game is the rock scissor paper system.When fighting a single monster, that monster almost all the time will randomly challenge one of your characters to a head to head.When you have two characters, you and your monstie. There is a 50% chance that will target you and another 50% that will target your monstie.Since you can decide what you do and what your monstie can do, you have a 100% chance to bring the turn into a happy end as long as you pick correctly. No randomness involved.However if you have a hunter, there are three of you.This lowers the chances to a 66% to target your characters and a 33% to target the hunter.If it targets the hunter, then there is only a 33% chance that he will win the head to head.This means basically that there is for every turn of the combat a 23% chance that things will go wrong. Thank goodness than as explained hunters are specially hard to kill and can survive most things but this will hurt against the hardest challenges and if the enemy decided to use an area attack, it will hit and hurt everyone badly.The game also has a hateful mechanic where the npc hunter or rider will randomly rethink their decision when you swap a monstie adding more randomness.Can be good if you see that is going to lose a head to head by giving you a new chance to roll well.But the usual case is having you see “oh, he picked the right choice, I’m going to swap monstie to build his kinship…” only to have him suddenly pick the opposite and ruin everything.The game gives you a failsafe in the taunt and protects skills for greatsword and gunlance but that will make you waste your turn, take damage and drain resources. Most monsters are something like a tick bomb that will explode after X turns unless you use your kinship there to defuse it, so many turns wasted will kill you.Then, that 23% is even lower because the buddy can decide to use a yellow action than is an instant loose.There is luckily one of the hunters who only uses very sparsely yellow actions and that turns it into the best buddy of the game.The other is a lot less reliable because this yellow turns.And then, there are the riders buddies that make things worse in an exponential way.Now, the chance that one of your controllable characters will be targeted is reduced to one half since there are two of both.And then, once again, one third to win the head to head.This reduces the happy ending to 66%.
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