At some point, somebody at Capcom must have looked at Monster Hunter and said, out loud, “You know, the monsters in this bad boy are actually pretty cute. And there’s these talking cats, and they’re pretty cute, too. We’re kinda leaving money on the table by not making this a turn-based monster-capturing RPG.” And the executives did grin, and the sky opened, and the money rained down. And they saw that that somebody was right, and they said, “We gotta make more of these.”
Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection is the third one of these, in fact, if the number didn’t give it away, so that somebody’s idea had some staying power, but it’s this writer’s first. Not my first Monster Hunter; like most folks in the West, mine was Monster...