so finished mhst3 and i have thoughts. it's all mostly positive stuff (though i was disappointed when arriving to locations and finding some monsters had been reusued, like yeah, i know, monsters are going to have more than one habitat and all that, but it was disappointing to get to tarkuan and find chatacabra and plesioth and garangolm. i've already seen those dudes give me new ones). some of it will be spoilers so under the cut
the story was excellent and very satisfying. that baby aenshin is my son, migaloo, the most precious baby ever and i will protect with my life.
really liked that they didn't have amara magically regain her memories, and they left simon in a morally dubious position where he wasn't quite redeemed, but he was definitely working on it. same with clarissa.
i really loved all the companions. i am not a simon apologist, but i did like how his character was handled and his motivations were sound. even deadbeat dad, ogden, was compelling and i loved how his story intersected with kora and gaul. that was nice, really found familied him lmao. i LOVED murry and the rest of the furtive five, i loved the heir having a hard time telling them apart and rudy's little 'well you can tell because this one smells like sunshine and this one has really nice whiskers' like man i'm sorry i didn't notice his WHISKERS. i loved the mentorship with thea and the growth they both had in learning to stand up for herself (thea) and learning that she's a kid, yes, but she's competent and can do all this shit without hand-holding (the heir). mostly i loved eleanor. i took her everywhere with me. that's my girlfriend and i love her solution in battle is just to hit things really hard.
i loved the bosses and i loved that the game lets you choose how to play it. like i could have whatever weapons i wanted and that was fine even if it wasn't the most optimal; same with monsties, i really REALLY love that i could just use the ones i liked and i could put whatever stats and abilities i wanted on them without having to think too much about minmaxing my team. (except for narwa and ibushi, fuck those guys in particular, i still don't know how to beat them i just cheese them with my dog, which was HILARIOUS bc i didn't look up guides i just went 'well okay my dog has good defence against dragon and a good stamina regen so if i put these genes on it then i should be able to evade everything and let eleanor do all the heavy hitting she's good at that' and it turned out to be a legit strat that others used too lmao).
i would like to draw my team at some point but the monster designs are really cool and detailed and i wanna do them RIGHT. you know? plus i still haven't settled on names for all my monsters, but i do love them all soooooooo much. love that i can have a thunder-only team and it's only a LITTLE bit annoying. (i didn't use thunder-only for the majority of the game because i liked some of my non-thunder monsties too much to get rid of them but the thought was there)
however i have Questions™
the skyscales can prevent crystalisis and heal themselves, but can they heal others? do arken, casimiro, and simon get healed or are they just dead men walking?
the ending left a few bits ambiguous: does clarissa remain queen in vermeil? are vermeil and azuria merging into one larger kingdom? how will governance work if so? a cutscene mentioned the sacrosanctum being the new capital but it's pretty far away from vermeil and azuria, so are we all just... moving there now or ???
with arken being crystalised, does he remain king or is the heir going to have to step up here?
the heir and eleanor signed some kind of pact, which i am assuming is more to do with agreeing not to battle-bind anymore and perhaps expand the rangers to protect and restore the crystalised lands, but how will that work? by which i'm mostly wondering what responsibilities they'll have and how carrying those out will mesh with the government. because arken wanted to use the rangers as an emergency combat force, but surely, now with all they've learned, they should be able to reject that kind of thing? is eleanor joining the rangers officially? are they creating a new ranger base in vermeil (would be cool for a dlc i'm just saying)?
mostly i just have a lot of questions about how the countries will be governed going forward and how the rangers/monsters will play into that because it's got a lot of potential for story lines where we have to deal with azuria and vermeil having a new status quo and what becomes of the sacrosanctum and all that.
how are the rangers and rider societies as a whole going to interact with non-rider societies, the wyverians, the hunters' guild, the scriveners? these are two entirely different cultures with entirely different views on monsters that are being thrust back together and i feel like there's going to be growing pains here. neither side should be forcing their views on the other, but that does mean there will be A Lot of conflicting ways of doing things bumping up against each other and i'd like to explore how that gets handled. ESPECIALLY when arken and clarissa seem to have gut reactions of "just attack them until they capitulate" like... that sounds bad, i hope we get confirmation of some character growth from them if they're going to stay as leaders of nations pls and thank you.
also what the fuck is the timeline here? there are so many flashbacks and conversations that seem to completely ignore what others have set up. okay so listen. eleanor tells us that she and her sister fled their home and they were commoners and clarissa worked her way up to be voted in as queen. but we ALSO get a flashback of amara leaving vermeil and clarissa being upset with her about that. the way clarissa talks to and about amara sounds like they were personal acquaintances and clarissa was betrayed on an individual level more than just a patriotic one. but amara left vermeil to marry arken, eleanor and the heir are around the same age, which means that eleanor and clarissa did the whole 'fleeing for their lives' thing AFTER the heir was born. so did amara GO BACK to vermeil after escaping azuria with the other rathalos FIRST, do a stint as queen there, and THEN go across the meridian? why would she do that? if she knew how desperate the situation was becoming, why would she delay that journey? this would explain why simon ended up with the vermeilians, mostly, and would make sense if amara wanted to get help in her mission and thought perhaps her home nation would be willing to help where arken wasn't. but if that's the case, how come vermeil didn't know amara was still alive? i get they clearly DIDNT send anyone with her, but surely they would've sent like a search party? if not to save her (because simon would've told them she likely died to aenshin) but to at least get confirmation of what was going on. because clarissa obviously knew that something Big was happening up there and that it needed to be stopped, but literally all it would've taken was for vermeil to send some folks to LEARN some stuff to figure out the whole story and then none of this would've happened. is fiero really such an asshat that he would rather battle-bind monsties for like... satisfying his power-hungry base desires over, you know, saving the world he lives in? i can't believe fiero would be that short-sighted. loads of characters in the story are kinda stupid, but they're all at least doing stupid things for what they think are the right reasons based on what they know. if amara went to vermeil and said 'hey there's this dire situation developing, will you let me take some warriors to go put a stop to it' and then she DIES, why on EARTH would the queen's advisor guy just... willingly allow the situation to get worse? to actively ENCOURAGE the situation to get worse? that's like. new levels of stupid.
anyway, idk if i'm simply misremembering some of the story's timeline here, but it seems to me that if eleanor and the heir are around the same age, then amara went back to vermeil and said 'hey, stuff's going down we need to do smth about the source of the issue rather than just keep reacting to the problems it causes' and then fiero and clarissa kept fucking up to make it way worse than it needed to be by ignoring what amara would've told them. because she seems like the sort of team player that wouldn't leave people in the dark for no reason. this makes fiero (and clarissa i guess) way, WAY worse in my mind than the game seems to present them.
i hope we get story dlc taking us to vermeil and restoring their ecosystems, building up the rangers by having new people join, getting to see how things change, maybe set up some safe transit routes for people leaving to go to the sacrosanctum. obviously new monsters would be nice (pls i still really want jin dahaad and nergigante and nu udra and...). we can see them removing all the battle-bindings and what that means. maybe there could be a splinter group of fanatics who don't want to do that. but mostly i'd just like to see vermeil as it is all crystalised and then healed and fully restored with a bunch of monsters they thought extinct forever returned to them.
i think all our companions should get a third monster and also an outfit change that doesn't require purchase. (eleanor needs a flying monstie so she can visit her girlfriend, you see)
