Last night I spent a good deal of time roaming around in Monster Hunter World cleaning up all of the things I had been ignoring. One of the problems with this game… if it can be called a problem at all… is that you get so many missions that you can run. At any given time I have 250 investigations constantly swapping themselves out for newer investigations and a seemingly endless number of optional quests opening up as you do things in the world. So yes… I just called too much content a problem, which is ultimately why I backpedaled that a bit because so often we complain about not having anything to do. The game is an endless generator of things you can do.
My play style is apparently not normal, and as a result I have ended up with tons of optional quests left unfinished and I am working through them slowly. Last night for an hour and some change I hung out with my friend Ashgar as we tackled various missions that had been sitting there waiting. The only problem is I am not sure which quests I am missing… because a good number of the star ranks are giving me the indicator that I have in fact finished all of the quests I have available… but that there are more I have yet to unlock. Ash explained that these are probably quests for which I have not actually captured the monster opening up the special arena version.
The truth is… Low Rank was a bit of a blur as I attempted to push forward to start doing the big kid content that I thought at the time was High Rank. Additionally I have played like some sort of a maniac in doing my SOS Roulette thing way more often than actually soloing any optional quests. Occasionally this finishes up missions but more often than not it is simply rerunning content I have already seen. I tend to open up the SOS menu and pick out whatever looks to be the most interesting… which tends to be the combo monster quests so oddly enough I have almost all of those finished.
What I am lacking in a major way however is anything that requires a capture… or anything that requires me to take something and run it back to camp. The delivery quests are maddening, and I just find it so frustrating to carry something slowly across the map only to get derailed by some nonsense along the way causing you to drop whatever you were transporting. I should in fact make a set of Kulu gloves so that I can do this nonsense faster because I have a couple more sitting in my optional quest menu that at some point I will need to deal with.
So you might ask yourself… why do I even care? Well the true end game in any title is the cosmetics… and at the end of doing every single optional quest is quite possibly the most nonsense of cosmetic items. Apparently in Monster Hunter there is a proud tradition of a special rainbow pigment that you can die your gear with. Upon completing all of the optional content you get another quest that ultimately rewards this thing, and apparently while using it your gear constantly cycles slowly through all of the colors of the rainbow. Why do I want this thing… I honestly have no clue… but knowing it exists makes me want to collect it.
In truth I didn’t make anywhere near as much progress as I would have liked last night. I ran around eight missions before needing to take a break… and I have untold more to go. It was more entertaining to do with a friend, but most of what I have left is not exactly extremely challenging. The hardest part with low rank content is making sure you get the capture instead of just getting the kill. There was a point last night when I thought I was just severing the tail off a Rathian… but at the exact same time I wound up getting the kill in. I mean I could in fact dig out a lower rank weapon… but I am not going to. Hitting things for big numbers is fun, and it will at the very least be a source of enjoyment while I retread this mountain of older content.
This weekend in theory was the weekend that I played catch up with Monster Hunter World. For awhile now I have been stalled out at the final boss of the game the insanely huge elder dragon Xeno’jiiva. First off… the fight is an annoying pain in the butt as melee. I am not sure if this is just a longsword thing or if it is an “all melee” thing but you spend all of your time trying to avoid being stepped on while roaming around trying to hit weak spots. Basically there are three glowing bits that seem to be weak… the tail, the front paws, and the head. Normally as a longsword you spend your time focused on the tail… but given this thing is about three times as tall as a normal monster it spends most of its time up in the air.
The fight as a whole is a lot of running around and avoiding breath attacks while attempting to pour damage into the front paws. After a point this will cause the monster to fall down exposing the head for a few minutes allowing you to get off a combo. The biggest problem I had was the monster has several things that can be a one shot if you are not careful, so my first attempt was mostly me sussing out what I should be doing and what I should not be doing. I am one of those people who learn by doing, and I doubt that reading a guide would have helped.
The second attempt was largely a ballet of attempting to do the right thing at the right moment. I managed to take down the monster but only had one faint left. Its funny how when you know there are no more faints… you shift into a sort of hyper focused mode because every move has potential success riding on it. Ultimately I really didn’t want to fail because the fight itself is cumbersome and has several phases of tedium while you are waiting for Xeno to finishing doing its nonsense and land so you can begin attacking again. I am sure those air phases are way more enjoyable if you have any semblance of a ranged attack… or if you are Tam and just playing the nonsense weapon.
Whatever the case I defeated a Xeno, and immediately shot up to 29 which was the next Hunter Rank plateau. It turns out you are phantomly gaining levels while you are playing the game, in spite of it appearing as though you are presently capped by a quest. I’ve talked about this before, but when you finish a game like this it always feels like you are obligated to sit and watch the credits as a sort of homage to the folks who poured all of the love into creating the game in the first place. The credit roll was on the short side allowing me to get right back into the action and as soon as I zoned into my room and back out… I picked up the next quest that was gating me.
The real highlight however is that I managed to pick up enough pieces from Xeno to craft the Extermination’s Edge… ultimately what is likely to be my primary end game weapon for awhile. The next quest involved hunting my very first tempered monster, and what did they give me as a target… a pair of Bazelgeuse. Until yesterday I had not ever actually killed a single Bazel… or Bagel as folks seem to call. It always seemed like it was more hassle than it was worth, and since I had never fought one… I personally found this quest insanely difficult and failed out completely on my first attempt. This lead me to believe that I should do some research, and wound up answering a few SOS flares for Bazel fights to learn the flow of how combat against it works.
Before going to bed last night after finishing Walking Dead, I decided to give it one more shot. It took me what felt like an eternity, but I managed to get both Bazel’s down and this time around I only managed to faint one time. This fight is a mess because Bazels interact with each other much the same as you would expect Bazel to interact with any other hunt. That means when they are dive bombing each other there are just giant fields of nope on the ground… and I spent most of the time rolling out of the way of impending doom.
Ultimately I focused on detailing both of them which seems to cut down on the sheer number of bombs by a bit and then worked one down to skull, attempting and failing at a trap only to wind up killing it outright. The other I tediously fought until it ran and finally managed to get a trap off finishing the nonsense. While I still hate this encounter… in a way I get why they forced us to do it. Fighting a Bazel as melee if nothing else teaches you that you absolutely need to call your shots and get in some strategic hits while you can… even if the rest of your time is spent avoiding everything else.
Now I am sitting at level 41, which I believe leaves me in an uncapped state until 49. In truth I have no clue how leveling works now… if I just gain some experience each time I take something down, or if I need to focus on tempered monsters to make forward momentum. Whatever the case I have lots of things to be hunting and lots of need for cash considering I went bankrupt making the armor and power talons… then rebuying the charms after getting bazel parts. In truth I am pretty happy with my gear as it stands… and I simply need to pour cash into it to level it up to maximum. I believe at some point Thalen still needs a Nergi kill, and ultimately Grace will need a slew of elder dragons as well so there is likely much monster slaying in my future. It was a good weekend and now I feel less lazy than I was for sitting high center on Xeno as long as I did.
The news about Toys R Us closing is not shocking given the rapid slide over the last month or so… but still hits me fairly hard. The truth is I didn’t go to the store that often anymore because quite frankly it was inconvenient. I did however take the opportunity on a regular occasion to visit them while roaming around other towns. I’ve been to at least one Toys R Us in San Antonio for awhile while we were down there for Pax South, but in that case it was largely because it was beside a Container Store my wife wanted to go to. I think ultimately everyone stopped going to the store for their various reasons, and this is yet another step along the chain to the loss of brick and mortar retail as a whole. It does however make me nostalgic about the Toys R Us from my past.
I found this image online, and decided to use it because more or less this represents the Toys R Us I remember from my childhood. The closest location for me was roughly an hour from my home and it was a destination location for whenever I had birthday money to spend. The reason why is that because as a kid it felt like Toys R Us had literally everything we could ever want to play with. You would go there and see toy lines that you didn’t even know existed, and for the ones you did know about… they usually had one of every figure in the line along with all of the accessories you had only heard about.
As my passion for Star Wars, GI Joe and the Thundercats turned to Video Games… Toys R Us became in a way more elevated in my mind as a destination for glory. During the heyday of the Nintendo Entertainment System they stocked what felt like every single game available for the system. For those who were not around during this era I found an image online representing how games were presented to us. There would be essentially the cover of one of the games with maybe some information about it on the backside hanging on a rack with some tickets. You would dread getting to the store and seeing an empty envelope hanging beneath the game you were looking for. I remember a few sad trips up to the redemption booth to ask if they maybe had one more copy of whatever game I was wanting somewhere in the back.
Regardless any time I managed to save up enough money to get a new game… I was immediately pestering my parents to see when we could next make the hour long slog to Tulsa and visit Toys R Us. I remember feeling like the Ticket Booth was a magical portal that had a copy of everything ever in existence… rather than just the entrance to the stock room. The core problem with the Toys R Us equation is that they made their name on being the “Biggest Toy Store There Is”. That meant to keep the promise they needed to stock more of everything to be that go to place when someone can’t find something anywhere else.
The problem is the “Children’s Bargain Town” slogan was mostly a lie, because as soon as I understood the concept of money… I understood that everything cost a little bit more at Toys R Us. In my market for a good chunk of my childhood there were was a single Toys R Us location. During the late 80s and early 90s they built a second location in what seemed to be the next up and coming area of town. However at no point was Toys R Us the bargain option. On the value for your money spectrum you had Walmart as the cheapest place you could buy anything followed fairly closely by K-Mart and Target being roughly the same. From there you jumped up to the Mall offerings of Circus World and KB Toys… and in a far distant end of the spectrum you had Toys R Us. I remember when Nintendo was king, a game at Toys R Us cost roughly ten dollars more than a game at Walmart for example.
Since they could not compete on price, they had to compete on the sheer nonsense amount of stuff they carried… but in the mid to late 90s that equation changed to. They started clearing out sections of the store to hollow them out and make room for the Babies R Us Franchise. In our store this meant that no longer did they carry products that you had never heard of… or in most cases even the entire product line for the ones you had heard of. Also it was around this time that the Video Game section was ejected from is prime real estate and shoved into a cubical in the far corner of the store the furthest location from the door. Additionally they shifted away from the ticket system and started carrying far fewer items meaning that they lost their sheer selection advantage over other stores. I remember trying Toys R Us first a few times like when Final Fantasy III (VI) came out… but finding them completely out of stock and having to move on and ultimately pick it up from Target.
As they lost selection advantage it felt like they started pushing more and more for product advantage by strong arming producers into creating a plethora of “exclusive” lines available only at Toys R Us. The problem is that this was ultimately a losing battle as well because for example in my metro area at our height we had 2 Toys R Us locations. On the other hand we have around twenty Walmart stores and about half that number of Targets. If you expand that out to the United States as a whole… the amount of products that discount retailers purchase and stock as compared to specialty toy retailers has to be staggering. So following on the heels quickly similarly exclusive product offerings started showing up in Target and then not long after Walmart diluting whatever advantage you once had. Sure you could get a collector into your store to buy that one product, but it was likely they were ONLY buying that and then moving onto another location where the money stretched a little further.
The up-swell of GameStop and Best Buy during the 90’s put a nail in the coffin in product offering advantage Toys R Us might have had on the video games front as well. Why would you go to Toys R Us for what was already a limited offering from their glory days… when you could just go to GameStop and find the return of carrying every available product offering for each console? Every one of these missteps hurt Toys R Us long before online retailing came in to take the final chomp out of it. Unfortunately the “biggest toy store there is” crown now belongs to Amazon. Why would you drive from store to store to find the one action figure you want… when you can just place an order online and get it shipped to your door in two days time?
On the video game side we have a wide array of digital store fronts allowing us to plunk down our money… and get a game within a few minutes rather than needing to throw pants on and drive to the store. For me personally the convenience is king over anything else. I could in theory purchase some of the games cheaper in physical form from Amazon and have the discs shipped to me in two days. However I would rather just have the game installed and always “on tap” rather than needing to fiddle for the disc or figure out which case I shoved which game into. In truth I am having a hard time remembering what the last game I purchased in physical form was. More than likely it was World of Warcraft Cataclysm collectors edition, and even then only because they had not yet started offering digital collectors editions of their games. From Pandaria onwards I happily gobbled up that digital CE and went on with my life rather than trying to hope and pray that Amazon would ship the game on time for me to hit the midnight start.
On consoles it is even more important to me personally to have games digitally, because when I take my switch or 3DS somewhere I don’t want to juggle a bunch of awkward cartridges… nor do I want some sort of a “cozy” that I carry around with me to keep them organized. I want the ability to flip to the game I want, hit a button and boot directly into it with no muss or fuss. Since at least 2007 I have been 99.9% digital in my game purchases, and each one of those sales is in theory one that could have gone to a retailer like Toys R Us. I am part of the problem and I am absolutely part of why this store is closing.
I have a deep nostalgia about my experiences with Toys R Us as a kid, but the adult version never quite lived up to those memories. While I would like to think I am still a Toys R Us kid at heart and can break into song singing the theme… I never had kids of my own to continue the tradition with. Additionally shopping at the physical store is inconvenient and requires a trip to a completely different area of town than I visit on a regular basis. Before the second store closed a few years ago… I used to go to that one occasionally because it was easy to get in and out of without a lot of hassle. I remember semi-regularly visiting when I was looking for Lego Minifigures blind bags and even finding some ones stashed from an ancient series.
The problem is… I maybe went there once a month if that and prior to the blind bags… it had been maybe five years since I had darkened the door of that store. I will miss the Toys R Us from my memories, and this absolutely feels like one of those “end of an era” moments. However it will join the same memory bin where Babbages, Software Etc, Media Play, Hastings, Circuit City, Computer City, Comp USA, KB Toys, Circus World and countless other stores I liked going to… but no longer exist. Part of getting older is remembering fondly things that don’t exist anymore… and I guess after a decline that started decades ago… I am okay with adding Toys R Us to that stack.
One of the more interesting things about Monster Hunter World is how your perspectives shift as you level through the game and ultimately get better at it. There was a time during the pre-launch demo that I considered Great Jagras to be challenging, and now that encounter doesn’t even bear mentioning. I’ve beaten that monsters several times before it even had a chance to run anywhere as a way of testing out new weapons. Similarly I remember a time when Tobi Kadachi invoked fear in me, and now it is just a chill electrical squirrel lizard that I largely ignore unless I specifically need parts from it. Similarly I used to run from Legiana and now… if it really wants to start some shit I will end it.
So the question is… what changed? Ultimately the answer is that I did. Sure I have better gear but also I have a better understanding of each of those fights. I also understand how the higher progressed players are always willing to take on whatever happens to be that fight that you are currently considering difficult. I remember being terrified of Anjanath but just recently farmed it to help folks get tickets for the Aloy appearance and bow event. It is all a matter of perspective and each time you move up in the game you reach a new plateau of difficulty… that tends to make everything below it pale in comparison.
This moves us forward to last nights activities. Nergigante was one of those encounters that I never thought would ever reach a point where I was comfortable with it. For me at least it was an extreme challenge to get through this fight when I needed it to move the story forward. In the meantime I have been fighting other elder dragons, that in truth are way more annoying than Nergi or at least have the potential to be more annoying. One of the weapons I have wanted in my elder dragon slaying arsenal is a Nergal Reaper… which does some dragon elemental damage but more importantly has high elderseal. This unfortunately would require me to farm Nergi… and that is just what I did last night.
Instead of throwing myself at this encounter solo… I decided on the nonsense option. That means I threw myself at SOS roulette over and over until I farmed the components I needed from Nergigante. This also means that there were more than a few times when a single newer player used up all of our faints and I failed at my mission. However even then… I walked away with a point of pride because during none of the MANY times I did this last night… did I actually faint myself. I managed to get in… deal significant amounts of damage with my new friend the poison blade and get out each time Nergi’s gaze turned to me.
Once again I had climbed to the top of the pile through repetition and experience… and even more importantly perspective. I’ve now fought things way harder than Nergigante and as a result the fight while mechanically the same seemed way easier. This is the aspect of Monster Hunter World that I think I like more than any, the feeling that I grew as a player more than my character did. Sure I am methodical when it comes to tackling new content, and sure I seem to be moving at a snails pace… but I feel like I am continuing to move the needle forward. Nergi has now entered the realm of things I feel comfortable farming… which is good I guess since my friend Grace is sitting at that step in the process meaning the cycle continues.
