Monster Hunter

2025 in Review: The Games

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Good Morning Folks! After giving you updates on my life… it is time to roll on into the rest of my year in review topics. I legitimately do not know how many of these I have, but I have stalled long enough. This morning I am going to talk about the games that were important to me during the last year in either a good way or a bad way. This list is not going to look anything like most 2025 in review lists, because I do not play a ton of new games. I play an awful lot of ARPGs and treat each season as though it were a game launch. This wildly skews the sort of results that I have in this scenario. I am also this time sort of loosely grouping the list into less important to more important, but not necessarily a strict order.

Path of Exile II: The Last of the Druids

This is probably the most recent of the games I am going to talk about it, and I am still more or less playing it. On December 12th, Path of Exile II released a big update that launched the Last of the Druids and Fate of the Vaal league. In it they gave us access to the first of the Int/Str hybrid classes the Druid which has ascendancies for Shaman and Oracle. More important than that, they gave us access to the primal ability tree and the talisman weapon that allow us to turn into a Bear, Wolf, or Wyvern. I’ve been deeply critical of Path of Exile II up until this point, seeing it as a bit of a mechanically worse version of Path of Exile that just happens to have better graphics and a better user interface. Playing Bear Druid, and specifically Demon Bear Shaman is what really pushed me over the edge to truly enjoying this game. It is fun as heck to hop around the map causing big explosions with my fat bear ass. The game still has problems… and will continue to have problems for a very long time… but this gameplay got me hooked.

Slormancer

Slormancer is a little 2D sorta isometric view roguelike arpglike game that is a heck of a lot of fun. I did not play this game anywhere near as much as I should have, but I hope to remedy that in 2026. I did play it enough however to want to talk about it. The mechanics of this game are just really fun, and it reminds me of what if you took Rogue Legacy and turned it into an ARPG. I mostly played the knight character, but the archer was pretty fun as well. This really wants to be played with a controller though, and is ideal for television gaming. Once I get off my ass and figure out what I want to use as a proper Steam in the Livingroom setup, I will probably be playing more of this. If you have not checked it out and like any of the types of games that I eluded to in this post… check it out. It’s a heck of a lot of fun for $20.

Dune Awakening

I have such wildly mixed feelings about Dune Awakening. This is going to be a game that goes in my disappointments of the year pile. The AggroChat folks and friends decided to play together on a private server that Tam rented for us as we all got started, and I feel like that is the correct way to play this game. It is unfortunate that it requires someone shelling out for a server, and it is even more unfortunate that it does not grant you private access to the shared open world pvp deep desert. What killed this game for me though… was upkeep. You are required to play a certain amount of this per week in order to generate enough fuel to keep the shield on your base active, or your base slowly disintegrates over time. This feels really fucking bad. Namely because I got busy with various events while playing this game… and then had the death of a spouse which knocked me even further out of whack with ever getting back in. Once I lost everything, there was no point in me going back. I would love to see a pure PVE sandbox version of this game that allows you to set custom rules on a server by server basis for things like upkeep. The game itself has gone from a peak concurrency of not quite 200k players to an average of 8k…. so I think maybe it did not work quite right for a lot of players.

Hellclock

So what if I told you there was a game… loosely based on the real world events surrounding Brazil’s War of Canudos… that took place in the aftermath of the abolishment of slavery, but also somehow involves exploring dungeons and killing zombies and shit? Hellclock is a deeply odd and stylistic roguelike ARPG where you have a fixed amount of time to explore on each run, and once you run out of time everything winds back and you get to keep any powerups that you purchased during the previous run. The cyclical nature of the game is deeply satisfying and you get various tools to extend your runs as you get better. I did not play anywhere near enough of this game but again I think it is prime fodder for once I sort out my Steam in the Livingroom setup. I have to solve my wireless network woes before I really do that unfortunately because I have my old gaming rig hooked up in the livingroom, the connectivity speeds are complete ass. I’ve also not really figured out a good keyboard and mouse option, and there will be games that I don’t necessarily want to play with a controller. Anyways NONE of that is about Hellclock, which is just a universally interesting game.

Titan’s Quest II

Titan’s Quest II had quite a number of updates throughout the year and I spent several days really getting into the game and checking out what it had to offer. I landed on the decision that I do not really enjoy playing a melee class in the game, but dig the heck out of playing ranged. I played a sort of icicle archer thing that worked really well, and honestly the game itself is just gorgeous. The fights are pretty interesting, and this is very much a worthy successor to the first game, which in itself was a worthy successor to Diablo II. If you like ARPGs in general or you were ever a fan of TItan’s Quest, then I suggest checking it out. They are continuing to release updates for the game as it is still in development so if you would rather play it once it is finished, then this might be a game to put a pin in and check back when the 1.0 release finally happens.

Abyssus

This game is a heck of a lot of fun to play with a friend, and Ace and I spent a bit of time playing this game and should probably at some point return to it. I think Destiny Rising more or less stole the place in our gaming lives that this took up for a bit. Essentially Abyssus is a wave based arena shooter rogue-like… about exploring the depths of an underwater dungeon. You and your friends take on waves of monsters, get loot, and work your way down to fixed boss fights at specific floors. The deeper you go the harder it gets and the more varied the environments become. Big Nautical-punk vibes with this game because you are both wearing these diving suits while you wield your big damned guns and kill things. The further you go the more points you get to configure your build and control your weapon load-outs, but a lot of options unlock symmetrically as you reach certain floors giving you a mix of guaranteed upgrades and choice based upgrades. I am not sure this game would be fun solo, but it was a blast with someone hanging out on voice chat.

Path of Exile – Mercenaries of Trarthus

Mercenaries of Trarthus was a challenge league that ran in Path of Exile from June 13th to October 27th and represented the first new content we had gotten in almost a year since the launch of Settlers of Kalguur the previous year. First it was just amazing to get some new content in the game, but more than that it introduced Mercenaries and I have always loved those sorts of mechanics in ARPGs. One of my favorite aspects of Diablo III was building out my companion to buff the things that were weak in my build, and that is largely what players did in order to make some truly busted builds. The real meta of the league was doing some sort of build that could apply large amounts of Lightning damage, and then using Doryani’s Prototype on your mercenary, to debuff all of the mobs in your presence to have large amounts of negative lighting resistance. I think the build that I ran as my second in the league managed to get close to -300% Lightning Resistance while dealing a ton of damage with Storm Brand of Indecision. It was thoroughly busted but lord did I have a lot of fun playing this league.

Monster Hunter Wilds

There will be some of you who do not remember just how much I got into Monster Hunter World when it released in 2018 both on the original PS4 release, and later when it came out on PC in August of that same year. I had never really mainlined a Monster Hunter game despite trying to dabble in them on the mobile platforms, but this game sucked me in and stole so much of my time. Monster Hunter Wilds was a return to the same style of game as Worlds and when it launched I had a heck of a lot of fun playing it. Sadly I did not really stick around as much as I thought I might, but that does not discount the fact that I had an awful lot of fun playing it. I probably would have played it more but every time Ammo, Sita and I tried to group up I started having network problems. Capcom… has some of the shittiest grouping systems ever, and if they got someone from a western live service game to come unfuck their game interface… I think folks would be around far longer. I only put in around 60 hours, but it was 60 hours well spent.

Last Epoch – Beneath Ancient Skies

On August 21st Last Epoch dropped a pretty signfiicant update with Beneath Ancient Skies which added a whole new chapter to the game and a new league mechanic hunting down primal monsters and chosing to evolve them making them more difficult and rewarding. I had a really fun league with this game, but ultimately I burned through it pretty quickly. I played a Fire Minions Necromancer build and then ultimately hopped on the Thorns damage train for quite possibly the stupidest build I have ever played in any game where I am just nuking the entire screen with thorns damage. The new act was a lot of fun and it is probably the best content they have added into the game to date. The primal league mechanic was also a lot of fun, and each time this game expands it keeps getting better. I think the challenge for me is that I “finish” with the game way faster than I do with Path of Exile. I reach a point with my builds where I have seen everything that I really want to see and really pushing to the true pinnacle content of the game requires more hours than I really want to dump into it. That is not a failing of the game and more a case that it still needs more years to cook before it will be as rich of an experience as Path of Exile has.

Path of Exile – Legacy of Phrecia Event

Earlier when I talked about Mercenaries of Trarthus, part of the reason why that league was so damned much fun is that it had been a literal year since we last got a new league in the game. So much of GGG’s time was being devoted to the care and feeding of the fledgling Path of Exile II, that the POE core felt ignored. That is not to say things were not happening, we had a few fun private leagues like the Pohx League event, but there was one thing that probably took the cake. Almost as a shadow drop, Grinding Gear Games gave us the Legacy of Phrecia alternative ruleset event where every single one of the 19 Ascendancy classe were replaced. It was wild to play through this and I played a Righteous Fire Scavenger… which is the alternative version of the Scion. It was so much fun, and now this game mode exists as an alternate ruleset that you can use to create custom leagues. There is part of me though that wishes at some point all of the Phrecia ascendancies go core and become just alternate options allowing us 38 different ascendancy choices in the game.

Destiny Rising

Destiny Rising is essentially my game of the year…. but it does not get the top slot for reasons I will talk about later. This is a gacha game from Net Ease that remixes the tried and true Destiny format, but also makes it a heck of a lot more enjoyable in the process. There is no reason why I should be loving a Gacha game as much as I am, because I thought Genshin Impact broke me of that. However… Destiny Rising is shockingly fair when it comes to its Gacha mechanics. I have 3 accounts, 2 of which I have spent zero money on… and they both feel like I have plenty of things to do without having spent a dime. The whole three acccouints thing is largely because I am trying to maintain a guild when there are really only two or three of us that are actively playing. That is a whole other discussion. If you ever loved Destiny at any point in the past, you owe it to yourself to check out Destiny Rising. It is so damned much fun and really streamlines what made that game great. If you DO end up playing… hit me up because we certainly can use some more active players in our guild to do dailies.

Guild Wars 2 Fractal Incursion Event

My “Game of the Year” really goes to more specifically an event of the year. In September, Guild Wars 2 shadow dropped an event called the Fractal Incursion. This added a new feature to the game which allowed you to randomly queue for Fractals, giving the game what it needed so badly… a more modern group finder. Not only did they do this… they bribed the fuck out of us to run tons of them by providing a path to a piece of legendary armor, and also giving you a pathway to get said armor for every single weight class in the game. The end result was that Lion’s Arch specifically around the Mists portal was busier than at any point I have ever seen in this game’s history. The above screenshot was taken one morning when I was working on my blog post… so completely off peak hours for either EU or NA and it was STILL packed. Better yet we are going to be getting a version of this same group finder for a combined version of Raids and Strikes later this year. This has breathed so much new life into Guild Wars 2, and prompted us to have some really fun Thursday night fractal groups as we all chain ran them trying to get through the achievements. Absolutely the highlight of my gaming year, and on the 13th I believe we are getting a return of the Fractal Rush event so looking forward to that as well.

Those were my games and gaming events of the year. I am sure it looks pretty different than the lists for most people. I did not really play much in the way of single player experiences this year. I hope to remedy that in 2026, but who knows where that will go. My happy place tends to be listening to an audiobook while plugging away at a mechanically interesting but narratively devoid experience. Even for this coming year my games list will be the games that I played, not necessarily the games that came out so at some point when I finally do get around to beating Clair Obscur it will probably make a list. Anyways. Were there any unusual games that made your personal Games of the Year list? Drop me a line below.

Wilds is Cursed

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Hey Folks! Last night instead of our usual Guild Wars 2 nonsense on Thursday nights… I attempted to do some Monster Hunter Wilds again with Ammo and Sita. We have tried to do this a few times… but something always ends up causing problems. The first time Ammo chain crashed until I lost power… and then when the power came back… I lost internet. Last night the entire time we were playing Sita sounded like a robot… and every time we engaged anything one or more of us would get dropped from the linked party. Dealing with Capcom multiplayer is a very specific realm of hell. Then we realized the thing we were trying to unlock and group up for… is a Solo Arena quest. So we had a lot of us all hanging out on voice and being frustrated together as we attempted to “Akuma”. But hey… Barrel bowling is still fun as heck.

Over in Guild Wars 2… I am back on that World vs World grind and so is Sita. Specifically we both bought Legendary Weapon Kits and I am chasing the very dumb goal of making Sunrise. This however is only a means to an end, because it will in turn allow me to make the Voltron of Guild Wars 2 weapons… Eternity. We even managed to drag Ammo along for this nonsense… but in truth… grouping with friends in WvW is pretty much pointless because it is not like you can actually see each other in the giant “Zerg” huddle. The key trait that you need to learn to succeed in this game mode is find the tag and stand on the tag… and then move only when the tag moves. We had a good commander that was flanked by some really freaking phenomenal healers and were able to “OutZerg” the other teams as we captured their stuff.

We were exceptionally successful and in a single average I managed to do half of a Gift of Battle reward track. I believe Sita who had started this grind before me came within a fraction of finishing his up. I am really looking for the WvW Rush event in July and will probably just bank a bunch of Gift of Battles because they are always useful… and also the track in general is a decent way to get Mystic Clovers. More importantly… I passed rank 100 in World Vs World and got the new title of Veteran… which seems weird that this is higher than General was. Why do I care about WvW ranks? Well I kind of want to make the backpack… which itself will require that I have rank 350. Only 248 left to go. I am hoping I can make a massive dent in this during the WvW Rush and hopefully finish that off… and will absolutely probably just be living in WvW during that time. Thankfully I find that whole nonsense shockingly enjoyable… for someone who is traditionally a massive CareBear.

Dune is out… or at least the headstart is out and I played a bit of it last night. Enough to get through the very beginning of the tutorial and out into Hagga Basin which is the first real zone. I watched a video about how limited the Trooper ends up being and how I should probably just play a Mentat which has a turret… so I did that thing. It really probably is the correct decision because very early you can get a bunch of “makes guns better” abilities. The turret unfortunately is kind of shit. I expected something more akin to the pop up turrets in The Division. What it is instead is a grenade that you throw… and then when you “detonate” it, it turns into a turret that maybe fires off three bolts before exploding and if you are standing near it… you take damage. I am not extremely sold on this game yet. I like the vibe and I am a massive Dune geek… but also the gameplay feels more extreme than I like my survival games. Dealing with lack of water is a massive problem… but I have a thing that lets me drain my victims of blood and convert that to water so hopefully that will make things easier. What I really need though is a Literjon so that I can carry water with me.

I am very much in the bumblefucking my way around the desert mode right now, but at least I have a crappy shelter. I strategically set up my shelter in a valley that stays almost entirely in shade no matter what time of day it is, that happens to be right beside one of the vacuum sealed caves. Given that things respawn in the world pretty regularly, this gives me a pretty decent source of scrap metal as well as some lootable chests that have a few materials that I do not have any use for right now… but are flagged as orange in color which makes me think at some point they will be useful. For the moment I am stumbling up the tech tree and the entire game will probably feel much better once I have a way to carry around water, and a way to traverse between the assorted rock outcroppings more easily. I have “walked without rhythm” my way to another outcropping… found a much larger scavenger camp than I am used to…and died without remembering to set down a respawn beacon. Tonight I will probably make my way back over there and try and retrieve whatever I dropped in my backpack.

The other huge benefit of where I decided to set up my base is that on the other side of the sealed cave… is a small scavenger camp. Essentially when it respawns… I can set down my turret, unseal the cave door… and let the turret kill the two Scavengers without me having to lift a finger. This gives me a somewhat reasonable renewable source of blood to then convert into water with my purification machine. There are various lootables around the camp as well, but I am not sure how much value a handful of Solari will have in the grand scheme of things. I have a contract to deliver scrap metal to someone, but it is also way across another open stretch of desert which terrifies me at the moment. I will probably wait until nightfall to cross so that I won’t have to also worry about the impact of direct sunlight. I am in this weird state of equilibrium with the game where I don’t love it and I don’t hate it… I just feel like I need to push through the awkward first steps that any survival game has.

Yesterday was also the content reveal stream for the Secrets of the Atlas expansion for Path of Exile and it looks amazing. However if I were to sit down and start talking about it… it would be a whole other blog post. I will probably save that for Monday. I hope you all have a phenomenal weekend and if you too are venturing forth into Arrakis, drop me a line and let me know what you are thinking about the game so far.

Wild Wicked Weather

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Good Morning Folks. We’ve been dealing with a pretty outrageous spate of weather events over the last couple of weeks. This current batch started on Thursday night we had really bad storms and a few tornadoes that spun up… which are were thankfully not at our house this time. However that does not mean that we have not been getting quite a bit of hail. The worst of it was golf ball sized hail, but Friday afternoon my wife was in the backyard reading and captured this photo of a deluge of pea sized hail. Thankfully none of it lasted terribly long, and to the best of my knowledge we’ve had not damage to either our automobiles or roof. It has just been stressful to effectively be under constant watch for bad weather. We’ve been running the televisions pretty much 24/7 just in case the news cuts in with a tornado warning or something.

What we have been dealing with more recently however is flooding. After over a week of pretty consistent deluge the ground is just completely saturated. This means when it is raining we are highly susceptible to flash flooding.Luckily anything we have dealt with has been minor, and is largely in the form of large pools of standing water on our lawn. However the green belt behind the house is pretty full and all of the nearby lakes and rivers are beyond flood stage. There are several roads in my town that are blocked off from travel due to flooding. With this also comes several deaths as folks foolhardily drive into water flowing over the road. You learn the catch phrase “Turn Around, Don’t Drown” pretty early around here… and clearly these folks did not mind that lesson. We are all safe and well… but are absolutely hoping for a break in this nonsense. Sadly by the end of the summer we will be back in drought territory more than likely.

Ever since realizing that Ammo, Sita, and Sol are timezone compatible with me… I have been joining in their nonsense when possible. We made tentative plans during the day to work on some stuff in Monster Hunter Wilds and I logged in to patch up my machine and make sure everything would load fine given that I had not played it in probably a month. I had to rebuild my shaders, so was thankful that I did some prep work. Ammo unfortunately got caught in this cycle of rebuilding shaders and then crashing out… and in the meantime Sita and I were partaking of barrel bowling in the new grand hub. Then… about the time it seemed like Ammo was stabilizing… I lost my internet. I can technically tether to my phone, but the connection is nowhere near stable enough to actually play much in the way of online games. It came back a few times… but only temporarily and around 9:20 I gave up for the evening. Apparently it had taken Ammo another 30 minutes or so before her situation was straightened out so it seems as though the entire outing was a bit cursed.

I did get to unlock the Grand Hub which was pretty great, which then allowed me to view the new cat cooking animation. It isn’t so much a cooking animation but more a situation where the three adorable palicoes in Tomato hats do a speedy delivery of food from somewhere else. I was using a Kunafa village voucher so they delivered me a meal of cheesy bread. While I will probably forever miss the actual cat cooking animations from Monster Hunter World, this is at least better than cooking my own food. The Monster Hunter Rise scenes were pretty great as well, but World will always be the best. The new scenes though have a heck of a lot of charm so I will accept it.

One good thing did come out of the otherwise cursed evening. Ammo and Sita have the whole grouping together thing down to an art form. That has always been the problem with Capcom online games… is that they seem to have no fucking clue how people actually interact with each other. It is such a clusterfuck to actually get grouped with a friend… but this is essentially the process that Sita taught me, that I will now follow going forward. This requires you to share a squad with the person you are wanting to group up with, but from the start screen you choose Lobby Search and then Squad Lobby Search. Next you choose the squad you share and choose to join that lobby. This is going to give you a private lobby only for members of that squad. Then when someone posts a quest you can go to Alma and choose Lobby Member Quests and find the quest that was just posted. Following these steps made it relatively painless to get grouped up.

Hopefully the next time it is Monster Hunter Wilds night, things will go a bit better overall.

Dark Knight Mode

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Hey Folks. I’m in a bit of a weird place right now with Monster Hunter Wilds. I am 56 hours into the game and HR 66 and essentially “done” with the game. That is not to say that I have stopped playing it, but I am also sort of out of stretch goals. I’ve completed the set of gear that I want and the weapons that I wanted… and have taken down the hardest tempered fight currently in the game. I feel like either Monster Hunter Wilds is a much easier game than Monster Hunter World was… either that or my muscle memory kicked in and I am just much better at the game than I was when World launched in 2018. I am also playing from the beginning on my platform of choice (PC) with my control scheme of choice (Mouse and Keyboard) so I figure some of it has to account for that.

Here is an attempt at a Photoshop image that pulls together all of the relevant data points about my gear load out. I am wearing the full Tier 8 Arkveld Alpha armor set and rocking a Guiding Artorious Sword and Shield and a Binder Mace Hammer. I’ve gone hard into defensive stats because I really enjoy being up in the face of the monster and “tanking it” in a manner that I would normally Tank an MMORPG boss. I spent a good chunk of last night running around with Ace and doing various hunts that happened to be up, and it was delightful. They are far better at breaking parts, and my job was to attempt to hold the attention of the monster as best as possible while they peppered it in the butt with arrows. I remembered there being some form of taunt in this game, and I need to look up to see if there is a gem I can add to my weapon that does that.

The most important part of my daily routine however is going to Suja and petting Poogie. In this version you get random items from petting the recurring pig. So far I have not uncovered any outfits and the only customization seems to be the ability to rename Poogie… which would be blasphemy. Hopefully in future patches we get the proper retinue of outfits to deck out our piggie pal. I do love the frog on head though with this rendition. For those who have not found Poogie yet, you have to get to chapter 3-2 and from that point forward you can port to Suja and pet until your heart is content… pending you know when you stop.

I also spent a bit of time and updated my hunter profile. I was still wearing Chatacabra armor up until this point, which was the first set of gear that I made when I started playing the game. The profile name system is a bit awkward so I attempted to come up with something sufficiently stupid. I think it mostly has a cohesive feel now. I am not sure that anyone actually looks at hunter profiles. I’ve not really checked any out of my friends and squadmates other than Ammo when she first joined. I should really do that, to see if anyone has something brilliant on theirs. At some point I need to finish up all of the optional quests that I have yet to run at least once. I lost momentum when I hit the endgame and focused entirely on getting my gear. Now that I am geared… I am a bit rudderless until more content is added.

Mostly I have been chipping away at various gear sets for cosmetic purposes. Essentially once you hit High Rank, any gear set that is blue, purple, or orange can be used for transmog. There are generally two color channels on each item and there is a wide variety of looks you can choose from, as well as some relatively crappy gear that seems to exist purely for cosmetic purposes. I wish however you could transmog your weapons, and dye them. I find it annoying that I was able to dye the entire Arkveld set, but I still have a glaringly white weapon that no longer matches it. Fashion Hunter is probably the true endgame, and I am slowly chipping away at the Jin Dahaad set. I’ve also crafted the full Odog set which I have always thought looked cool. I do kinda wish the Red variant from Worlds still existed. Maybe in a later update we will get the non-Guardian Odog.

I have no clue why… but in every game I end up with what feels like a default activity. For me it is beating up this dumb chicken. I have no clue WHY I like killing it so much… but I really do. I always “feel like chicken tonight”. It doesn’t hurt that Tempered variants are up almost constantly and they all seem to have really good rewards. This morning for example before I sat down to write this post I knocked one out and got three Wyvern gems from it. Basically the rewards that I have been getting is what has been dictating what monsters I hunt. I think I have largely collected a full set of the Tempered monster Investigations, and the Frenzied variants seem way less common. Maybe as I knock out some more of the two monsters at once optional quests, other things will open up. I should probably set my focus on doing those soon-ish just to see if the landscape shifts at all.

Monster Hunter Wilds is a phenomenal game… but also one that I find myself lacking the desire to grind for grind’s sake. I’ve got a couple of friends in the 70s, one in the 80s… and one that is 119 as of this morning. My guess is that they are playing with a fixed group of friends, because the act of doing group hunts is way more enjoyable than solo hunting. I could happily log in to do group content with my friend Ace every night, but my will to keep pushing just for myself is waning. I am likely going to take a break from the game for a bit, at least until the April update that adds new content. I will probably keep doing weekly quests as they show up. However I knocked out most of those in a single evening. I remember all of this taking me so much longer to get to in World, but again… that was really my very first Monster Hunter game.