Journal, April 20, 2010: Hoping not to give my presence away, I crouch low to the ground. I hear them cackle and caw as they meander around piles of bones.

My prey makes his appearance -- the Great Jaggi. I ready my rugged great sword. In a flash, he’s upon me! Maybe I wasn’t prepared after all....

Eat steel, vile beast!

My weapon of ridiculous proportion slices through the beast again and again, but he escapes my grasp and flees to another section of the woods. I track his movements and find the monster resting in what he believes to be a safe zone. Not so!

I must move quickly so as to not allow the beast a chance to recover. I hold my sword back and concentrate with all my being to deliver a life-extinguishing blow to my prey. From his carcass, I carve out his claws, hide, and frill. The village rewards me with more items from which I can fashion new weapons and armor.

Tomorrow is another day. I look forward to putting my newly acquired loot to the test against the next big game. Will I face another terrifying creature of dinosaurian ancestry, or will I trade blows with a monster of truly inhuman quality?

Rob Savillo: Ah, young hunter. I see that you’ve stumbled upon my old quest journal.

Alejandro Quan-Madrid: Young hunter? What the hell, Rob.

Rob: Sorry, sometimes I get a little carried away.

Alejandro: You’re not going to get all Demon’s Souls on me, are you?

Rob: Oh, no. I like Monster Hunter Tri, but it’s no Demon’s Souls.

Now that's a monster!

Alejandro: Like is a strong word. To me, Monster Hunter Tri is unsure of what type of game that it wants to be. I would place it somewhere between an action and role-playing game (but I wouldn't call it an action-RPG). Unfortunately, the developers decided to ditch the good parts of those genres.

With item excavation and synthesis in place of experience points and coupled with a wimpy combat system, Tri's jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none design doesn't give enough gratification for the hoops it makes players jump through.

The game certainly has an RPG feel. The visuals are reminiscent of Final Fantasy 10, the nonplayable characters talk excessively to try and force a generic storyline, and you can customize your hero with armor, weapons, and various items. 

Unfortunately, with no experience points and leveling system, I find it much harder to find motivation to keep coming back.

Sure, when running around Moga Woods and killing monsters, your character gains resource points. That’s nice, but it does little in terms of character growth; it only helps you solve mundane villager assignments.

So tasty!

Rob: Monster Hunter fits well within the role-playing genre. Do we really need to see an arbitrary number increase in order to classify a game as an RPG? I don't think so -- instead, designers merely need to convey some kind of progression to the player, but that needn't be experience points.

Monster Hunter does this in a number of ways -- building equipment buy collecting resources, increasing the functionality of the village (such as upgrading the farm with more hired hands or cultivatable items or increasing the size of fishing fleet), and completing quests for the guild, which open up new locales to hunt in and new prey to slaughter in Moga Woods.

The game also encourages collecting sets and keeping them -- not necessarily tossing one set for another -- because of the different skill bonuses attributed each. I’d argue that this type of loot acquisition and management fits decidedly with RPGs.

In your hut, you'll notice an option to save equipment sets. Going out to hunt the Great Jaggi? Fast equip your preferred load out for taking down the big guys. Need to visit the Woods for items to combine? Load up the equipment set that increases the chance of finding items.