Recent reviews by PhennaMYA

I have never been more blown away by a game quite like this. It brings back so many things that feel like they've been missing from games for ages. It's still very obviously a work in progress, with numerous dead ends, but the gameplay and combat are so good that I just keep making new characters. It's a great social game too, with wonderful music and chill vibes for grinding or chatting with friends, and the character creation is surprisingly flexible for how simple it is. It's a testament to the attention to detail and effort put into designing an excellent game. This game clearly comes from a place of experience and passion.

I really and truly hope that this game and its dev have the opportunity for a long and healthy life, and that it can inspire others to make something this fun and expressive.

it's like castlevania but smol and with very neat combat.

it's excellent and extremely intuitive for sprites and small-scale art. really easy to work with, though a little awkward for some niche things. excels at animation

Can't recommend this until the co op is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ working. If your excuse is that you're busy working on infinite, then drop infinite.

collect cute demon waifus and read their cute dialogue and look at their cute art. short, pretty easy game. slightly janky setup but easily played with a keyboard. i want more of the cute girls please support this game and it's cute girls, buy the artbook.

Don't waste your time on this rollercoaster, play a game that respects your time.

this game is exhausting, this game is emotional, this game will rip you apart and leave you to put yourself back together. i don't fully understand this game, but any game that can provide such a visceral experience while also being fun to play deserves to be seen and played by everyone.

Played this game on:
i5 6600k (16GB RAM)
RX 480 8GB
an SSD

@1080p 50-60fps

THE GOOD:
Game runs well enough once volumetric settings are turned off
Game looks pretty enough to justify running "well enough"
Much faster pace than previous monster hunter games, even considering the massive introductory sequence of cutscenes and tutorial. Most "filler" missions between giant monster hunts are relegated to optional quests you can do while your friends are complete story quests.
Controls are much smoother and more "action game" than previous monhun games, makes sequences like XL elder dragons much more fun to fight.
Scout fly system is an improvement over paintballing. Convenient, simple to work with, and doesn't completely trivialize tracking the monster (you still have to do the initial tracking to find the monster the first few times). I can understand how some people might feel scout flies cheapen the experience but I'd rather not try to track monsters over maps as large as MHW's when i could barely find them in time in older games.
As a gunlance player the new combat system feels a bit simplified but also much more intuitive. A list of commands and combos would still be appreciated tho.
Very user friendly upgrading system that refunds your materials if you don't want the weapon and would rather put those materials into a different weapon tree.
Huge amounts of quality of life changes compared to previous games, like being able to accept new quests on an expedition, fast travel, or being able to eat while away from the home city.
Tutorials having mini videos in them is also quite great.

THE GREAT:
EXPLOSIONS
BIG MONSTERS
MEOWSCULAR CHEF
STUPID FRIENDS
ARM WRESTLING
SSD LOAD TIMES
very capcom
there's a reason i've played this nearly 12 hours on day one.

THE BAD:
Even if the huge intro sequence is shorter than previous games slog of slow early quests, it's still a huge intro sequence that's far too hand-holdy and "cinematic" for my tastes.
The game still runs comparatively like ♥♥♥♥ on lower specced PCs, especially from a few years ago, and is riddled with minor bugs.
The online system isn't really any less clunky than previous monhun games and prone to frequent disconnects, presumably due to high load on day one.
Navigating the maps can get a bit disorienting due to their size and verticality, meaning sometimes a new player can get kinda lost and miss out on the hunt.
The glowing green scoutfly effect on objects isn't pretty and kinda creates an "OOH SHINY" mentality where it's easy to get distracted by random unimportant objects in the enviornment. I don't need to have every latchberry, slashberry, and needleberry bush highlighted when I'm not wielding a bowgun.
The slinger feels kinda underutilized in gameplay for how frequently the hunter uses it in cutscenes.
The characters and story are as mediocre and forgettable as any other monhun game, with a few exceptions like the chef.
A lot of systems in the game are explained through text boxes and help windows very early and not really introduced naturally or organically, so it's disorienting and hard to place what some of these systems are if you don't recognize similar systems from previous games.
A lot of graphics settings are unclear as to what they do and the lack of an FPS counter makes filtering out the graphics settings you like much more trial and error than it needs to be.

THE TERRIBLE:
HANDLER GIRL A ♥♥♥♥
the amount of IT support requests i'm getting from people i built PCs for because of this game
a lot of the character faces are kinda really pushing into uncanny valley, especially in the character creation at the start.
CAN'T PLAY A PALICO
HATE HANDLER GIRL.

TLDR:
this game is like if you took lost planet 2 and then made it melee combat, that's what it feels like and it's glorious. if you haven't played lost planet 2 the ♥♥♥♥ are you doing.

THISSSSSSSS.

Hour and a half setting up my PS3 controller with it.
Thirty minutes learning the controls.

SO MUCH FUN. Bombastic and crazy and animu, but fun.

That was pleasant! Some of the stuff with the behavior from the two girls was a bit confusing at first, but the game starts to introduce this somewhat interesting dynamic of how the catgirls are treated as pets rather than other humans in the society. I'm very curious to see if they stay consistent with that and develop the story in a meaningful way. If not, you can still BATHE IN THE MOE.

If nothing else, these catgirls manage to be extremely cute, and most of their actions makes sense. I'm waiting for the full release! I am hoping that the full release will add more to the characters and make the story more enjoyable, but I did find myself adjusting to them and starting to like them rather quickly over this demo.

Depending on what kind of things are cut and how the re-writes for those portions are handled, it may be a better idea to purchase the uncut version than the all-ages, but I'm hoping that the all-ages version drums up some nice content on it's own to be worth the purchase.

It's also been mentioned a few times, but being able to control something as silly as the bounciness of boobs in a VN like this is kind of a good thing. The entire featureset of the options as a whole is somewhat surprising, though I haven't had to really mess with anything to get an ideal experience.

+ for boob physics, good art, a good translation, good animations, CAMERA MOVEMENT IN A VN, and mostly natural writing
- needs a few more poses, in my opinion, and the writing does feel a tad silly at times

*Please note that this review was written by a lonely 19-year old who's fairly used to silly Japanese things by now.