If Monster Hunter Freedom 2 isn't the love of your life, you still can't fault it on good looks. The CG animation is tops. Nobody is surprised by this since it is CAPCOM. The in-game graphics and the scenes that play out using the game's engine are really nice. Music swells and changes to match exciting events during the game and the monsters have a believably scary array of sounds. The scale of the game's world is nicely captured and there is a lot of enjoyment to be had scaling walls and looking out over palisades into verdant forests or roiling waters. The scenery is often interrupted by a huge, blood-fanged monster. This tends to put a damper on those photo opportunities at ye old scenic overlook...

Like a lot of titles that value customization, you can see the effect of dressing your Monster Hunter Freedom 2 character differently and arming him or her with different weapons. The variety is fun for people that appreciate the dress-up-doll style of gameplay made common in past RPG and Action/RPG titles. The item collection and customization is a natural, but the interesting thing about this genre is the additional strategic component of gathering and hunting. Monsters are generally easy to find, but they move around a lot. This makes the map display critical and also helps you appreciate the benefit of a reactive paintball that allows you to track monsters for a limited time even if they leave your screen. The other category of mission tends toward gathering items or crafting with gathered ingredients. This requires a keen eye on the environment since there aren't any labels on items. The dedicated fans will appreciate this feature which works along similar lines as the card collecting or rarity ratings for any collectible in a game. The whole thing would work better if the graphics were improved just a tick. It can be hard to find that perfect item that you haven't seen before when it is blending into the background. The goal of the developers seems to have been to keep the interface simple and uncluttered. Mission accomplished but there are times when it wouldn't be a bad thing to get some kind of visual clue about a useful item nearby.

To look at other "gotta catch 'em all" games and compare the Monster Hunter franchise is probably doing one or the other side a disservice. It still comes down to a very stylized gameplay and story element that runs true across any of these games. There isn't much of a story and there isn't much of an objective other than to improve your hunting skills. Monster Hunter Freedom 2 feels - as did its predecessor - much like an Easter egg hunt on a grand scale. The battles are usually over quickly when you expire or win the day. The battle mechanics can be complex but generally don't have to be. What we're left with is gathering and hunting for the sake of both. There isn't a point to playing except to improve your character's skill and obtain or create excellent items. Why would this be fun?

It's fun for the same reason that a game like Pokemon is fun. It's even more fun because the monsters in Monster Hunter Freedom 2 are not cute and cuddly. Most grown-ups that aren't catering to their kids' obsession are not capturing cute characters, trading cards, or watching anime shows featuring teenage kids tracking down badges. And yet it is undeniably fun to battle creatures and capture them... or eat them even! Like I said, this is the adult version of "gotta catch 'em all." Monster Hunter Freedom 2 does a nice job of updating a style of play that appeals strongly to a niche audience. To say this is a mission-based game is a major understatement. The game is nothing but a series of missions strung together without any strong plot or story element to get in the way. If you like the idea of grinding and collecting money, points, and items, then you'll have a blast here. If you came expecting some rousing plot or a story that matters, you'll be disappointed.

If the lack of a story or enduring hook in the game's plot is a bad thing, we can at least say that the collaborative elements of Monster Hunter Freedom 2 are right on target. The ability to form a party and go out after large prey is cool. Really cool. If you had a dedicated group or even a dedicated friend willing to play the game with you on a regular basis, it would be easily addictive. In a single-player world, there really isn't enough to make Monster Hunter Freedom 2 more than a vacation rental. With multiple (up to four) players in the mix, there are all kind of possibilities. The traps and poisons you rarely have time to fool with suddenly become incredibly fun and strategic. The monsters you couldn't touch with a hundred-foot pole suddenly become accessible. There are also some missions that aren't available to individuals, so you know you are missing a portion of the game when you aren't playing with friends.

Rarely does a game offer such extensive training. It is impossible to go through the town training school and not be at least middle-of-the-road in terms of capture, kill, and gather skills. Proficiency with weapons, use and creation of items, the game's controls... all of these things start to gel once you work through the training. The "real" game is plenty difficult, but you'll be a million times better prepared after the training. Veterans of the first game will find that they don't need the training since the controls and actions are duplicated from that title, for the most part. It may help to revisit certain segments of training and if so, the entire series is modular and not sequential. NPC interaction will help to explain the 10% of strategy that isn't covered in training and you always have the manual if you're the nervous type. Props for all the support though... nobody should come away feeling that they weren't prepared for the Monster Hunter Freedom 2 experience.

There are some interesting elements to how the game plays and controls. The play style is straight-up mission combat, so don't expect to lose much if you forget to save. Plenty of prompting is available to help you remember in any case. The load screens were what became so annoying in the first game. Thankfully, there is less loading this time around and what remains is tolerable. Moving from one area of the game to another requires some loading, but not so much as to create frustration. In the heat of a battle while you are chasing a monster from section to section, you may find this loading mechanic painful but it is just the trade-off for nice looking environments. The menu system is a strange one because it is meant to be "always on" and quick to access. You can grab traps or throwing items during a battle and heal quickly as you need. The downside is that a stray button-press will cause you to inadvertently slug down a much-needed potion or waste a whetstone on a perfectly sharp blade. The idea to put menu controls anywhere near the often-used face buttons was a bad idea. Something less likely to be hit such as the Select button would have been a better place to enable the menu. The draw-sword and put-away sword idea is also still cumbersome. It is easy to slip at a critical moment as you go for the killing blow and end up stupidly putting away your sword! Other weapons don't have a similar quandary, but for projectile weapons you have the loading to worry about.

Many elements of the game seem calibrated to remind the player that he or she is a fragile creature with decent fighting skills, hopelessly outmatched by his or her opponent. Compared to most of the monsters, the character feels slow and less-than-deadly. Healing and using items is a nice thing, but the direct approach is often frustrating. So much of the camera control and the character control is muddy and difficult to orient correctly. In a perfect irony, the more the PSP approaches the PS2's level of graphic sophistication, the more we see typical 3D camera and control issues crop up. Many weapons and items require precision control in order to be effective. Swinging the camera around or turning your character around sometimes feels like backing up a big truck. Whether this is due to a conscious choice by the developers or simply the limitations of the system is unknown. What we know is that Monster Hunter Freedom 2 plays well enough to reward the players that purchased the last version of the game and keep then enthralled. More, bigger, better is the mantra compared to the first iteration on PSP. Now if we can just find a more compelling reason to keep hunting and slaughtering all these monsters...