User blog comment:Kogath/Monster Hunter Stories Discussion/@comment-25119729-20170815102150

So I have gotten myself to play the demo and I'm gonna write down my opinion on it. As such most of the stuff your gonna read is subjective.

Right off the bat, the CGI intro. The monsters animations can be "off" sometimes, the Tigrex and baby Rathalos you get move wierd and seems to rather slide across the screen than actually move around (pay attention to the Rathalos' legs when they run up the hill in the intro, also when he gets tail bashed by the Nargacuga and falls off the cliff). Then there are the human characters. While I think that Navi, despite being ugly, can actually get away in the CGI look, the human characters can not. These huge eyes together with the mouth movements makes them look likte some kind of robot pretending to be alive instead of actually being it. There is something just "off" about them, that makes them look creepy and unatural. What I also noticed was that right att the start and at some parts withint the intro got "pixelated" as if you were watching a bad YT video. Mabye it was because this is the demo or maybe because I use the old 3DS and not the new one. It was still wierd to see that.

After that, the playable prologe, were you get introduced to the characters. You get the stereotypical silent protagonist, while your friends are cookie cutter personalities. Cheval is basically like you, only that he gets scared easily and gets bullied by Lilia. Lilia herself is just a overexcited girl that at first wants to be a rider and then shifts into "I want to help people", without explanations as to why that mtoivation shifted. When you return to the village, an ingame cutscene plays, showing off the town. Right there it gets wierd as well, because the characters that live there and work at the smith and market are absent for a few seconds in the cutscene, before they pop into existence before your very eyes on the screen. Um, what? When you can walk around, after a certain distance, the textures of the characters pop away to get replaced by a grey placeholder model, right there for you to see. You have to get pretty close for the placeholder model to pop up the textures of the characters again. Again, it could be because this is a demo, or because I use the old 3DS with inferior hardware, but it is still wierd to see that.

Story wise, it isn't very notable either. A Nargacuga affected by Black Blight attacks the village, crushes Chevals house with his mother in it and gets chased off by a bunch of Velocidromes (lol?). Despite never seeing her corpse and only getting the ruins and some broken mirror, which I amn not even sure the mother actually had on herself when she was on screen, we get told she is dead. This serves to turn Cheval from a lesser version of the protagonist into an edgy emo who can't trust any monster anymore because " a monster killed muh family!", who wants to kill all monsters affected by Black Blight. Lilia gets her unexplained motivation shift and now wants to "help everybody". Ok. You meanwhile finally get to do the ritual that makes you a rider.

It is in this ritual that Navi is introduced. Now, many have already said why Navi is a piece of shit, but his game presence hammers it home. He is introduced trying to steal your egg because he is hungry (trying to murder an unborn baby), when caught proclaims that he is "the shining example of every felyne" (massive undeserved ego, also shown when he says "I'm the best!" when it is you that won the fight), and following you around for the rest of the game and cracking jokes like you were best friends forever despite being a complete stranger nobody in the village knows.

While I never had any good exspectations for Stories, the demo hits home just how much I can't bring myself to like the game. While the actual gameplay quality is alright, everything around that isn't. Characters are shallow and uninteresting, making me apathetic to what actually happens to them. The Story has potential to be interesting, but doesn't make anything out of it (Conflict between Riders getting discovered by Hunters much?) and barely hides the fact that it can't make anything original with the universe it is based in. The tone of the game is way to wacky and animesque to actaully get investend in it. Overall pretty lackluster and I doubt the full game is gonna do it better. Pretty meh.