User blog comment:BannedLagiacrus/Monster Appreciation Week: Kulve Taroth/@comment-15446856-20181207140642

April 2018, a trailer for an update to Monster Hunter: World is announced. Players, including myself are surprised and hyped to see what appeared to be a brand new monster, an Elder Dragon, clad in gold and in an area of gold. The monster would be the first of the brand new Siege Quests, a type of quests designed around multiple hunts on a single monster, appearing to be like the Elder Dragon fights of classic games, where they would be whittled down each attempt until they fell. It would be in next week. Its name: Kulve Taroth.

I begin the quest for the first time, engorged by the hype. I thought everything was amazing, the music, the monster, the area, the theme, the way the characters remark their amazement on seeing it, the fact it has minions around it, there is gold everywhere, there is unique gold fauna! I fight the Kulve, it appears tough, not doing much damage to it. Eventually it repels. I said, "this fight is going to be fantastic from start to finish". Fantastic I said.

The hype then soon crumbled as time went on, and then after I had beaten the quest the second time, all hype had faded and let me have a clear vision on what I had experienced.

I came to the conclusion that Kulve Taroth is my most hated monster in the game and a horrific presentation of what future Siege Monsters will be like. Everything about this monster is bad, and I am perfectly able of explaining it all as I've done so previously. Not only do I intend on sharing my thoughts, but also inspire thought in people who think nothing is wrong with Kulve. I shall split it into segments for easier reading.

Appearance

With the hype goggles this is something brand new and epic. But don't be fooled, it isn't. The design is like they took a Great Jagras, copy-pasted a Tobi-Kadachi tail on its back, replaced its dreadlocks with ram horns, gave it lipstick, and what can only be described as a bra on its chest. Upscale all of that and voila! A "new" and "original" monster! No. Without the gold Kulve Taroth is literally now just a fucking Great Jagras with horns and spikes. Not to mention, the Kulve Taroth even walks and moves EXACTLY like Great Jagras; the full Jagras with its golden coat and normal Jagras when freed. And they try to cover that all up by just painting everything gold.

So right off the bat we have a unoriginal design that tries to pass off as new, but anyone with the ability to compare and think will see the obvious similarities.

Abilities

Here we go. Kulve Taroth has got to be one of the most boring and annoying as hell fights I have ever experienced in the whole series. In every phase Kulve Taroth has an assortment of moves, which, like Xeno'jiiva, only TWO ARE ORIGINAL. The two attacks I speak of are: making the ceiling in Phase 4 drip lava, oh I'm sorry, "molten gold", and it wildly smashing the ground with its horns also in Phase 4. Kulve Taroth decided to one-up Xeno'Jiiva by having its entire moveset be taken with minor alteration from Great Jagras, Great Girros, Dodogama AND Tobi-Kadachi! Again, completely unoriginal. It takes some tail swipes from Tobi and the Great Fang's, it takes the bites from Great Jagras and Great Girros, the claw swipes from the Greats and Dodogama, it gets the body slams from fat Jagras and Dodogama, the rolls from fat Jagras and Dodo, the side tackle from Girros, the charge attack from Girros, and even its infamous heat beams are just altered from Dodo's magma ball spitting animations.

Now, what about the attacks themselves? Holy shit, they are bad. Many of its attacks are slow and very predictable, you can easily evade them even on your first time. But these don't make it horrendous, it's, that, motherfucking, TAIL! WHO THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO MAKE ITS TAIL SO OUTRAGEOUSLY HUGE?! The tail swipes that are supposed to be avoided easily are turned into a nightmare as the tail is so damn big it will hit you from all the way near its head. The shittest of them all, is the Crimson Fatalis cursed rolls. They are fast, they go far, they are done by a monster bigger than the fucking final story monster, and they are its most done attack! There is nothing more scalp rippingly annoying that Kulve Taroth rolling towards you, thinking you're safe, but that shitstained tail tip hits you for full damage and you cart. Fuck that tail. And fuck those rolls right to hell.

It also has heat beams that are really annoying, ready to drain your health down in an instant. In Phase 4 the fight becomes a madhouse, with Kulve suddenly becoming exactly as fast as any of the Fanged Wyvern trio despite still being four times the size of them! Here, it decides its size and speed isn't good enough for it and begins burning the ceiling into globs of lava that randomly fall onto the ground. Perfectly reminds me of another Elder Dragon who does this with random mine explosions on the ground.

I hate the attacks for being incredibly annoying, and they are either ridiculously easy to avoid or difficult to avoid just because of its size, and the worst part being that they're just moves taken from current monsters in the game.

The Hunt

''But nobody cares about the attacks. Is the hunt good?'' Let me tell you, the hunt is a marathon. A marathon of mental endurance. Kulve Taroth isn't defeated in one go like any other monster, you have to fight it multiple times, each weakening it further.

Oh, did you think you would come back after breaking a part that it would retain the damage from before? No! Of course not! Why would we show actual progress when we could just have the monster completely reset after a repel?

There are four phases. No matter what your level is, you never begin in a later phase, you have to go through all four to beat Kulve.

Phase 1

This is undoubtedly the worst phase of them all. Although with the hype this feels fantastic the first time, it quickly becomes shit. Every hunt begins the same, you get the cutscene, which by the way always plays despite how high your progress levels are. Then, you get the non-changing dialogue from the characters. Every single attempt, the exact same lines of dialogue.

What I can only describe as being like MHGU's Lao Shan-Lung without having ever fought that monster, you hit Kulve while it slowly walks through the tunnels of the cave until it gets mad enough to go to Phase 2. It is a slow and mind achingly boring process. You do little damage as solid gold is hard. The most you can do is try as you can to mount it so its coat goes molten.

And lets not forget the irritating as fuck Gajalaka everywhere that knock you rolling out of your combos with everything they do. Its like they didn't want this fight to be fun on purpose.

Additionally, fuck how you have to constantly swing everywhere to move around the wall filled area.

Phase 2

After that headache, you arrive in Phase 2 to an area wide roar from Taroth. Great start. Kulve Taroth begins fighting you for real and it's really bad. The surprisingly small area makes avoiding its wide reaching rolls nearly impossible. Nothing of interest happens here, only less boring than Phase 1 because of it attacking you.

Phase 3

By this point already an hour or two has passed since you began the siege. You are beginning or already annoyed with the fight, I was at that point. It burns through the wall and enters what is arguably the most tolerable of the Phases. Here, you have the most firepower, literally, against Kulve. Three stalactites and three geysers help you against this monster, along with many points you can land jumping attacks on it. But this is the also the Phase that lasts the longest, and has lava all across the floor that erupts if Kulve does enough fire attacks. Great, the first monster to have a real special effect on the area is this one.

Phase 4

After hours of doing the same process over and over and over again, you finally break its damned coat and reach the final area.

Here, as I said before, Kulve Taroth becomes as fast as the Fanged Wyvern trio despite it being still at least being 4 times their size. Here its a slug-fest where you must hit only the horns if you want to succeed. Oh, I forgot. You don't actually kill Kulve. You break its horns. And then it flees. Hold up. That doesn't make any fucking sense at all. What's the fucking point of us breaking its horns if it's just going to flee in the exact same way as all the other times it has during this longer than a feature length film length of a quest? What's anyone in Astera and the Guild going to get out of just causing it misery? To prove that it exists? Exploiting its gold even though they could just steal it without going through all this? AGGH!

Back to the topic of the finale, you now have to deal with a giant monster doing attacks made for monsters that are the cannon fodder of the locales they are in. The result is as bad as it sounds. It also begins exploiting its heat breath to its maximum extent, breathing it onto the ceiling to make it randomly drip lava onto you and massacring your health bar at the rate that Lunastra does!

And then, after so long, you finally break the horns and beat the fucking quest. But after all that I went through, I felt not satisfaction like a genuine hard monster, but little relief that it was all over.

Rewards

Nothing can successfully award me for the unending agony this thing put me through. What finishing the siege grants you are, relics. Yep. Those randomised weapons from 4U from Guild Quests. 4U's case is better automatically as you don't have to fight the same monster many times over an hour just to complete one quest and get your RNG stuff.

In Kulve's case, the weapons are all golden (totally didn't expect that(sarcasm btw)), and are just as RNG to get a good one like in 4U except this time while you completed 6/8 quests in 4U in an hour, you take one hour and a half to beat one quest just to get that fucking randomised small chance you'll get something good from it all. Not to mention that it's even longer if solo'd.

You also get tickets, but only a person that is insane or is in a 24 hour run of the game with multiplayer would go and complete the quest more than once in a row.

Not worth the time, not worth the struggle.

The Siege Mode

I despise what Siege mode is. It is a quest type that is designed around multiplayer, and multiplayer only, with zero alterations or nerfs for solo players. No, this is wrong, this is stupid. Why would they make a quest mode that punishes solo players in such a gruelling way? What about the players, including myself who either are unable to get or pay for an online subscription? I'll answer that question myself, we're fucked.

In multiplayer from what it seems, Kulve is still poor but somewhat more tolerable. But in solo, it is one of the WORST experiences in the whole goddamn series. Every attempt takes around 16 to 25 minutes to complete. While that may not sound like much, because you're solo hunting, the levels are going up in slow portions. What does that mean? Constantly having to pause the attack in order to gather tracks, lots and lots of tracks. And even that doesn't help much! Soon, the attempts stack up, and you realise just how much time you're wasting hunting the exact same monster. Brace through until the end, and you can expect to defeat the siege monster in 4-6 hours. This isn't an extreme exaggeration here, this is literally the amount of time it took for me to defeat Kulve Taroth. I feel like all capping an outrage on how this is an abomination of a time completion and that this rends all complaints of other giant monsters taking long to defeat invalid, but I won't.

But... the thing that is the absolute worst about sieges is; you, cannot, leave. Not for another quest, not for an expedition, you cannot leave to the main menu, you cannot even leave the Gathering Hall. If you leave the Gathering Hall, or do just one quest other than the monster, THE SIEGE AUTOMATICALLY ENDS AND YOU HAVE TO RESTART THE FUCKING WHOLE THING FROM THE VERY BEGINNING!! This is torture! Why did I spend so much time of my life trying to clear one quest?!

Capcom did do one thing successfully, create a mode that is the definition of insanity!

It astounds me because after just two completed quests, I have never gotten any feeling to do Kulve Taroth's siege ever again. It is a disaster of gameplay design in every way. I cannot respect the people who think that this is the future of Monster Hunter DLC and updates. Forcing players to pay for an online subscription to make a fight better is just as bad as coursing players to buy loot boxes to make an intentionally long part of a game shorter and easier. It doesn't matter if it's part on the console version companies rather than Capcom, it's still shitty. Yeah, if only I had a PC indeed.

Unfortunately, there will probably come a day when the second Siege Monster comes, and that too will probably be just as bad if not worse than Kulve Taroth. And its all thanks to the mistake that is Siege Mode.

Fuck Siege Mode, screw paid online multiplayer and most importantly, damn Kulve Taroth to the depths of oblivion.