A bit late, but there IS an in world reason you can't go to the Faraway Forest early on, the game explicitly says your dreamer's key isn't powerful enough until you clear all the other dungeons. Then the Professors upgrades your key to enter.
Ultimately, as much as I like the charm of Ni no Kuni, I found the second game lacking. Especially compared some other stellar JRPGs out there like P5. I am not sure how somebody could rate the story in NK2 better than it in all honesty. Most of it was too easy, and even with the hard fights so much power was tied to your level that any "challenging" enemies were just damage sponges/one hit kills until you evened out the level, and then they were as easy as anything else.
I am working on Platinum because I am a horrible completion fiend, but I really would rather be playing most anything else at this point.
@pogo: It isn't perfect, but they made it WAY more complicated than it needed to be in this stream. It's still one of the best games I have played in years.
I am honestly surprised Jason didn't have a better grasp of it, given he is the big player of it.
@xeiphyer: It really isn't as bad as they are making it out to be. It IS a bit obtuse but Jason should probably really understand it by this point.
Join a Quest is for people in your session. After Brad saw the cutscene this is all they needed to do (or they could have left the quest and restarted it as normal after the cutscene, like you suggest).
SOS is for the whole public. You never SOS if you are trying to get specific people into your game.
Getting in the same session is sometimes annoying, I admit. Also the whole "any party member joining permanently shapes the session" is super dumb. Though I have rarely ever had this mess up my games. In 150 hours I have only had like two or three leavers F things up. I just learned to never SOS 2-player quests.
I am glad to see a fellow Insect Glaive user in Ben. Though I have recently picked up Lance and Hunting Horn after 300 hunts with Glaive. It gets crazy how different all the weapons feel.
@subscryber: To me the part that I prefer MHW over games like Dark Souls is the preparation aspect of the hunts.
Okay, I am going against a Kirin? Let's put together a lightning resist, stun resist, paralysis resist set to guarantee I can drop him. Maybe I need to hunt several other monsters to put together that set. I actually enjoy that part of the game. As I learn his patterns and become better equipped at killing him, I can start to shift my set away from pure survivability and into damage so that I can do 30 minute (and later 15 minute) investigations for that same monster.
The game does this fantastic job of presenting you with fights that seem incredibly tough at first, like this Tempered Kirin fight, only to have them become trivial as you learn the fight. First time I saw a Barroth? Super scary. Now? One of the easiest monsters to farm.
The learning and preparation part is what really is exciting in MHW. Of course there are fight mechanics to learn too, like getting the hang of Nergigante's divebomb or Teostra's Supernova, but that is really only part of it. To say that every monster fights the same way, or even a similar way, is being very reductive though. I have around 120 hours with Insect Glaive (and about 20 with Hunting Horn) and I am still learning new things about both weapons.
@lumbermancer: It was always in WoW, it just wasn't transparently presented to the end user. People used mods to surface it for a long time until Blizzard just skipped the middle man and did it themselves.
I would say WoW has consistently gotten [A LOT] better since Vanilla, but that is another discussion altogether.
@president_barackbar: Pretty common in other earlier games too. Even things as big as WoW used an ilvl system, it’s not like Destiny even popularized the mechanic.
The crew played a lot more Destiny though, so it makes sense for them to draw that particular comparison,
I normally hate Soulsborne games, never liked a Dark Souls and Bloodborne is maybe one of the few video game purchases I regret.
Despite that, somehow this game has always looked interesting to me. I don't know if I am just a sucker for the dystopian corporate atmosphere or what, but this just looks kind of cool. I feel like I would be in it more for the story and world building than the actual gameplay though.
Addfwyn's comments