100% Achievement Review
Let me get this out of the way first and foremost: This game is not great. I would not describe this game as "good". This is a playable waste of time. You will not leave this game feeling new emotions or any sense of... well, really anything.
This game is why I tend to avoid RPG's
Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin is a textbook example of style over substance when it comes to being an RPG. The games extremely strong opening starts showing cracks as soon as you leave the first chapter.
The main feature of this game is the combat, which is REALLY not good enough to carry the game for roughly 100 hours. Too much of the game is walking, extremely monotonous combat, and mindlessly boring cutscenes (out of AND in combat). Combat is riddled with 3 QTE's that get stale very quickly, but are required to complete or else you get punished very hard, with no skips in the options.
With the game title being "Stories" you'd think the story to be a little better
The story somehow combines both the blandness of Monster Hunter plots with the average silent protagonist JPRG. The plot is so by-the-books that I pointed out a particular character at the beginning for looking a 'tad too evil' and he turned out to actually be the villain, and he wasn't present in the game until the last 10% of it.
Too much of the game is muddied by "Monster Hunter" plot. A big monster was seen terrorizing the forest, go put a stop to it! Oh, you're back, and it wasn't the one we saw? Have you tried the mountains? Oh you're back! And it still wasn't the one? Have you tried the Volcano? Good work! I wish you luck in the next chapter!
This goes on for SEVEN CHAPTERS. I won't berate the game for sprinkling in details from Stories 1, as I haven't played it, but if it's anything like this, it's probably even worse. A handful of plotpoints from 1, like Navirou, the obligatory voice of the MC, are seemingly just forced into the game for no reason at all. He has absolutely no reason to be here, unlike being a major part of the plot in 1, so I hear.
I wont go too much into detail about the story, but just know that it's the same repeated "power of friendship" story beats over, and over, and over. All the way until the end. Oops I may have actually spoiled too much!
The Gameplay
Enough complaints about outside combat, lets talk about inside combat.
The game actually really blends the intuition of Monster Hunter into a turn based combat system well. Does this giant rock dragon look like the kind of guy to use Speed moves? Of course not, he's going to primarily use Power moves because he's a big hulking rock! Uh oh he's enraging! Perhaps he's going to use his steam to put us to sleep, Ah! That sounds a bit like a Tech move they would do, let's counter it with a Power attack! Intuitive thinking!
The Rock-Paper-Scissors combat is well crafted but is also a tad confusing.
Countering Rock with Paper will win the "Head to Head", which means you take about 30% damage and deal 120% in return.
Countering Rock with TWO Paper will combo attack and negate their attack entirely! Team up with your team as often as you can! Oh but sometimes it doesn't work because they're casting a spell, which means you take an unexpected 30% damage. But for some spells it does? Oh and AoE spells don't work since it's against everyone and not just the Head to Head. Oh and the enemy sometimes doesn't show their intention, so play around that! And sometimes the monster just gets to attack twice!
Did you get all of that? Because if you mess up once you take 50% HP! Oh, and make sure you remember EVERY monster pattern, all 110 of them! Forgot the pattern of the thing 40 hours ago? Get good I guess!
There's also a handful of combat effecting bingo sheets on each monster, which to be honest, are completely pointless outside of the dead PvP. As long as your monster has a Rock, Paper, and Scissors ability, it effectively doesn't matter which monster you use. Each bingo token can be swapped and slapped onto ANY monster in the game, which means you only really have to focus ONE monster. Elemental effectiveness is really only a suggestion. Which really defeats the purpose of a creature collector game if they're just being used to suck bingo tokens out of.
To add to all this
The game comes off as extremely lazy?
This game really is just a basic JRPG with a MH coat of paint. Flat roads with almost no elevation changes and simple "HM" mechanics to get chests of minor loot. Puzzle piece dungeons were to be expected, I have no gripes with that, but several early game attempts to "spice" it up, such as repairing a bridge, are forgotten for the rest of the entire game.
This is minor spoilers, as you should expect endgame content to an RPG, but: The final endgame dungeon is a 9 floor dungeon of challenges. Pretty standard stuff right?
Here's the kicker: After you defeat the final boss of this endgame dungeon, you get a bonus Super Endgame dungeon! Cool! Would you believe me if I told you that Super Dungeon is just an EXACT clone of the first one, just with some higher level stuff? Exact copy. I had to google it just to make sure that's what I was seeing. It's an incredibly lazy development.
Ultimately I really don't know what kind of thumb to give this game, because my time with this game was agonizing. It's, by definition, a playable game with a decent main core of gameplay, but the insanely addicting lootbox system in the form of eggs, general lack of RNG boosting systems to buy missing genes or rare monster parts, and insane lack of Quality of Life improvements (500 monster cap and you can hatch 12 at a time but you can only release 1 at a time too?? Tedious.) make this game far from enjoyable.